A swarm of AI "crawlers" is running rampant on the internet, scouring billions of websites for data to feed algorithms at leading tech companies -- all without permission or payment, upending the online economy. Before the rise of AI chatbots, websites allowed search engines to access their content in return for increased visibility, a system that rewarded them with traffic and advertising revenues.
INDIANAPOLIS - When it came to the current landscape of social media, three NBA players had enough. Indiana Pacers forward Aaron Nesmith, Cleveland Cavaliers guard Darius Garland, and Boston Celtics guard Payton Pritchard realized that while athletes are dominant forces anywhere they post content, platforms owned by others got the benefits. That's how the idea for Off Court came to be.
Roundups are all the rage right now, and multiple platforms seem to love them. While this might be news to some, it's not news to me - I've been posting mainly roundups since early 2023, and had a lot of success doing it. What started as a way to supplement the income from my recipes has turned into my main strategy for content creation and revenue generation.
Chatbots consume and regurgitate information from across the web, but they lack a standardized business model to compensate sources. That means those sources could one day dry up, leaving less information for the always-hungry AI, weakening its output. Enter the Real Simple Licensing (RSL) Standard, a new tech-based licensing solution for the "AI-first internet," as RSL puts it. It's backed by Reddit, Yahoo!, Ziff Davis (PCMag's parent company), People, Medium, WikiHow, Quora, Adweek, and more.
For 25 years, search engines like and Microsoft's Bing crawled and indexed websites, sending users to relevant pages. This drove traffic, supporting the web's grand bargain: sites let tech firms copy their data for free in exchange for referrals. Ads and subscriptions funded content creation, which in turn improved search results. In today's new AI era, products such as Google's AI Overviews and , OpenAI's , and Perplexity deliver answers directly, often eliminating the need to visit the original source.
I've been publishing since 2008, and in that time I've seen it all-the slick agency emails, the endless PR pitches, the promises of "exposure," and the shameless attempts to get premium placement without paying a dime. After nearly two decades in this business, I can say with full authority: if you're not bringing actual value to the table-through payment, product of equal worth, or a reasonable middle ground-then kindly fuck off.
Small content businesses must rethink their revenue strategies due to changing audience behaviors and platform policies while seizing new opportunities with flexible, creative tactics.
"Best are voracious fan bases. Fan boys, fan girls. And an older demographic, where Aunt Carol doesn't really know how to use Facebook, and she's just likely to share everything."
