AI companies hoovered up the entire internet before anyone questioned: Is that OK? This is the question that has led to a multitude of lawsuits (including, famously, The New York Times suing OpenAI), many deals between AI companies and various publishers, and an emerging consensus that content creators should be compensated for their data.
That’s all well and good in theory, but what about the “how?” That’s what my guests this week, Olivia Joslin and Toshit Panigrahi, are here to talk about. Joslin and Panigrahi are the co-founders of TollBit, which is one of a handful of companies tackling a very hard problem in media today, and that’s how to get people to pay for content. Well, not people — machines. The web scraping that AI companies do used to be fairly benign. It helps power things like Google search and has traditionally been used as a research tool. But now the big AI guys are just taking that information and summarizing it, without doing that much of the linking anymore. And that’s kind of a problem.
Publishers are very motivated now to find ways to be compensated when someone scrapes their content, and that’s exactly what TollBit is trying to create: a marketplace where publishers and those who want their data can make a simple exchange: money for information. Of course things aren’t always that simple, and I got into the complexities, the politics, and the realities of trying to get someone to pay for something that they’ve up until now been getting for free.
It was a really illuminating conversation, and I hope you listen all the way to the end where we zero on what a healthy media future looks like. As ever, if you enjoyed this conversation, it would be great if you could follow the show on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast app, really. Also, I’d appreciate it if you’d leave a rating or review — it really does help the show. And if you’re on YouTube, please like the video and subscribe to the channel. Much obliged.
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