Bot traffic has already passed human traffic on the web. Oasy co-founder Choy Travers thinks publishers should stop blocking the bots and start selling them ads.
Pete Pachal talks with Choy Travers, co-founder of Amsterdam-based Oasy, about a new kind of advertising: sponsored content served to AI crawlers on a publisher's site, on the bet that the AI will use it when answering a user's question. They cover why blocking bots backfires, how Oasy's free-for-publishers, CPM-for-advertisers model works, disclosure that has to survive a crawl and a summary, Perplexity's cloaking objection, why licensing deals leave most publishers behind, and the billboard problem in AI attribution. This is part two of a two-part look at ads for bots; part one is Mark Howard, COO of TIME.
Disclosure: Pete has been running Oasy on mediacopilot.ai for several months.
In this episode
- Why blocking AI crawlers means removing yourself from the fastest-growing search channel
- How Oasy's model works: free for publishers, CPM for advertisers, one placement per page
- What an advertiser is actually buying when there's no guaranteed placement
- Disclosure that has to survive a crawl, a chunk, and a summary
- Perplexity's cloaking objection, and what it gets right and wrong
- Why licensing deals will pay the top players and leave the rest scraped
- Who is responsible when an AI platform strips the label
- Pay-per-crawl versus pay-per-use, and the billboard problem in attribution
- The utopian and dystopian versions of the ads-for-bots future
Guest: Choy Travers, Co-Founder, Oasy: LinkedIn | oasy.ai
Watch the video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU43Zhz3esA
Full post and transcript: mediacopilot.ai
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Music: "Favorite" by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0
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