Join the Resistance, Stop the Botpocalypse

The Dawn of a New Age

As of last week, robots.nxt's bot payment funnel is online and operational.

We're calling for you — yes, you, dear reader — to join the resistance and fight the web3 botpocalypse. Sign up to robots.nxt to survive the onslaught of AI enshittification.

Welcome to the dawn of a new age of the internet, web3.

Every age is marked by commercial model and has harbingers heralding the change.

Web1 was ads and ecommerce — Google and Amazon led the charge, claiming their place as kings of the web.

Web2 was software as a service, B2B with Salesforce et al, and B2C with Netflix et al. For 15 years, SaaS has driven essentially all startup business models.

As I considered web3, I asked — what commerce model will drive this version of the web?

What is web3, anyway?

web3 is AI, tokenization, and crypto.

Which means that the commerce model for web3 will be AI, tokenization, and crypto.

What does that mean for us? How do we do that?

Sit a moment, traveler, and warm yourself. Consider our journey in light of the road already travelled as we plot a course through madness to the light of the new day.

In the Beginning, Man Created web1

In the beginning, Man created the internet, and it was human. Terribly and divinely human. Awful and full of awe. The internet was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of its depth. No one could find anything, but somehow we found each other.

Man said, "Come, let us build temples to gather." We built temples to generosity and hubris, websites and forums and gathering places to discuss and exchange. To learn, to understand, to dispute, to fight and rage, rage, against the dying of the light.

Money came and saw what we built and said "We must understand them so that we can make more Money." And there were analytics, and the analytics served ads.

And the Money saw that the data was good, and separated the traffic into segments, and segments into audiences, and audiences into funnels, and funnels into ads, and ads made Money.

And it was morning, the first day of the first era of the internet.

We built tools, objects embodied our desires to build and manage, maintain and destroy. The common clay of the internet.

The Dawning of the Second Age

Lo, it no longer made sense to build a full-stack end-to-end software platform.

We built components, bricks that we mortar together with APIs, and we stacked them together into new temples, unique and useful and terrible and everything in between.

And the Money said, "We will sell to businesses, and we will make Money, and that Money will be annual recurring revenue, and everyone will worship ARR."

And we called it Software as a Service, and SaaS gave unto us ARR, and the Money saw that it was good, and the Money was happy.

And it was evening, and it was morning, the first day of the second era of the internet.

Enough of that. I've beaten the analogy to death already.

Then came unto us the dawn of AI. Ok stop dang I already said I would stop.

Death of the Human Internet is the Birth of web3

We used these tools to build bots, graceful and devastating to bring power to our temples and wreak havoc upon our enemies. And now botpocalypse is upon us.

Webcrawlers were built for content indexing so that Money could serve ads. And those webcrawlers became content scrapers, no longer analyzing and organizing links, but transforming the data into tokens, and feeding those tokens into large language models.

The bots came, they were small, and they were few. And they prospered, proliferated, and consumed the entire web. Behold, all the content on the web was used to train AI.

Analytics ignores bots, because bots don't make money for websites.

Quietly, invisible, bots went from a fraction of website traffic to the majority.

Actual growth of bot traffic over the next few years will be geometric or exponential.

All money online is made from humans by ads, ecommerce, lead-generation for a service business, or SaaS.

Bots do not make money for websites. Bots cost websites money. Yet bots are the main traffic source for websites.

Captain, Pull Up! Pull Up! Pull Up!

Ever-shrinking human traffic subsidizes ever-growing bot traffic.

Sites have to make more money from a smaller portion of traffic just to break even.

That's a death spiral.

What are the bots doing? They're scraping content to feed into an AI.

The AI companies are for-profit, and don't have a product unless they have content.

Your content, from your website.

They're already paying billions for content, so they have the means and intent to pay, if there's a charge attached.

There's dozens of deals between high-profile websites and AI companies. These are all human-to-human negotiated deals. That is expensive and takes forever.

But there's two billion websites. AI companies will never license content from even a fraction of 2,000,000,000 websites by doing human-to-human deals.

Tech automates, which crushes costs, shrinks timeframes, and scales.

We already segment traffic into audiences, and we already push those audiences into a monetization funnel.

Only 1.5% of this sites' bots are bots that the website actually wants to visit.

This is the botpocalypse. And it'll happen to you!

Bots are an audience, so treat them like an audience. Whenever a bot requests content that the site wants to sell, robots.nxt requires the bot to pay.

If the bot pays, they get the content. If they don't pay, they get ignored.

Why give freebies to for-profit companies who take your freebie and use it to make money for themselves? It's insane, isn't it? You're killing your own business to subsidize someone who is using your expense to make more money for themselves!

Insane!

robots.nxt kills bots that can't or won't pay, saving the website those expenses.

And robots.nxt converts bots that can and will pay into revenue for the website.

Why are you giving away your content to AI companies? Are they beggars on the street desperate for a handout?

Converting bots from an expense into a revenue source stops you from subsidizing billion-dollar AI companies and transforms you into a fairly-paid supplier.

Make bots pay you.

web3 is AI, tokenization, and crypto.

robots.nxt finds the AI bots, tokenizes the value of your content, and charges the bots to access it. And that's the monetization strategy for web3.

If you don't… bots will kill you. And they won't notice or care. You're grist for the mill.

The internet is for humans!

Fight back! Make bots PAY!