Independent journalism built the modern web. Then AI ate it. Trillions of tokens of human reporting were ingested into language models without consent, attribution, or payment. The journalists who wrote it received a rounding error. The companies who scraped it received a market cap.
We’re not litigating the past. We’re building the future. ArchiveBay is a marketplace where AI companies pay creators — cleanly, transparently, on chain — for the right to train on their work.
Three rules. They are not negotiable.
One. The work has to actually be yours.
Every archive on ArchiveBay is verified at the source — through real APIs (Beehiiv, Ghost, YouTube) where they exist, through verification posts and DNS records where they don’t. We never accept a URL on faith. If you didn’t make it, you can’t list it.
Two. The platform fee is 1%.
One percent. Built for creators, not landlords. The split is enforced in the database AND on the Solana smart contract — the on-chain program literally cannot send more than 1% to the platform treasury. If we want to grow, you have to grow first.
Three. The editorial firewall is absolute.
Sources never pay journalists through this platform. The platform never pays journalists. There are no onboarding bonuses, no referral fees, no “sponsored archives”, no editorial subsidies of any kind. ArchiveBay exists for a single transaction: an AI company licensing content from a creator who owns it. That’s it. That’s the whole product.
Independent journalism built the modern web. Independent journalism should also be paid for the AI that’s replacing it. Not as litigation, not as charity, not as some discretionary fund some executive can yank back when the quarter looks bad. As contract. On-chain. Forever.
We’re building the receipts.