last month Ben Thompson wrote about pay for crawl. he first defended the ad based system stating that web wouldn't be successful if there was no way to distribute information for free to billions of people in the early days. in his view subscriptions are a way to fund future writing of an author. it is not a payment for the current issue. the only successful way to monetize one off articles was with ads. however, it is clear at this point that the ad model is broken. google has started to summarize the results instead of sending traffic to long tail of blogs. in a few years people will increasingly browse web through agentic interfaces anyways. he basically proposed the system that Cloudflare announced yesterday but in his opinion these x402 payments should happen via stablecoins

https://stratechery.com/2025/the-agentic-web-and-original-sin/

I like building crypto apps and learning new things.

i think Cloudflare understands this. that is way they didn't go that route

I’m excited for this future but imo the key piece to solve is on the demand/user side. If there’s no users with funded wallets/micropayments set up, then it won’t matter if sites are set up for agent payments