Cloudflare, a cloud infrastructure provider serving 20% of the tissue, announced on Tuesday the launch of a new market that repeats the relationship between website owners and AI companies – ideally giving publishers greater control of their content.
For the last year, Cloudflare launched tools for publishers to deal with the ruthless rise of Crawlers AI, including a one -click solution to block all bots AI, as well as a control panel to see how their Crawlers AI visit. In an interview of 2024, Cloudflare Matthew Prince CEO told TechCrunch that these products gave a foundation for a new kind of market in which publishers could distribute their content to AI companies and compensate them.
Now, Cloudflare brings this life to life.
It’s called Pay Per Crawl, and the cloudflare begins the “experiment” in private beta on Tuesday. Website owners in the experiment can choose to leave AI Crawlers, on an individual basis, scrape their site at a specified rate – a small production for each “detection”. Alternatively, web site owners may choose to let Crawlers AI scratch their site for free or completely exclude them. Cloudflare claims that its tools will allow websites to see if detectors are scraping their site for AI training data to display in AI search answers or for other purposes.
On a scale, the cloudflare market is a great idea that could offer publishers a potential business model for the AI era – and also places the cloudflare in the center of all. Market launch comes at a time when news publishers are facing existential questions about how readers approach, as Google search release is weakening and AI Chatbots are increasing in popularity.
There is no clear answer on how news publishers will survive in the AI era. Some, such as the New York Times, have filed lawsuits against technology companies for the preparation of AI models in without license articles. Meanwhile, other publishers have hit a multiannual agreement on the permission to use their content For the training of AI models and to display their content in the AI Chatbot answers.
However, only major publishers have hit AI licensing agreements and are still unclear if they provide significant sources of revenue. Cloudflare aims to create a more durable system where publishers can set prices on their own terms.
The company also announced on Tuesday that the new websites created with Cloudflare will now block all Crawlers AI by default. Location owners should grant some AI Crawlers license to access their site – a change of cloudflare says it will give each new “default of control” to each new sector.
Several great publishers, including Conde Nast, Time, Associated Press, Atlantic, Adweek and Fortune, have signed with Cloudflare to exclude AI detectors from default to support the company’s broader target of a ” -based approach”.
The business model that many of these publishers have been based for decades becomes slowly unreliable. Historically, online publishers allowed Google to scratch their websites in exchange for google search references, which was translated into their websites and ultimately advertising revenue.
However, new data from Cloudflare suggest that publishers may gain a worse deal in the AI era than in the Google Search Age. While Some sites report Chatgpt as an important source of trafficThis does not seem to be widely happened.
In June, Cloudflare says that he found that Google’s Crawler woke up his websites 14 times for each referral he gave them. Meanwhile, Openai’s Crawler woke up websites 17,000 times for each referral, while anthropogenic websites of 73,000 times for each referral.
Meanwhile, Openai and Google build AI agents designed to visit websites on behalf of users, collect information and return it directly to users. A future in which these tools are mainstream has a huge impact on publishers based on readers who visit their websites.
Cloudflare notes that the “true potential” of remuneration by detection can appear in a “agency” of the future.
“What if a Paywall agency could work on the edge of the network, completely programmatic?
To participate in the Cloudflare Experimental Market, AI companies and publishers must also be created with cloudflare accounts. In their accounts, both parties can set prices where they would like to buy and sell a “detection” of the publisher’s content. Cloudflare acts as the mediator in these transactions, charging AI and distributing profits to the publisher.
Cloudflare Ripley Park’s spokesman tells TechCrunch that there are no stablecoins or cryptocurrency involved in fee by detection right now, even though many have suggested The digital currency would be perfect for something.
The cloudflare market feels like a bold vision for the future that requires many publishers and AI companies to board. Still, there is no guarantee that publishers will get a good deal, and the persuasive AI companies could be tough, as it is free scratching free.
However, Cloudflare looks like one of the few companies able to make such a market.
