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- [00:00]
A
Today on the podcast, we're talking about a really interesting business concept and maybe even side hustle for you. So listen up if you are interested in making money online. But Cloudflare is a company who just launched a marketplace that will now allow websites to charge AI bots for scraping their data. So if you have a blog you've been, you spent the last 10 years working hard on, and you're worried about you're losing traffic to Google, Google AI search, you may want to consider this. So we're going to talk all about that today. Before we do, Jaden, why don't you tell them about our school community?
- [00:36]
B
Yeah. So every single week, Jamie and I record an exclusive video. We don't post anywhere else and we post it on our school community. We have over 350 members and over 60 videos in our classroom from, you know, the last more than a year we've been running this thing. We have courses on a whole bunch of different online side hustles. AI marketing, how we're using AI tools and growth hacks to grow our businesses and careers. This week in particular, Jamie and I released a video which goes over how we've been able to use the Amazon Influencer program to get free stuff. You can flip that, you can sell it. Jamie talks about getting a free couch, that's a thousand dollars couch from somebody and making video that was like a minute or two long and then be able to flip that or use it. So this jacket I am currently wearing, if you're watching the video, free from the Amazon Influencer program. So someone sent it to me for free and my, my wife messaged them and she got a bunch of other random stuff too. So this is a really cool thing. We made a whole video about this. If you're not interested in that. There are dozens of other videos on a ton of other topics. We'd love to have you as a member. It's $19 a month and there is a link in the description. All right, let's get into what Cloudflare is doing. I think this is really interesting. So the thing that Cloudflare has said is that they actually have about 20% of the alt websites on the web are using them. I personally think I have like maybe 20 different websites personally that I have running through Cloudflare. It's just like the best. It protects you from essentially. So they did something smart. They made a free thing that protects you from a DDoS attack. I think it's called where where essentially you try to overwhelm a website server. By sending like, you know, a million visitors to it in like 10 seconds and crash their server and take their website offline. It's, it's, you know, I can't even remember what the acronym is, but it's like a distributed over, you know, corporate security. People are going to hate me for forgetting this. But anyways, this is what Cloudflare, one of their products is. What it does is it helps with that. So anytime you hear about like some big website getting taken down by like, you know, North Korea's bot network, they always go to Cloudflare, get essentially hosted. So it's like it builds a screen between the website and the world. So when the world is accessing the website, they're actually going through Cloudflare. Cloudflare has got all these algorithms and AI that can detect if, you know, these are all from the same IP address or the same region and they'll block out all the bots so your actual website server isn't getting overwhelmed and crashing. So that's something that I personally use them for. And so it doesn't surprise me that over 20% of all the websites in the world are using Cloudflare because this is a pretty amazing service and it's very cheap and probably, I don't know, maybe they sell like traffic data or something like that from that, or maybe it's a lead or like a cost leader for a lot of their other services which are more expensive. If you're on like, I think if you have like an insane amount of traffic, you probably got to pay them a lot for it. My websites probably just have never hit that, you know, million daily user threshold or anything like that. But the thing that they're doing now I think is so fascinating because for the last year they, they had a bunch of different tools for all of these, you know, 20% of the people that are using them. That essentially is a one click solution to block all AI bots. So you pretty much enable this thing and if there's an AI bot going to scrape your website, you just block it. You don't have to do it. It was interesting. There's a whole, there's a whole like story from Wikipedia a while back where they were saying like these bots that essentially are crawling Wikipedia and scraping it are costing Wikipedia insane amounts of money. Because the way they like store all of the data on the Wikipedia server is like, if there's a website that doesn't get visited very often, like a Wikipedia page, they store at like this really far back kind of cache section, they're like, it's not getting access very often, but because the bots access literally every single page, all of the, like, cached pages were getting, like, hit very frequently and they had to pay a lot more money, like, for the server of that. So, like, man, these things are costing us, like, so much money. Um, I think they said something like 30 or 25% or 30% of all the traffic on Wikipedia was just like bots scraping them and they're like, sick of how much money it costs them in server bills. So this is obviously a very useful tool. Now, beyond just blocking these scrapers, Cloudflare is letting you make money from it. So I guess Jamie, tell us a little bit about what, what they're doing with that.
- [04:55]
A
Yeah, so, I mean, I, I, like I said at the beginning, imagine you had a blog about, you know, fishing for seahorses, and you're an expert, you're like the best person in the world at fishing for seahorses. You know, how to capture them, you know, breed them in captivity, all that. And you have spent, you know, 10 to 15 years on this blog. And it's your, it's how you make a living. So people are, you know, buying, you know, guides from you, books from you. They're, you know, you know, you're going to do speaking events, you're working one on one with other seahorse breeders, and all of a sudden Google AI search comes along and now if anyone ever wants information they don't need to go to your website and you no longer are getting that income, well, now you have a way to kind of still protect yourself and potentially make some money. So I think it's really interesting concept because, you know, I think in a sense it isn't fair that, you know, your info that you, you know, work so hard to put out there is, is just kind of just basically being ripped off and used without any sort of compensation. So I feel like this is a great model moving forward, not just for blogs, but any other sort of, you know, content creation, really.
- [06:09]
B
It's kind of cool too, because this has been a problem, like a lot of people complained about. They're like, all the AI models are scraping our data and they're training off of it, then they're, you know, selling it for 20 bucks a month subscriptions to chat GPT. And there's, I feel like there's very few people that could have done anything about this. But Cloudflare is like one of the companies that just happens to sit between the public and most major or serious websites. And so they're kind of like the perfect person because they, they can essentially detect when someone is a bot. They can see this IP address has hit like a million other websites today. This is not a normal human that's just, you know, obsessed with Wikipedia. And so like they are actually the person that can like detect that. So I think that's very cool. It's also a very clean UI for this marketplace that they've built. They're calling it Pay per Crawl, which is so funny. Like we have Google that does like, you know, pay per click and you know, you got pay per view and now all of a sudden we got pay per crawl. So essentially there's a AI audit which is if you're familiar with cloudflare and you've been blocking these AI bots from scraping your website, there used to just be something that would know you had a toggle that would like allow it or block it. Now there's a button that says charge. So now you can just charge them for it. And it's a marker marketplace. So you can, you can kind of just pick what the price is. It's kind of interesting because I'm not sure if companies like the New York Times, which have kind of filed lawsuits against OpenAI if they're going to be doing this, how they plan on monetizing. I feel like bigger websites like Reddit for example, just locked all of their data, said no one's allowed to crawl us and if you do, we'll sue you. And then they go and strike like multi million dollar deals with Google and are like, you can use our data for training, you know, Gemini 2.5 Pro or whatever the latest model is, but you got to pay us. And so Google, and I think Apple as Well, Google probably OpenAI are all paying licensing deals to Reddit. Now. Most people's blogs are not as big as Reddit and so you don't really have the like legal power and you're not a publicly traded company. So it's a lot harder for just your average Joe to, you know, tell OpenAI not to scrape them if you don't want them to. Reddit can do something like that. And so I think the bigger people can, smaller people cannot. So I think this is kind of a perfect solution. Something that was kind of interesting that their CEO was talking about though was like the concept of like agents negotiating these, these like rates where like you could, you could have an agent that's going out scraping it needs certain data for like different projects or different Things because the way that they're saying is like right now it's blocking web like AI models that are just crawling to scrape your data and put it into like an LLM. But in the future you're gonna have agents that are out searching the web looking for like information for maybe their whoever's running them, like a business. It's like, hey, go do research on this industry. We're trying to do a report on X, Y and Z. So then it's scraping your website. You know, I really getting anything from that agent scraping your website per se. So what they're recommending here is maybe when you actually have this monetization turned on, you're not just monetizing like if OpenAI scraping the whole Internet or like you know, the thousand other companies building LLMs, but all of the agents that are running around the Internet, the millions and millions of agents that are gonna be running around the Internet scraping stuff as well. You might actually be able to monetize those as well, which I think is also a very interesting concept.
- [09:28]
A
Yeah, and I mean, I think this could be almost like an answer to the whole music licensing thing we talked about too, how, you know, companies like Suno AI are training off this, the music. Well, how did the, how does the artist get compensated for that? Maybe they could put it behind some kind of paywall like this as well, you know, and then the more times it's crawled for or used, you know, it could be, they could be compensated. I don't know. I feel like they're onto something big here, I think.
- [09:57]
B
Yeah, I think this is pretty cool. So if you want to participate in this, the AI company and the publisher both have to be set up with different cloudflare accounts. So if you're not already, you might want to be try this if you're interested in it. And then in your account you can actually set what rate you want to sell your crawls for. And publishers can set the rate for what they will pay essentially for a crawl. And. And then Cloudflare just acts as an intermediary between the transaction. They charge the AI company and then they pay you as a publisher or the publisher is for this. So I mean, it's fantastic. I love the marketplace model. Cloudflare is probably the only company, there's a handful, but Cloudflare is really the only one I think that could successfully pull this off in a big way. You could imagine, like Google would, but also Google's like the big one of the biggest crawlers. They've been doing it for free for so long. I think they wouldn't want to do that because they make them look like a hypocrite for all their free crawling. Um, so yeah, I think this is very interesting. Great play by Cloudflare. And if you're interested in making money online, you may want to get your website signed up with this and see if you start raking in some dough. If you do, please let us know. Over on the AI Hustle School community, there's a link in the description to that we'd love to hear from you. If this is a side hustle that you're making a lot of money on. Thanks so much for tuning in and we will catch you guys in the next episode.