This article explores insights from a video by Ajit Ghuman, CEO of Monetizely, a global leader in software pricing strategy. In his analysis, Ghuman breaks down Cloudflare's revolutionary "Pay Per Crawl" pricing metric and explains how this innovation may have solved a critical problem facing the media industry and content creators in the age of AI.
The Media Industry Crisis: On the Brink of Extinction
The media landscape is currently experiencing what could be described as an existential threat. As Ajit Ghuman points out, this isn't simply a market correction but potentially "an extinction event" for many established publishers.
"Media industry is getting absolutely obliterated right now. I'm talking about Squashed Earth, Huff Post and the Washington Post down 50%, Business Insider down 55%, firing 21% of the workforce. This isn't a correction, this could easily become an extinction event."
The root cause? Artificial intelligence services are systematically extracting content from across the internet, repurposing it, and delivering it directly to users—all while retaining 100% of the value. Meanwhile, the original content producers who invested years building audiences and creating valuable content receive nothing in return.
Cloudflare's Game-Changing Solution: Pay Per Crawl
As a company that controls approximately 20% of internet traffic, Cloudflare is uniquely positioned to address this imbalance. Their solution comes in the form of a new pricing metric that Ghuman argues "just solved a trillion dollar problem" with just two words: Pay Per Crawl.
Rather than simply creating tools to block AI bots from scraping content (a defensive approach), Cloudflare has established a marketplace that fundamentally realigns the relationship between content producers and AI companies:
"Instead of charging publishers to block AI bots, they created a marketplace where AI companies can pay these content producers on a pay-per-crawl basis."
This approach represents a paradigm shift from treating content scraping as a technical problem to addressing it as an economic and incentive problem.
Beyond Features: Building Incentive Structures
What makes Cloudflare's innovation particularly significant is how it exemplifies a broader principle about successful business models. As Ghuman explains:
"This is exactly what I mean when I say most founders are thinking too small. Companies aren't building products, they're building incentive structures. Pricing is not how companies collect money, it's how they program human behavior at scale."
This perspective challenges the typical Silicon Valley obsession with features, user experience, and product-market fit. While these elements are important, they miss what Ghuman argues is the critical factor determining whether companies survive: their pricing metric.
The Alignment Strategy: Learning from the Best
To illustrate the power of well-aligned pricing metrics, Ghuman points to other successful examples:
"AWS charges on a per usage basis because they want customers to scale without friction. Stripe charges per transaction because they only win when customers win. These aren't pricing strategies, they are alignment strategies."
The contrast with most SaaS companies is stark. Many businesses base their pricing on internal costs of production (like OpenAI's token-based pricing), creating a fundamental misalignment:
"Customers want to use the product less to save money. Companies want them to use it more to justify the cost."
Transforming Zero-Sum into Positive-Sum
What makes Cloudflare's Pay Per Crawl model revolutionary is how it transforms an adversarial relationship into a collaborative one:
"Cloudflare just flipped a zero sum war into a positive sum game. Instead of publishers fighting AI companies, they are now partners. The more AI companies succeed, the more publishers get paid."
This systemic realignment explains why major publishers like Condé Nast, Time, Associated Press, and The Atlantic are adopting the model. For the first time, they're operating within a system where "everyone's incentive point in the same direction."
The Key Question for Every Business
Ghuman concludes with a powerful question that all business leaders should consider about their own pricing models:
"The question isn't what should we charge? The question is when our customers win, how do we win? Can we both win together? Can we price based on that?"
This approach—focusing on incentive alignment rather than simply extracting value—represents the future of sustainable business models, especially in technology and SaaS companies.
By examining how Cloudflare solved a complex problem through innovative pricing, we gain valuable insights into how businesses can create more sustainable relationships with customers and partners. The lesson is clear: the most powerful pricing strategies don't just collect revenue—they align incentives and program behaviors that benefit all parties involved.