How this startup is helping publishers profit from AI scraping

00:00 Speaker A

This month Reddit sued AI giant Anthropic claiming that the OpenAI rival had accessed its platform of more than 100,000 times. It accessed the platform since July of 2022 after Anthropic allegedly said it had blocked its bots from doing so. We sat down with the COO of Reddit to discuss the suit.

00:16 Speaker B

What’s important to us is that um that we are able to protect our users privacy, their deletion rights, like we have policies um that ensure that, you know, when users take down a post, like the post is taken down. And so it’s really important and as we said in our terms of service that, you know, we have a conversation with folks who have access to our data because that’s a commitment that we have in terms of our policies.

00:55 Speaker A

Our next guest has crunched the numbers on the size and scope of AI scraping by bots and helps publishers profit from this scraping. Joining us now, we’ve got Toit Fenagrahi, who is the Tolbit CEO and co-founder. Tolbit is a New York based startup that helps news publishers monitor and make money when AI companies scrape their content, uh by acting almost like a toll booth of the internet. Did we get that right, Toit?

01:25 Tosit

Yes, that’s correct. Thanks for having me.

01:28 Speaker A

Absolutely. So take us into your business and and what you’re seeing more broadly here, especially as we’re knowing and knowledge of knowledgeable of how much scraping these AI engines need to do in order to get either knowledge sets that can then be used for generative AI efforts and they reach to basically every source part of the web that they can essentially get their hands on for free.

02:06 Tosit

Absolutely. So Tolbit is a platform that helps uh websites of all sizes monitor, manage, and monetize their AI bot traffic, which essentially means we give them tools to to get an idea of how uh rampant the scraping might be on their site. We give them tools to block it and enforce content access rights. And then we give them uh a real innovation is our bot paywall, a tool that allows these AI bots to come in and actually pay for sanctioned access to that content um and and data, right? And I think one of the things that we’re seeing, right, especially in the last quarter, is the demand for not for uh uh content for training, content for retrieval at inference time. When people ask a question, the bots have to go out and read and answer your question.

03:09 Speaker A

Is AI training as it stands right now ethical from the standard practices that users expect when they’re on the internet?

03:24 Tosit

I think this is a question that’s bigger than all of us. I think we’re uh uh definitely looking to some of the courts to set to decide and set some precedents as to whether or not training is fair use. But I think uh us as a business, right, and I think where some of the conversation should be going should be around, you know, these bots who are who have to go out when you and I ask a question on any of these platforms to go read that content, right? They don’t know what happened today. They don’t know what the price of a ticket was if you wanted to go to France, right? They actually have to go out and access those sites to get that information. That will be a far bigger use case than than uh just training as these tools continue to evolve.

04:26 Speaker A

And so what what is the revenue model like? How how does the business make money?

04:34 Tosit

So essentially what with the technology that we built, we have built a gateway that any AI application, agent, bot can come in through and actually pay uh through the form of micro payments for access to content and data, right? So it could be anything from what happened today, right? You want to you want to read um what happened on the news today to I want to know, you know, what the price of a hotel is today in New York and I want you to go uh book it for me, right? And so we are able to uh let the websites set those rules, set the the access protocols for what that content data should cost. And then we take a transaction fee on top of that for enabling this faster, cleaner, licensed access to that content data.

05:29 Speaker A

To a really fascinating business and I’m sure there’s a very large total addressable market that just continues to grow at this juncture. Thanks so much for breaking this down. We appreciate it.

05:41 Tosit

Thank you.