A few months before it was public news, Ryan Dice told me at a private dinner in Austin that he was planning to exit Digital Marketer and leave the course and information business entirely.
We were at dinner with a small group. He brought it up casually, the way you’d mention a business decision you’ve already processed and made peace with.
His reasoning was simple: “Yo, where this is going, we’re gonna be out of business very soon. So I’m just gonna cash out now.”
I’ve thought about that conversation a lot since then.
Why This Matters
Ryan Dice is one of the most successful digital marketing entrepreneurs of his generation. He didn’t build Digital Marketer by being wrong about the market. He built it by being right — consistently, for over a decade — about how information businesses grow online.
When someone like that reads the exit sign… that’s a signal worth paying attention to.
And here’s the thing: his reasoning wasn’t what most people would expect.
He wasn’t afraid of AI wiping out his business overnight. He wasn’t in panic mode about ChatGPT writing his courses for free.
His concern was the economics. The marketing is going to get much harder. Traffic is going to get increasingly unpredictable. The cost to acquire a customer — through paid ads, SEO, social, email — is going to keep rising. And what people will pay for packaged information is going to keep declining.
When those two lines cross, the business math stops working.
The Squeeze
I’ve been running Asian Efficiency since 2011. I started in the information product space. I know how this model works.
The traditional info product funnel went something like this: build great content, attract SEO traffic, convert it to an email list, sell courses to that list. At its peak, this was one of the most efficient business models on the internet.
It worked because two things were cheap: attention and information.
SEO traffic was cheap because Google didn’t penalize content farms yet and AI-written content didn’t exist at scale. Information was valuable because you had to find a person, buy their course, and learn from them directly.
Both of those conditions have been quietly deteriorating for years.
Search traffic got more expensive — not in dollar terms, but in effort. Google kept adjusting, platforms kept holding clicks, and organic reach kept shrinking. Meanwhile, AI is making information genuinely cheaper. Not because AI is better at teaching, but because it provides “good enough” answers at zero marginal cost.
Ryan saw where those two trends were converging. And he decided to move before the math got bad.
The Part People Miss
Here’s what I think is the most important nuance: Ryan’s call wasn’t “courses are dead.” He was building an AI-focused brand simultaneously. He wasn’t running away from digital marketing.
He was making a specific judgment: the economics of the information product model — the way it used to monetize attention — that specific model’s best days are behind it.
And he decided it was better to extract value from the business while it still had value, rather than spend the next five years fighting uphill against structural headwinds.
That’s not pessimism. That’s pattern recognition.
The question for everyone who runs an information business — a course, a newsletter, a membership, a podcast — is the same question Ryan was asking himself.
Not “is my content good?” Good content isn’t the problem.
The question is: is there still a tailwind? Or are you paddling into the wind and calling it persistence?
What I Think Is Still True
I don’t fully agree with Ryan’s conclusion. I think there’s still a real market for humans teaching humans.
What I agree with is the diagnosis: distribution is breaking. The old acquisition model is getting harder. The value of raw information is declining.
Where I see opportunity is in the parts of information businesses that AI can’t easily replace: curation, community, context, and direct human relationships.
A course that teaches you to use ChatGPT? AI can do that for free. But a workshop where a practitioner sits down with your actual business and shows you exactly what to build? That’s still worth something. The experience of learning from a person who’s done it — in real-time, with your specific context — that doesn’t commoditize as easily.
But getting people to that experience requires distribution. And distribution is the hard part now.
The Bigger Lesson
Every industry has tailwinds and headwinds. The information business had a 15-year tailwind. It was so long, it felt permanent.
Smart operators don’t confuse “we’ve had a tailwind for 15 years” with “tailwinds last forever.”
Ryan Dice built his business with the wind at his back, recognized when the conditions changed, and made a rational decision to exit while the business still had real value.
He didn’t wait until he had no choice.
I started downsizing Asian Efficiency — from 12 people down to 5 — partly for the same reason. AI made us more efficient, yes. But I also wanted to create space to explore what’s next. You can’t explore when you’re maintaining a large operation.
The question isn’t whether your current model works today.
The question is: can you feel where the wind is going?
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