Comment by mxuribe
10 hours ago
So, the snake oil salesman in me immediately wonders if this will become the new landscape for spam....It might go something like the following...
1. Establish domain names and relevant cloudflare account including the monetization gateway (associated rules, etc.).
2. Then host a ton of crap content across a wide swath of topics...not even decent quality...merely a step above old school style SEO keywords...just enough low quality "honey" to attract the AI flies, and their high volumes of traffic.
3. Charge very low amounts to ensure the AI "visitors" won't balk programmatically at the cost.
4. Then wait for lots of AI traffic (attracted by the "honey")...and then profit!
Obviously lots of holes in the above...but, unless I'm missing something, it feels like more spam headed our way (because the AI agents will swallow up all the crap content created only for triggering usage costs)...which is a shame. Because while I'm not sure about this overall approach of this gateway, I certainly would welcome web authors to get paid something for their efforts! If cloudflare can help achieve this for web authors, then I'm in favor! Of course, the cynic in me also recognizes that by being the middleman, cloudflare does stand to gain whether the volume of traffic is for good content or spam crap. Is cloudflare a new type of bank now?
Must think happy thoughts! The internet feels darker every day, but, must think happy thoughts!
Crawler, AI or not, cannot afford to pay per visit. The entire model of crawling works because the incremental cost of each crawl is so low. Even fractions of a penny would be prohibitive.
As it should be. Bots are still user agents much like browsers
If you're paying per token for AI, you can also pay a smaller amount to use the Web.
If it gets off the ground it will attract SEO, but the people running agents will have incentives to use a better search engine, or maybe even whitelist known good domains.
Think of it as a gullibility tax. AI is currently pretty gullible but perhaps that will change?
"host a ton of crap content across a wide swath of topics.."
But how will anybody know it's there?
Host two crap tons of content across a wide swath of topics... one which points to the other?
I'm basically of the impression that this is already happening based on all the LLM generated slop search results I get - presumably for ad revenue (or in the case of Musk to push political views).
Yeah, that could work.