“There is a distribution demand curve for humans, where certain customers will be worth a lot of money, then a long tail of people who will not convert at the same rate,” Henderson said. “The way you deal with that is by having a spectrum of products that match that demand curve.”
For bots, this means enabling content creators to establish a taxonomy of responses based on the needs of the publisher. If a website has a licensing partnership with an AI firm, for example, its crawlers may be allowed to access content for free or at a predetermined price. Unfamiliar bots could be turned away or charged a higher price. That price could even change depending on the exact content the bot is looking to collect—one gathering information on car prices could be tolled more than one looking for sports scores, for instance.
This approach to bot monetization is not unique to Monetization OS, but the way it blends the offerings is. In fact, the paywall would even account for emerging use cases, such as when a human subscriber uses an agent to gather information from a website. The end result is a single system that monetizes every visitor to its site.
Monetization OS still faces the same dilemma as its peers, which is that its bot monetization strategy only works if AI firms are willing to pay in the first place. No amount of technical wizardry can circumvent that issue.
But it does address the problem partially, in that its more effective monetization of human visitors would at least result in an uptick in revenue in the short term. By packaging these offerings as one, the company can pitch both short-term and long-term revenue gain in one product.
The 24-person team has raised north of $6 million, and it counts backers including Google, Cloudflare, and Mather. It is also much more affordable than classic paywall technology and easier to implement, according to Henderson. It will have a tiered pricing structure, with a free, paid, and enterprise offering based on total interactions per month.
I have always found the concept of smart paywalls to be alluring, as they theoretically take all the guesswork out of monetization, leaving content creators to focus on their work and let the machines sort the money. The idea of blending this technology with bot monetization extends that calculus to its logical next step.
The odds of success are, as always, long, especially considering that the competition has a combined market cap well north of a trillion dollars. But it is nonetheless heartening to see a promising new approach to such a consequential problem.
Talking Heds
ATTN: Please: The social influence publisher ATTN:, which you likely encountered in the form of its short-form political content, has been a hive of activity. Last month, its cofounders Matthew Siegel and Jarrett Moreno bought a majority stake in the company back from Candle Media, the Blackstone-backed firm that paid $150 million for it in 2022. Then this week, the publisher, whose business largely stems from its agency work, hired media executive Edgar Hernandez as its first chief commercial officer. Hernandez, who most recently served as the chief strategy officer at the multicultural media agency My Code, has previously served stints at BuzzFeed and Complex. Now independent, ATTN: has a remit to grow, probably through acquisitions, and financial backing from a throng of deep-pocketed investors.
