/reader

AI web crawlers had begun inundating news and information websites with thousands of requests a day compared to the handful they typically saw from search engines. Not only was the explosion in traffic ballooning hosting costs for these sites, the bots supplied zero traffic to them in return. Web traffic in exchange for permission to crawl has been one of the unseen foundations of the internet economy for a generation.

Joslin, who is 29, was seeing this happen from the perspective of an AI company doing the crawling, Fairmarkit,. Panigrahi, who is also 29, was seeing it as the head of ads for Toast, the restaurant point of sale company where they’d both worked early in their careers. 

“It felt like we were seeing two sides of the same problem,” Joslin said. It also seemed like there wasn’t yet a good solution. The web wasn’t set up to easily compensate news and information websites for this new structural shift, they said. 

So they created Tollbit. It’s literally an online tollbooth. You sign up. You decide how much, if anything, to charge AI bots to crawl your website. And the next time they show up to crawl they get routed to Tollbit’s subdomain and hit with a paywall. Publishers can choose different prices for crawls to generate article summaries and for displaying the article’s full text. And it allows publishers to exclude some website data entirely. 

“It felt like we were back in the Napster days for the music industry and that maybe we could supply a Spotify-like solution – a recurring revenue model for the publishing industry,” Joslin said. 

Since then – just 18 months – Tollbit, has become one of the most talked about new ventures in the tech/media startup community. More than 2000 publications now use Tollbit’s system including Time, Newsweek,  AdWeek and the Associated Press. That list also includes publications owned by Penske Media, like Rolling Stone; publications owned by Mansueto Ventures, like Inc and Fast Company; publications owned by Lee Enterprises, which includes almost 80 newspapers; and publications owned by Hearst, which include 27 magazines like Elle and 30 newspapers including the San Francisco Chronicle. 

Tollbit processed more than 15 million transactions in the first quarter of this year, up from 5 million in the fourth quarter 2024. That volume is likely to be even higher when second quarter volumes are tallied.  It’s grown just past 20 employees. And it’s raised $31 million in two rounds from Lightspeed Venture Partners; Jeff Dean, Google’s chief scientist and cofounder of Google Brain; and Bill Maris, who started Google Ventures and is now the founding partner of S32.

If you’re tempted to yawn in the face of a story about internet plumbing, stop yourself. Tollbit has lashed itself to one of the most disruptive developments online since the invention of Google itself. 

Google essentially invented the business of crawling in exchange for monetizable traffic a generation ago with Adwords. It remains the source of its dominance today. And it has been an essential fuel for the growth of the $16 trillion global internet economy.

Now, AI chatbots are massively disrupting this relationship, and the disruption is only accelerating. Not only are more and more searches going through AI chatbots that generate zero traffic for publishers. Google itself is now sending publishers less traffic. Instead, Google is increasingly choosing to use its own AI product Gemini to respond to queries as a way of competing with the chatbots. 

This is the biggest challenge to Google’s advertising money machine that the company has ever faced.  Google has the money and talent to adjust. But super successful companies stumble more than they succeed when faced with such an existential threat. 

The speed that this five alarm fire is sweeping through digital publishing is breathtaking. The AI revolution is effectively only 31 months old. But from May 2024 to February 2025 traffic to the 500 most visited US websites fell 15 percent according to Axios. Some news sites have gotten hit much harder.  A recent piece in the Wall Street Journal said that monthly search traffic to Business Insider is down 55 percent in the last three years and by 33 percent in just the last 18 months to 50 million. 

It drove Business Insider’s decision earlier this month to lay off 21 percent of its editorial staff. That same piece quoted Nicholas Thompson, the CEO of the Atlantic, saying that he ultimately expected referral traffic from search to disappear entirely. “Google is shifting from being a search engine to an answer engine,” he said.

Online tolls is such a new business that it’s too soon to predict how meaningful first mover advantage will be. But we’re about to find out how much it matters. Cloudflare, the $60 billion content delivery network and cybersecurity giant, is gearing up to launch its own online tollboth on July 1, according to someone who has seen a draft of the press release. 

That could quickly disintermediate Tollbit. But it could just as easily be the best thing to happen to the company.  The market for online tolls is only as big as the AI companies allow it to be. They’re the ones paying the tolls. And it should be no surprise that right now they are dragging their feet. Cloudflare has the leverage to force more of them to sign on to this concept. That would expand transaction volumes for all players, including Tollbit. 

The one thing Cloudflare’s entry into online tolls shouldn’t be is a surprise. CEO Matthew Prince has been talking about AIs traffic disruptions at least since January.  Two months ago he said during an interview at the Council on Foreign Relations that “AI is going to fundamentally change the business model of the web…. We sit in between 80 percent of the AI companies. And 20 to 30 percent of the web uses Cloudflare. Part of what we’re thinking about is (what we can do about) that.” 

By now you’re probably wondering why online tolls might be a business at all. Aren’t many publishers solving this problem by blocking all the AI bots? They are. What most don’t realize, Tollbit’s Panigrahi told me, is that technically these aren’t blocks as much as requests. And he said that more and more AI companies are ignoring those requests. He said 3.3 percent of crawl block requests were ignored at the end of 2024. At the end of March 2025, it was up to 13 percent. 

Ok. But Isn’t there a limit on the amount of training data the AI companies will eventually need? Sure, big publishers like News Corp have inked nine figure deals with AI companies for access. And yes, the dozens of publisher lawsuits pending against AI companies will also most likely lead to deals eventually. There’s also a market for middlemen like Scalepost.AI to aggregate smaller content libraries and to take a percentage of those deals. But won’t transaction volumes for training data ultimately start to shrink, not grow? 

What many are just beginning to understand, Panigrahi told me, is that at least for questions about current events,  training data is only part of what enables an AI chatbot  to answer your question. 

Training data enables the AI chatbot to understand the question. And it enables it to answer the question if it’s on a topic with an established and rarely updated corpus of information. Want to know  “How did the Manhattan Project get its name?”  or “How many instruments does Paul McCartney play?” The AI chatbot you use will use its  corpus of training data to answer the question. 

But for questions about current events such as “Give me the two most popular columns in favor and against the US attacking Iran”  no AI chatbot is up to date enough. To do that, they rely on Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) technology to do, in effect, a real time search. After you ask, it crawls the best websites, and instantaneously assembles an answer. 

This is the technology driving most of the explosion in crawls to publisher websites, Panigrahi said. And as AI agents become a bigger and bigger part of web traffic as both human and AI agent use of AI chatbots explode in volume, he said it’s easy to argue that the volume of tollable crawls will expand in kind. 

“When we started, the world was very fixated on training data. We went to every single newspaper and media executive and the first thing they told us was “What’s the benefit of a toll? I’m going to either sue or I’m going to go do my one off deal,” Panigrahi told me. Now, according to Tollbit’s just released quarterly “State of the Bots” report, RAG crawls exceed training data crawls by 2.5 times on Tollbit’s network. Panigrahi said that trend is going to continue until “the majority of the internet is going to be AI traffic, not human traffic. The web is not configured for that today. So that’s the real opportunity we are chasing.” 

A guestimate of how big this new space could be is still complicated because it depends on so many hard to predict variables like the growth rate of AI bots, the crawling prices they are prepared to pay and the percentage of that revenue a company like Tollbit can grab. And Joslin and Panigrahi won’t tell me what those numbers look like inside Tollbit right now.

But it’s not hard to imagine how Tollbit could be generating as much as $71 million a year for its publishing partners right now. And that’s just Tollbit’s suggested pricing model if bots just want content to summarize. Tollbit suggests using the much higher syndication rate for bots that want to display an entire article. The math works like this: Total daily AI bot traffic to Tollbit client websites seems to be doubling every quarter right now. It was about 2.75 million at the end of the fourth quarter 2024, and 6.5 million at the end of the first quarter 2025.  If it doubles again in the second quarter to 13 million, that’s $195,000 a day Tollbit could be generating for its customers at the CPM of a typical content website of, say $15. $195,000 times 365 days is $71 million. 

Campbell Brown, Meta’s former head of media partnerships, who was one of Tollbit’s earliest investors, said what attracted her to Joslin and Panigrahi is that they’d figured out a way to get between publishers and the big technology companies. She’d seen how fraught that relationship had become from her time at Meta. “This was the first time I’d seen anyone present a possible solution.” It had only been four months since she’d left Meta, but she signed on as a senior advisor and began introducing the two cofounders to all the news executives she’d met during her seven years at the social media giant. 

Brown said that to her it’s obvious that AI chatbots are going to drive a lot of news consumption in the future. “All you have to do is look at my teenagers or their friends. These chatbots, not the New York Times, are their first touch point with news and information. That’s going to create a huge amount of competition for real time information among the big AI companies. Why? Because if your AI chatbot can’t tell me who won the game last night, give me five articles about it and do it right every time, my kids are going to find the one that does.”  

The prospect of a new revenue stream like this is tantalizing for publishers. For those with long tenures in the business it also feels richly deserved. One of the biggest mistakes the industry made 25 years ago was not taking Google’s rise seriously enough and therefore not demanding more compensation for letting Google crawl their websites when Google was small enough to be pushed around. “Pointing this out is often the last thing we tell publishers when we meet with them,”Panigrahi said. “ Imagine knowing what you know now about Google back then. This is your opportunity to turn the clock back 25 years.’”

Dan Knauss, one of the organizers of WordCamp Canada, wrote a post on their blog using WordLand. Here's a screen shot of what that post looked like when he was editing it. That's all you need to see to understand the role that WordLand plays. It's a pretty self-describing product. #

A great scene from The West Wing. Use your imagination, something similar is probably happening right now.#

Fast forward to Jan 2021 and I built something from scratch. And I'm still using it!

2017 me would be amazed. 2021 me was proud. 2025 me is still proud but very nonchalant about it. Maybe that's not entirely true — I sometimes still can't believe what I've built — but, after using it for over four years, it is just normal. Especially since working on some other projects which other people have actually used in anger.

I have to remind myself not to take any of this for granted.

• On Writing by Stephen King
• Fairy Tale also by Stephen King
• Something in the Woods Loves You by Jarod K. Anderson

Watching

• After being having it recommended multiple times I've finally given in and started watching Naruto. It takes a bit to get going, but so far I'm enjoying it!
  • Though my watching is currently on pause. Probably until I get back from my vacation.

Projects

• I'm working on a silly side project, which is a Discord bot that posts images to both Bluesky and my GoToSocial instance. It takes care of image conversion, compression, and using LMM to extract a caption (which is not always accurate but 💁‍♂️). It's aptly named image-poster.
• Working on having my page generation code also generate a different file for each of the previous versions of my now page.

I sold the modem because I found a more effective solution for my needs. My setup now uses OpenWRT on a GL.iNet Flint 2 router, which connects to a Zyxel NR7302 Outdoor 5G modem.

When my fiancée and I merged our households, we decided to bring my existing 5G setup from my second home into our new apartment. This initially meant continuing with my GL.iNet Beryl AX as the main router. This 5G approach remained a sensible financial choice: using a second SIM card from my unlimited mobile contract is significantly more cost-effective than a new wired connection.

Once in the new apartment, the existing Wi-Fi coverage wasn’t ideal for our 99-square-meter space. To improve the overall Wi-Fi signal throughout the flat, I acquired a GL.iNet Flint 2 to serve as the new main router. This allowed me to repurpose the Beryl AX as an 802.11s mesh repeater, strategically positioned in the middle of the flat to extend coverage to the opposite side.

While the signal quality from the original 5G modem was still acceptable indoors, my upload speeds weren’t as fast as they used to be. Then, a few days ago, I upgraded my phone contract, giving me a potential 500 Mbps download speed. To truly take advantage of this increased speed, I started investigating how to improve the modem’s reception.

At my previous location, the 5G tower was in sight, providing perfect speeds. In the new apartment, cell towers are more distant, and I observed my phone’s signal improved only with the windows open. This led me to research outdoor antennas and eventually to the Zyxel NR7302 Outdoor 5G modem. It’s quite affordable because Deutsche Telekom provides it to business customers and many refurbished units are available on eBay. Replacing my indoor modem with this outdoor unit significantly boosted reception, and now I consistently get around 400 Mbps download and, crucially, my upload speed has jumped from approximately 10 Mbps to up to 40 Mbps.

The Zyxel modem is powered by Power over Ethernet via a slim Ethernet cable routed through my office window. I initially tried an even thinner “window cable”, but it couldn’t establish a gigabit connection between the router and modem.

On the home network side, the Flint 2 connects via Ethernet to my work laptop and home servers. To address connection issues during calls with simultaneous uploads, I’ve implemented SQM with cake-autorate on the Flint 2 to mitigate buffer bloat.

I’m satisfied with this setup. The only potential enhancement would be connecting the repeater via Ethernet cables, but there’s no suitable infrastructure. Alternatively, a mesh network capable of utilizing DFS channels would be beneficial. Fortunately, our apartment’s thick walls help protect against interference from neighboring Wi-Fi networks, and 80 MHz of 5 GHz channels provide a fast connection throughout. My office, of course, has the strongest connection. 😁

Interactions & Comments

 

We’ve crossed the line.
Half a year gone,
already too much.

Hold on,
it’s not done with us yet.

• Playability.
• On The Blog:
• Permanently Moved
• Photo 365
• The Ministry Of My Own Labour
• Terminal Access
• Dipping the Stacks
• Reading
• Music
• Remember Kids:

Playability.

I’ve been noodling on a chapter in SLOP MACHINES called ‘In Game’, trying to build on why Worlds are the first emergent medium of the 21st century, and why all techno social systems should be seen as worlds.

One of things happening in culture that I think we can all feel intuitively, is that increasingly, media mediums are playable. I don’t mean ‘gamification’, and I don’t simply mean ‘engagement’ (but metrics inside of systems are certainly part of it). But the sense that people – Gen Z and Gen A, are literate in exploring systems. They poke at the rules, bend them, maybe even break them and see how the system responds far more than millennials did. We played the game, but didn’t fully appreciate that culture is an emergent property of a system’s design.

What counts as playable?

• Rule legibility: you can guess cause and effect by interacting with the system.
• Exploit headroom: there’s space to find workarounds the creators didn’t intend.
• Reward feedback: if something works, you get immediate feedback.

Once you learn to spot playability, you see it anywhere that requires ‘Playing the meta‘. Fortnite kids comb patch notes; TikTok creators speedrun trend cycles; memecoin traders hop chains and farm the real time attention economy, economic entertainment is emerging, Stock markets have become a platform for oldskool 4chan raids. With playable media, the content barely matters, playing the system is the content.

To do that, you need fluency in the Code Space you are interacting with. Living inside platform updates rewires your nervous system, all social media creators know how this feels. Fortnite’s shrinking circle retrains time-pressure reflexes. Minecraft encourages modularity and long-term planning. Meme-coins condition you to embrace volatility, and to surf chaos.

Over time, these rhythms become second nature. Stability, by contrast, begins to feel alien. The world outside of EXOCAPITALISM, feels too slow, too inert, and too dull.

Politics is now playable too. You tweet out your opinion, or make a comment on facebook, a youtube video and navigate the public sentiment. You can outrage farm or become a reply guy, there’s plenty of player styles. Conspiracy threads are like alternate reality games. Politicians use viral momentum as a scoreboard too; most long term policy is an afterthought. Keeping the game going is the goal, not resolution or ending it. Trump is very good at this.

Generative media is playable too, more so than ever before. But as i said, the content really doesn’t matter, our current social media platforms as playable systems don’t really reward quality anyway; they reward throughput. Machines are always going to win that game.

I should be clear, ‘playability’ isn’t ‘gamification’. As someone who spent a decade in HR tech, gamification (In my opinion) is mostly about obedience theatre. Badges on the coffee app, loyalty points, and mechanics to get you to finish your training. Gamification is used to make you feel like you’re playing when you’re really just complying. Playability is something else entirely. It’s embedded in the physics of a system, and as a mode of interaction. It invites experimentation, rewards cleverness, and tolerates failure. IMO DeFi yield farming is playable. A stamp card is not.

So how do people learn to navigate these spaces? They play. They watch walkthroughs, argue on Discord, test hypotheses with real money. Failure isn’t final, it’s part of the loop. For many of the crazy Gen Z and Gen Alpha crypto kids I’ve interacted with, a blown-up financial position is just a re-start. This time with a funnier twitter handle and maybe a slightly more optimal strat. These kids are learning the contours of the new Web3 financial system through practice, iteration, and community.

Code writes the rules. Rules shape incentives. Incentives shape behaviour. And behaviour becomes culture.

The point I’m trying to make isn’t that “everything’s a game.” Instead I want to see / stress that all techno-social systems can/are become are playable media.

Back to the point on behaviour becoming the culture. Right now in the US, gambling and sports betting is emerging as one of the most playable mediums and forms of media.

I saw this meme the other day:

As a Solarpunk who thinks about the future, I think this is a little grim. But it does speak to something important.

It reflects the economic reality of Exocaptialism. The most obvious cultural metaphors we have to describe playable media and systems are either the Casino and video games. Unfortunately both already fused a longtime ago. You really do need to realise that NFT flippers and memcoin traders, don’t care about money as much as you think they do, they just want to play games.

As more systems become legible and playable, it’s the logic of the casino, not capitalism! that seeps out into the rest of life. This is why playability matters. Not because everything is a game, but because we are all beginning to think like players, and this changes how we should understand agency inside of systems.

It’s hard to resist the casino, capitalism is even harder, but recognising that a system is playable is the first step toward navigating it with intent rather than just reacting to it. But it also makes us realise that the rules of the game can be changed at any time. By the players or the worldrunners.

Update: Added a slightly tweaked and updated version of this text into my essay collection on worlds at worldrunning.guide

On The Blog:

BBC: Future of the Social Internet Report

A while ago I was interviewed and invited to contribute to BBC R&D’s Future of the Social Internet Report, which explores the shifting dynamics of digital social platforms and online communities.

That report has just dropped: Projections: The Social Internet.

Permanently Moved

No-Go London

If life already feels precarious on your own high street, then a city like London must be ten times worse? 

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2025/06/21/2515-no-go-london/

Experience.Computer: https://experience.computer/
Worldrunning.guide: https://worldrunning.guide/
Subscriber Zine support the show! https://startselectreset.com/

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded by @thejaymo

Subscribe to the Podcast: https://permanentlymoved.online/

Support ✨

£5 MONTHLY 👏

Includes Handmade Zine ✉️

Subscribe

Wherever you get your podcasts

Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Pulled nearly 3 years of notes into one document and topped the full number up to 100.
• Lots of research this week on products and features for a game engine I’m working on.
• Had a call with Microsoft Textworld’s team.
• Had a long call about vibe coding and the steps to go from figma to xcode
• Wrote a really long entry on a mailing list on Apples AI strategy might turn it into a blog post.

Terminal Access

Political Dimensions of Solarpunk…Ten Years Later – Andrew Dana Hudson

We’ve spent a decade imagining better futures. Now what?

Earlier this week Andrew Dana Hudson dropped a long read reflecting on the 10 year anniversary of his hugely influential 2015 essay ‘The Political Dimensions of Solarpunk‘

Some excerpts below:

Probably the most important solarpunk development of the decade, though, is that we were right to bet on solar power. The technology could have plateaued. Instead, costs keep dropping. Efficiency keeps improving. Deployment keeps hockey-sticking. Circularity is getting closer. Land use is looking less zero-sum. A lot of this is thanks to China, but everyone is getting a piece of the action. Solar panels are now cheaper per square meter than wooden fencing.

And certainly, many would love to just build the garden-roofed ecotopia without all the messy class struggle, the delicate balancing of various environmental and community concerns (red tape, ugh!), the slow growing of real grassroots resilience and power? Solarpunk subreddits, Facebook groups, and other image-forward spaces have long fielded debates about whether solarpunk *had* to be anti-capitalist. This is one of the hazards of being an aesthetic as well as an ideology.

There’s a lot more we can say about both of these challenges, but in short they make doing solarpunk both harder and more necessary. The more cyberpunk the world gets, the more useful solarpunks become. The more material reality is buried under layers of digital abstraction, the better it feels to actually get your hands dirty.

Despite the challenges——or perhaps because of them——solarpunk has, on balance, been a tremendously successful “memetic engine.”

Horus and Motherfucker – Eddie Rathke

In more ‘friends doing things’ terminal access news, Eddie Rathke has a Kickstarter for his new novel. Illustrations by the good TonyTran.

Here’s the pitch:

The Adventures of Horus & Motherfucker is an ultraviolent sword & sorcery black comedy about two escaped slaves wandering the countryside killing monsters and chasing god.

But after reading The Adventures of Horus & Motherfucker in a single sitting at my house while I did my day job, he told me it was essentially unpublishable. Too dark. Too weird. Too many jokes. Too much cannibalism.

Dipping the Stacks

My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts · The Fly Blog

I think this is going to get clearer over the next year. The cool kid haughtiness about “stochastic parrots” and “vibe coding” can’t survive much more contact with reality. I’m snarking about these people, but I meant what I said: they’re smarter than me. And when they get over this affectation, they’re going to make coding agents profoundly more effective than they are today.

‘Nobody wants a robot to read them a story!’ The creatives and academics rejecting AI – at work and at home

Tom, who works in IT for the government, doesn’t use AI in his tech work, but found colleagues were using it in other ways. Promotion is partly decided on annual appraisals they have to write, and he had asked a manager whose appraisal had impressed him how he’d done it, thinking he’d spent days on it. “He said, ‘I just spent 10 minutes – I used ChatGPT,’” Tom recalls. “He suggested I should do the same, which I don’t agree with. I made that point, and he said, ‘Well, you’re probably not going to get anywhere unless you do.’”

21st Century Dark Age: will the elision of advertising and entertainment kill art?

We consume art, just as we consume content (whether that’s consuming journalism or consuming pornography). Delineation of materialism by virtue of tangible or intangible – pretending there’s some moral boundary there – feels foolish. There is no real ethical difference between spending £10 to buy synthetic eyelashes, and spending £10 to stream Citizen Kane.

But what we’ve relied on previously is a balance, where the commoditisation of art is offset by the commoditisation of everything else. As my partner observed of the Gen Z woman scrolling through reel after reel of product placement on the plane, we (millennials) used to tolerate advertising during a TV show because sitting through it meant that we could get to the good stuff.

Physicality: the new age of UI

I love products with innovative, novel interfaces — modern iOS isn’t a simply a product, but a platform. Its designers bear responsibility to make the system look good even in uncontrolled situations where third party developers like myself come up with new, unforeseen ideas. That leaves us with the question of how we can embrace a new, more complex design paradigm for interfaces.

Against Self-Capture

Luria observed that whenever he asked an oral interviewee to engage in self-analysis, they would experience difficulty. He observed that self-analysis like we rely on in literate cultures requires “a certain demolition of situational thinking. It calls for the isolation of the self, around which the entire world swirls for each individual person, removal of the center of every situation from that situation enough to allow the center, the self, to be examined and described.”

Reading

I still have the last two books of the year to read but they are both dense and hard going. So despite my resolution I’m taking a break. Finally reading Right Story, Wrong Story by Tyson Yunkaporta. And I used Audible credit to get Interceptor City, Dan Abnett’s follow up to his 40k pilot/flight ace book ‘Double Eagle‘. As usual Toby Longworth’s performance as narrator is fantastic.

Music

Spotify Playlist

• Spotify

HAIM – Relationships

Pop queens HAIM have a new album out very soon. I’m looking forward to it. This first single is catchy as hell. Look, I know they are multiplatinum, and Grammy nominated but there are so many people in this world, some my friends who are musos, who don’t know that the HAIM sisters have been cranking out top tier pop since 2007 at all. It’s baffling.

Remember Kids:

Newsletter 📨

Subscribe to my weeknotes and latest podcast episodes, sent directly to your inbox

Subscribe Now 📥

The post Playability appeared first on thejaymo.

I love that! I think the juxtaposition of websites in a printed phone book is exactly the kind of thing that makes you pause and reconsider the medium of the web in a new light. Isn’t that exactly what art is for?

Kristoffer continues:

Elliot and I began working on diagram.website, a map with hundreds of links to the internet beyond platform walls. We envisioned this map like a night sky in a nature reserve—removed from the light pollution of cities—inviting a sense of awe for the vastness of the universe, or in our case, the internet. We wanted people to know that the poetic internet already existed, waiting for them…The result of that conversation is what you now hold in your hands.

The web is a web because of its seemingly infinite number of interconnected sites, not because of it’s half-dozen social platforms. It’s called the web, not the mall.

There’s an entire night sky out there to discover!

Reply via: Email · Mastodon · Bluesky