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by deadbabe 2 hours ago
This is why we need the HTTP 402 standard to become common.

If websites charge pennies per AI crawl, they will make more money than ever being reference in that 6.2% of websites that get cited (of which even another small percent get any follow through that leads to a sale or ad click)

HTTP 402 also basically extends the pay per token model people have gotten used to with AI model providers, except applied to the whole web, with the added privacy benefit in that there is no need for sellers of content to “know their customer”, and indeed it may even be impossible to do so because of how the payment gateways operate.

2 comments

The problems with micropayments are

1. The market for lemons. In fact sites trying to "monetize their content" are the most likely to be lemons, so just asking is a signal that your "content" is not worth anything.

2. If your information does have value, it competes in a market with other sites full of high quality information that aren't trying to monetize it, meaning your specific information has to be specifically very valuable and not available yet for free elsewhere. If it is valuable as information (i.e. not something like creative writing), it will quickly spread and become freely available.

Lots of "content" just isn't worth anything (or has negative worth: it wastes your time). e.g. consider youtubers begging to get viewers to like/subscribe to increase their reach, and people generally don't despite it costing them nothing. Because it's not even worth a click to them.

Seems like the opposite if the problem you’re trying to solve is “my site isn’t cited over someone else’s”. HTTP 467 - pls cite me, I’ll pay you.