Show HN: Pay-per-Crawl – make AI crawlers pay per page in USDC, for 10 stacks

An interesting idea would be to have agents pay in advance for either proposed content, or already created content that hasn't yet been released. They could also propose content that they would pay for. Once that threshold has been reached, the content get delivered either after creation or instantly. It also goes public at that point. There will be free-riders on that model, but at least the content gets seen. So blurry is free, discernible costs.

Maybe just accept messages from agents, no matter whether they want to pay or not? So basically offer them a feedback form and allow a conversation to be initiated. You could even host that conversation and charge for it, I suppose.

BTW, your comments are flagged/dead so I couldn't reply below.

FWIW, I just fast-coded a stats/tracking system that marks visitors "likely human" "suspicious" and "bot" .. works pretty well too and runs across 1 domain and 5 sub-domains simultaneously and the tracking script also enables any user to submit a comment through a modal popup. It doesn't track the admin either if told not to.

Imagine being able to talk to a bot - "who are you, what do you want and who sent you?" It's like something out of Blade Runner with "Likely Human" being an apt alternate film title.

Haha, I would make verified crawlers free but the unverified crawlers I would make them pay. So, blocked by default, but if it verifies itself then free. And one time verification cost.

I ran into a similar thing running a dense LLM that doesn't use many MoE experts with vast knowledge. It ends up doing a lot of searching. In the end my local AI is as free as electricity but I pay for the searches.

The search providers I pay likely don't pay their sources. Some others (that I don't use) don't even have the original text only providing summaries. Some offer both.

until people charge all visitors this is incredibly unlikely to ever work

https://forgemesh.io/wordpress - a wordpress plugin and with just a few clicks watch the money roll in, ay? Superb. How good is it at differentiating traffic? Won't human users and legitimate search engines be walled-off? Is there a way to see a leaderboard of all the installs? Expecting a Vue3 version? Bots can also fake real humans, is there a way to create a hive-mind for immunity against them? In this way, I wonder if it's worth forming a "union of sites" and splitting the x402 proceeds while also helping bots find the right content.

In the end it could lead to mirrors for bots to feed from. So one paid site entry leads to many copies shared between friends, and anyone really.

It it possible to paywall everything with the price falling (or rising) the older it is or the more (or less) a single visitor takes?