The Extraction Economy: They take the value. You pay.

Introduction to a Six-Part Series

This started with a shoe store.

A customer walks in, tries on three pairs, takes a photo of the tag, and walks out. They didn’t come for the product. They came for the service. The fit. The expertise. The physical space. All of it costs money to provide. None of it was paid for.

This is showrooming. A term that is used to describe people using brick-and-mortar stores as free research labs before ordering online.

Now it's growing much, much larger.

Online creators face the same quiet theft. AI models crawl their websites, scrape their content, summarize their ideas, and deliver answers directly to users without redirecting traffic. This is called zero-click. The visitor gets the value without visiting. The creator gets nothing. No click. No credit. No transaction.

They do precisely what the customer in the shoe store did. They extract value and leave the bill behind.

This is no longer about shoes. Or salons. Or blog posts. This is how the new economy works. Extraction without exchange. Consumption without cost. Benefit without burden.

In this six-part series, we’ll walk through how showrooming evolved from retail behaviour to a digital operating model. We’ll explore how AI is accelerating the problem. How platforms and algorithms have replaced human relationships. How original creators, retailers, writers, subject matter experts are losing the right to be paid for the very value they create.

And we’ll look at what happens if this continues to work.

Not all customers are created equal. We’ve just been trained not to say it. We know who shows up with questions, takes everything they can, and walks out without spending a cent. We see it in our stores, inboxes, and on our websites.

If creators stay silent, we deserve what’s coming. If we continue to give our time, expertise, and work to people who never intended to pay, then the loss is on us.

There is a path forward. However, before we address this, we need to acknowledge it. This is the groundwork. The terms, the tactics, the trends. Before there’s a solution, there has to be outrage.

Because this model isn’t just unsustainable. It’s broken. And if creators do nothing, we will be left with content farms, vacant storefronts, and monopolies taking everything they can while giving nothing back.

Let’s stop being polite about it. Let’s name it. Let’s push back. Before we’re left begging for access to our own audience.

Let’s get to work.

You just read this for free. That’s the problem.

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