AI has revived the micropayments dream
In a new piece from The Rebooting, Supertab CEO Cosmin Ene argues that AI agents could finally make micropayments viable, something thirty years of failed schemes couldn't manage. Over half of internet traffic is already bots, according to Cloudflare, and the rise of agents could split the web into one version built for humans and another for machines that don't watch ads and don't click banners.
As Ene put it, "the world has changed more than the last 20 years" in the last 20 months, and AI systems now "consume crazy amounts of content and data at unprecedented scale and speed" without the ad-supported exchange that funded the web as we know it.
The article lays out Supertab's approach. Rather than fighting over how AI models were trained, the opportunity is charging for grounding, the moment a model reaches out for fresh information. That means building infrastructure for publishers to set usage rules and prices, then aggregating and settling transactions that often amount to fractions of a cent, since the transaction costs of processing so many tiny payments have sunk most micropayments efforts in the past.
The piece also points to momentum elsewhere in the space, noting Cloudflare's newly announced Monetization Gateway, which lets publishers charge AI models for scraping using stablecoins to keep transaction costs low.
Watch the full conversation, listen to the podcast, or read the full article here.
