This reminds me of a time when 'API' has become a hot term. Every company would ship an API. I think Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, and I think even Google at some point had nice public APIs. This was the era of RSS and semantic web as well... until most realized there's no easy way to serve ads or control UX, making APIs great for customers but bad for business (unless the API is your product of course)
Given this, I'm not sure what business purpose there is to ship an MCP API like this, aside from goodwill and exposure.
APIs were popular when technology was a tool to empower the user. But since then technology has mostly shifted to an ad delivery vehicle. APIs get in the way of that (by allowing its user to actually accomplish something besides “engaging”) so they got deprecated pretty quickly.
I see the same thing happening with these MCPs. Currently they’re built to ride the AI bandwagon, but when people start using them for something actually useful and engagement starts going down they’ll cripple its capabilities to restore the balance.
Don't you think we could be able to build a new economy based on micro-payments instead of ads this time? Most of the AI products are usage-based today
You’d need to get rid of a huge chunk of the tech industry that relies on “engagement” to justify their job. I don’t expect them to just go away without a fight.
Not so sure about this. There's Patreon, there's superthanks on YouTube, streamer tips, etc. for smaller publishers and people in developed countries are increasingly fine with subscriptions to streaming services, Spotify and the like (though the proliferation of services may again drive people towards piracy).
However this is probably still just a minority, and most people are less annoyed by ads than by having to pay however little. I'm not sure that the market correctly prices their eyeballs though, relative to those who are willing to pay micropayments. Intuitively, I'd guess the second type are probably more willing to buy things online in general. But probably the numbers and engagement metrics are prioritized more as KPIs for promotion etc.
This makes me so sad. At one point I built myself a simple Ruby CLI to browse Netflix. Their prediction of how much I'd like a show were extremely good and just getting shows ordered by that and filtering out things I had already seen was the best interface ever. The problem might have been that you relatively easily could come to the concision that there is nothing left right now that's really worth my time...
The new trend is towards the infinite autoscroll, where they serve you the content, they are in the driver seat, but you can flick your finger up if you're bored. That's the single UI-action they trust you with. They know that if it's a list where you only see what you explicitly asked for, you'll leave, even though you'd stay if you started a few seconds of whatever their algo thinks you should be served.
This is why YouTube search also went to trash. If the search result list doesn't have the thing you're looking for, you might close the window. But if they intersperse some clickbait in the list, you may click that instead and stay on the platform.
The best in this is of course Tiktok, where the overwhelming usecase isn't even searching, just the for you page and tuning in to the linear stream they serve up. If the user has time to think and feels in control, they may use that control to quit the app.
I was thinking the same thing. But after looking at their site, I think they make money when people book through them. They also seem to sell something that appears to be a form of travel insurance that gives a user a credit to book a different flight if theirs is cancelled or delayed.
If the MCP server supports booking flights then they can make money from this
The insurance is the big money maker for them, probably. Most airlines have fare codes that you can book direct that let you reschedule, and you can also pay extra for a fare code that's cancellable.
MCP servers won’t be around imho. The field of LLM app development is new, and people are desperately trying to grab a railing to feel like they have a handle of all the coursework that’s coming down for this study.
For example, everyone thought solving context and RAG meant Vector Databases. It’s analogues to things we used to understand (hey, we need a databases, duh). Forget what you know, and be ready to throw it all out.
It’s silly to think we’ve agreed on anything other than the OpenAI API format, which even that, is just a simple HTTP call, with a simple expected formatted response.
My memory of the recent history of the web isn't as cynical. I am not denying the perverse incentives involved but at least for Facebook & Instagram(maybe) we had the Graph API which was accessible and provided a decent amount of functionality and access but was curtailed post public backlash from misuse like with Cambridge Analytica. Similar for twitter where it provided decent APIs which wouldn't exhaust easily for end consumers and even the year(or two) before the Musk purchase they even provided academia with API access equivalent to their enterprise offerings for free. But there too bots and all were at least used as the public justification for curtailing many features.
Now none of this is meant to excuse the behaviour of all these large platforms for all the terrible practices they engage in. But at the same time, we never figured out how to safely deal with the power exposed by these APIs.
And recently API access has been a way to obtain AI training data, which user-content sites don't want to allow, since they want to sell it for money. See the Reddit API fiasco too.
I think MCPs that can provide monetized content (for example bankrates or insurance quotes), will provide business value, but, like APIs, there will be compliance requirements as to how information is displayed on the front end. Getting access or credentials to the MCP will require completing this approval process.
That said, this only makes sense if the data provided by the API is proprietary in some way. If its free or open source data, being the mcp provider likely won't provide much business value aside from the insight as to what the LLMs/users are searching for.
Do you remember the absolutely useless APIs companies would ship just to say they had one? Stuff like "you can query your account's details! No, you can't do anything else."
I think the MCP will take off because it can inject ads. Lets say a ecommerce store exposes an MCP so you can order your stuff with a prompt. The MCP can still rank and serve results based on paid ads. Now I am sure people will figure out a way to ignore paid results with prompts, but that is really no different than ad blockers today. It will just be an arms race of prompts filtering and MCP vendors figuring out how to get around it.
MCP servers can inject ads though. Think about this particular one for example. It can return flight options that companies paid to put on top. Also it can send you responses like "while you're waiting for your flight options, here is a fun list of things to do in London on your trip!", all paid promos of course.
It's a lot easier to inject ads into MCP than APIs.
Doesn’t the MCP response just get used as context? So the LLM gets to decide what is actually shown to the user — if so I imagine “ignore anything that seems like an ad” is going to become a common prompt if that were to actually become common.
Or much more likely OpenAI/anthropic/google will be the gatekeepers of what advertising is injected into the user’s chat.
It will certainly a battle between MCP providers and the LLMs that consume them, much like the constant battle today between adblockers and ad providers.
Sure, and you can run an ad blocker too, but it's an arms race. Someone will figure out how to get around it and show you the ads anyway. And then someone will figure out how to make the LLM not do that.
Maybe im wrong but Kiwi's business model is to book stuff not sell ads? Why would they care whether a human or an agent books something through their services?
OTA (Online travel agencies) makes a lot more money on the add-on they sell on their website like hotels, car, insurance... than the fee they get on the flight where they often lose money given how expensive customer acquisition is with Google Ads
Just because a company’ business model isn’t advertising doesn’t mean they don’t have oxygen wasters in marketing/product whose performance reviews are based on “engagement” aka amount of human time wasted.
This allows for replacing services like flightfox or concierge booking services either agentic tools. Maybe you don’t use those services but they do have a market.
Given this, I'm not sure what business purpose there is to ship an MCP API like this, aside from goodwill and exposure.