Olivia Joslin and Toshit Panigrahi, observing the rise of AI web crawlers impacting news websites, founded Tollbit, an innovative system allowing publishers to charge for bot access. Their platform routes AI bots to a paywall where site owners can set prices for different levels of access to their content. This mimics a 'Spotify-like' revenue model, addressing the unsustainable traffic patterns and hosting costs publishers face due to AI's growing presence online. Within 18 months, Tollbit has gained traction, with over 2000 publications using its services, including notable names like Time and Newsweek.
Joslin noted, "It felt like we were seeing two sides of the same problem. The web wasn't set up to easily compensate news and information websites for this new structural shift."
Joslin explained the concept, saying, "We could supply a Spotify-like solution - a recurring revenue model for the publishing industry."
With Tollbit, "Publishers can choose different prices for crawls to generate article summaries and for displaying the article's full text."
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