Snapshot · This Week in Tech (Audio)
Cloudflare announced it will block AI training crawlers from accessing ad-supported websites by default starting September 15th, defaulting to allowing search crawling but blocking AI agents.
Where this was said
At 58:48 · chapter starts 56:30
Leo introduces Cloudflare's move to block AI bots from ad-supported websites, drawing a comparison to when Spanish news outlets blocked Google snippets — and then begged Google to come back. Jason Hiner delivers his sharpest indictment of the AI industry [1] — Jason Hiner "AI companies scraped the entire internet — copyright content and all — to train their models. Now Cloudflare is blocking those bots, but th…" 2:11:50 : the models were trained by scraping the entire open web, copyright and all. GPT-3 may have been 30–40% Reddit. The owners of that content never consented and never got paid. Now Cloudflare is locking the remaining 20%, but the theft has already happened. The AI companies' strategy, Jason says, is to grow large enough to go public, then settle the copyright lawsuits as a class action for pennies on the dollar. Lisa notes that AI overviews have already gutted affiliate revenue for consumer technology sites, and Owen describes watching Google's ad value collapse for a friend's business after the AI summary changes.
Google is scared for the first time in two decades. Its response — shoving more AI overviews at the users who haven't left yet — is backfiring. When Google I/O dropped and the new AI-heavy search launched, DuckDuckGo usage spiked. Google is hastening the very disruption it's trying to avoid.
Ad-based monetization works well for game apps where users spend extended time in-session, as seen with Grid and Wordle.
Tool-focused apps like PuffCount are poor candidates for ad monetization because users don't stay in-session long enough.
A hard paywall is a screen that blocks all app features unless the user pays or starts a free trial — it cannot be dismissed.
Mobile apps are primarily monetized through either ads (best for games) or in-app purchases/subscriptions (best for tools).
According to the episode, YouTube outperforms every other social platform for building trust and driving SaaS conversions.
Vasco stated that the majority of his app's user base came directly from his YouTube channel.
SEO Bot features a 'Boost My Domain Rating' button that routes users directly to Listing Bot, an example of in-product cross-selling.
The founder's entire product portfolio is AI-related, making it easier to package products attractively for directories.
The founder attached their SaaS demo to the trending debate about whether AI coding is actually good enough to build a full SaaS product.
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