two-sided marketplace

Cloudflare has introduced a bot paywall system allowing customers to charge AI models for scraping their content. The system enables content owners to set minimum prices and AI crawlers to bid, creating a two-sided marketplace. Stephanie Cohen, Cloudflare's chief strategy officer, highlighted the shift toward monetizing internet interactions as AI activity grows.

The author is building a P2P crowdshipping marketplace (similar to BlaBlaCar for packages) and faces the cold start problem, where travelers and senders are reluctant to join without the other side. They seek strategies to bootstrap the first 50-100 transactions, asking if manual matching, subsidies, or route constraints worked for others.