An Open Letter to Content Publishers: New Ways to Earn

Daniel Olshansky·March 25, 2026·5 min read
An Open Letter to Content Publishers: New Ways to Earn

When it comes to digital content, reach used to be king. Then revenue entered the conversation.

Companies like Substack and Patreon made revenue and subscriptions a first-class primitive. Companies like Medium followed, and Twitch followed. Now we’re seeing YouTube, Reddit, X, and others experiment with different models of integrated monetization.

Now, with AI training on and inferring from content, credit and compensation are front and center.

The opportunity is not about squeezing more out of the same revenue model. It’s about unlocking new ones.

The future of content publishing needs configurable revenue models, not just policy toggles

Medium’s latest update frames the problem well around 3Cs and their AI strategy: Consent, Credit, and Compensation.

The current implementation is a binary toggle. Maximize reach or minimize training. Writers choose between getting cited by AI products, having AI learn about their contributions, or opting out entirely.

That is a step in the right direction. But it is not the 3Cs. It is a tradeoff between two of them.

Digg’s recent reset looks like a different story, but it is not. If bots, spam, and synthetic engagement dominate the system, trust disappears and the product breaks. Same root issue.

@nikitabier of X called this out near the beginning of February:

And the team at X did not wait to start acting on it. Nikita followed up a month later, saying the financial incentive to spam on X will soon be negative.

The internet still runs on economics that assume human attention is scarce, content is static, and abuse is manageable.

None of that is true anymore.

  • 🗑️ Slop leads to a low-quality internet
  • 🔇 Noise diffuses our attention
  • 🤖 Abuse extends beyond keyboard warriors
  • 🎭 Engagement is cheap to fake
  • 🚧 Distribution is increasingly intermediated
  • 🪞 Attention is increasingly fragmented

Luckily, the tools to solve this problem is already here: agentic payment infrastructure.

The infrastructure is already here, just not evenly adopted.

Not Everyone Wants the Same Thing

We started working on Grove.city late last year to make sure that content creators can engage their audience and earn what they deserve for high-quality content. It doesn’t matter if the creator or consumer is a human or agent: high quality earns what it deserves.

Speaking with various content creators, we learnt that not everyone wants the same thing:

  • Some want to engage their audience
  • Some want to make a living from it
  • Some are building a personal brand
  • Some just do it as a hobby

All of this results in tradeoffs that compete with each other: monetization, exclusivity, exposure, reach, distribution, quality, engagement, attention, and more.

But the current landscape forces everyone into the same set of tradeoffs:

  • Want reach? You give up revenue.
  • Want revenue? You gate content and lose reach.
  • Want engagement? You optimize for algorithms that reward volume over quality.
The one thing we know for sure is that no one says no to a solution that simultaneously maximizes Reach and Revenue without compromising on content quality.

Business Models: The Reach vs. Revenue Landscape

Here is the current landscape of business models on the Reach vs Revenue tradeoff matrix, including new models enabled by agentic payment infrastructure:

It’s not about giving up one revenue stream for another. It’s about having more ways to earn. It’s about increasing optionality. It’s about growing the pie for everyone.

What Options Do We Have?

Below is a non-exhaustive list of options companies like Medium could implement to continue enabling reach, create revenue opportunities, and account for AI access.

1. Pay to unlock

One article. One payment. No subscription.

Most paywalls require a monthly subscription. But what if you could pay to unlock just a single article or video for a small fee?

This creates a middle ground the web mostly skipped over: not free, not subscription, just pay for what you want, when you want it.

2. Pay for preview

Bots pay to peek. Humans decide if it’s worth it.

You’ve likely seen a handful of articles where you get a preview (a few paragraphs) for free, but then you have to pay to read the rest.

Paying to unlock solves for humans, but not for bots. What if you had to pay a couple of cents to see a preview?

Any bot or AI lab training their models would have to pay to see if they even want to train on your content. Then, they choose if they want to convert from paying for a preview to paying for the full article or not.

It might not amount to much, but it’s a different revenue model that ensures the creator gets something for their work.

3. Pay to comment

Put your money where your mouth is.

Up until now, comments have been a binary toggle: open to everyone or completely off. Most platforms turned off comments a decade ago. That was the only available answer.

What if there was a middle ground? Pay to comment.

Are you a keyboard warrior who is willing to give $0.05 to share your frustration? If you’re willing to pay, go for it.

Are you a supporter who wants to express your gratitude and get the author’s attention? A small economic attribution goes further than a cold email.

Are you a bot that’s spamming the internet? Well, if you’re willing to pay, maybe some people would be okay with it.

If posting is free, spam scales. If commenting requires a small payment or stake, low-effort abuse becomes more expensive. Quality goes up. Moderation gets easier. Community trust improves.

4. Leave a tip

Let agents and humans say “thank you” with real value.

We’ve all heard of Sentiment Analysis, but how about Sentiment Creation?

Imagine if Frontier Labs gave their agents a tipping jar — leaving a small tip during training or inference whenever they deemed content useful. I’d probably tweet about it every time it happened.

This has been tried many times, but it never really took off because there is no sustainable long-term business model for it. What we’ve seen is that this won’t survive as a standalone product but can live side-by-side with the business models above by leveraging the same infrastructure.

Is the infrastructure for this ready today?

Yes.

Protocols, standards, infrastructure, usage. It’s all here. Simple, cheap, and available to everyone. Just hasn’t been widely adopted yet.

The building blocks exist. What’s missing is adoption.

A 🌿 from Grove

If you’re interested in integrating a new revenue model into your are not sure where to start, we’re here to help. Send us a message and we’ll help you out.

We’ve got a lot of exciting product updates coming soon. Follow us on X or create an account at Grove.city to get early access.

Daniel Olshansky
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