Cloudflare's AI Toll Booth for Creators

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Welcome to this week's issue of the Niche Media Publishing Newsletter.

If you missed last week, check it out:

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Let’s get started with this week’s topics.

Cloudflare Robinhood for Creators?

This news is bigger than the recognition it’s getting. Cloudflare recently announce a ground-breaking new effort to enable website owners to sell access to AI bots on a novel marketplace:

This is exactly the type of forward thinking infrastructure that the digital economy needs right now.

I’ve been discuss this as a necessary solution for some time. I don’t think it’s a simple problem to solve, but if anyone can do it, I’m bullish on Cloudflare. They have most of the web as clients already, and they have the technical chops to do it.

Here’s a demo of what this could look like:

And this is why I’m still bullish on original, high signal, content creation.

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Cracking the Paid Subscription Model

I’m doing a lot of thinking about what way to charge for content is, short of an AI marketplace saving us.

My prior is that everyone seemed to hate paywalls when some publishers first tried implementing them years ago. But I’m beginning to think times have changed.

Glen Allsopp has an excellent post up on Digitalbox, a content publisher, and I noticed an interesting point:

This is surprising and notable! At $5/month that’s $21,000 MRR. For a SATIRE site. This isn’t even a weighty B2B trade magazine.

So what’s my point?

More indie publishers should try this out. Let’s see how much our content is worth.

Brandon seems to be onto something similar here with Retro Dodo:

I suspect the hardest part might actually be setting up the paywall infrastructure. That’s a rabbit hole I’ll be traveling down.

Substack and Beehiiv were likely the first iteration of this trend. But the reality is that it doesn’t really make sense to shoehorn the entire content landscape into a fairly narrow newsletter subscription model.

FWIW, I see the lines between blog (website), newsletter, and community (UGC) increasingly blurring. We just need new, flexible, payment rails to make it work.

Google’s Horrible, No Good Year

Apparently Google isn’t fairing much better in their myriad anti-trust woes…

As much satisfaction as I take from Google’s comeuppance, I’m not counting on anything changing too soon with all of the legal dogfights, appeals, and enforcement decisions still a long ways from being resolved.

Need Traffic? Want to Build Community?

I’m “all in” on Reddit right now as the fastest way to acquire users and build community.

As such, my course is a fluid, evolving project. I’m adding new modules weekly!

Other Things I Read Recently

These are some articles I enjoyed, but don’t really have anything to add to!

Other Newsletters Worth Following

Here are some other publications I subscribe to, author, or co-sign.

If you are operating a newsletter (or even just interested), this next one is one of my “must opens” every week as a newsletter operator myself:

For some of the best breakdowns of creator success stories:

If you want to go deeper with Reddit (one of my favorite creator ecosystems right now), check out my sister publication:

And don’t miss Amy’s excellent insights into wants happening in the world of content marketers.

Interested in Booking an Ad?

I’ve put together a resource sheet over at Passionfruit here.

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OK, that's it for this week...

Please do reply to this email with any feedback or suggestions.

Ewen