The accidental guardian: How Cloudflare’s Matthew Prince became publishing’s unexpected defender

When Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince first started getting calls from distressed publishers about the threat of AI crawlers scraping their content, his knee-jerk reaction was to roll his eyes. 

And honestly, a little eye-rolling is fair — Cloudflare’s day job is fending off botnets and nation-state cyberattacks, not debating how Google and other AI companies crawl publisher sites. That means any AI-focused crawling the company tracks represents a narrow slice of the overall traffic and data the cloud-edge company processes. “I remember being like, why is the media always so afraid of the next new technology?” he recalls.

But when publishers continued to press him, he pulled the data — and that’s when the scale and urgency of the problem snapped into focus for him. He was shocked. He could see that the business model of digital publishing was dissolving. 

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The AI hype cycle is rewriting ad tech’s M&A math

The comparison comes up a lot in boardrooms right now, with many asking if the current AI boom is just ad tech’s version of the late-90s dotcom bubble? Are we in the “Flooz.com” phase — or already drifting toward the shake out?

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Ad Tech Briefing: The 2025 M&A rebound is back with a whimper, not a bang


If you look at 2025’s deal tape, it’s easy to see why people ask. The year began with genuine froth: a more business-friendly U.S. administration, falling-rate expectations, and early trophy prints such as T-Mobile’s double-swoop on Vistar Media (for approximately $600 million) and Blis ($175 million), plus strategic moves like Publicis buying Lotame and The Trade Desk picking up Sincera. 

But by Q3, dealmakers were talking about something closer to a controlled deflation than a mania. Global mergers and acquisition volumes across talent- and tech-enabled services are down about 8% year on year, with buyers citing macro volatility and a widening valuation gap as the main reasons processes stall, according to sources.  For many, this represents the much-touted 2025 rebound in M&A as arriving with “a whimper, not a bang,” as bankers lean into smaller, more surgical transactions instead of 2021-style land grabs.

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