Name: How Beehiiv and Cloudflare Are Giving Creators Control Over AI Scraping
Uploaded: 2026-06-23T13:01:00Z
Duration: 11 min 52 s
Description: Beehiiv co-founder and CEO Tyler Denk discusses the newsletter platform’s new partnership with Cloudflare, which allows creators to block and control how artificial-intelligence bots scrape their content. Denk also explains why owning an audience via email provides a moat against algorithmic volatility.

https://www.barrons.com/client

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A Successful Transition Requires Honesty and a ‘Heavy Lift’

Young advisors considering a succession plan should maximize engagement with clients because “it can take a long time to gain that trust and build those relationships,” says Nate Fisher, managing director and wealth advisor at Carson Wealth.

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Succession Planning and Establishing Trust With Clients

The Carson Wealth managing director and wealth advisor says his decision to partner with the firm was driven by the need for increased capacity for holistic services and a clear succession plan for his retiring father.

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Oil and Gas in a Volatile World

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Sustainable Investing and the Wealth Transfer

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Beehiiv co-founder and CEO Tyler Denk discusses the newsletter platform’s new partnership with Cloudflare, which allows creators to block and control how artificial-intelligence bots scrape their content. Denk also explains why owning an audience via email provides a moat against algorithmic volatility. Photo: WSJ Leadership Institute

https://m.wsj.net/video/20260622/ac3078b9-c1af-49f5-a0cf-4c40ec0fc9b2/1/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

Beehiiv co-founder and CEO Tyler Denk discusses the newsletter platform’s new partnership with Cloudflare, which allows creators to block and control how artificial-intelligence bots scrape their content. Denk also explains why owning an audience via email provides a moat against algorithmic volatility.

How Beehiiv and Cloudflare Are Giving Creators Control Over AI Scraping

So I have Tyler Denk here. He's the co-founder and CEO.

And CEO.

Of Beehiiv. A platform helping creators and businesses, not just turn newsletters into media companies, but really he is interested in creating the tools and systems to enable them to have success. So Tyler, thank you so much for joining us here at Cannes.

Thanks for having me.

Let's get started right at the beginning. What is the difference between you and Substack?

Yeah, let's get right into it. There's a few different things. I think the business model is one, so they are a take rate business model like a lot of companies in the creator economy.

Sorry, what is take rate?

A take rate. So they will take a percentage of your earnings. So if you generate $100,000 in earnings, you owe them 10,000. So they're taking 10% of everything you earn on the platform. We are more of a traditional SaaS business where you pay a flat rate, $79 a month, $150 a month, depending on the size of your newsletter. So that's one would be the business model. Two, capabilities. They are kind of shifting more towards a social platform. We're very much tools and infrastructure and so we have automations, we have APIs, we have web hooks, we have what a more sophisticated content creator who wanted to build a business around their content would need to succeed. They're more of a simplified platform for better or worse.

So in short, you say they're a platform and you're basically about tools and infrastructure.

Yeah, I think the analogy that works really well is Amazon versus Shopify. They are building the destination. If you want to follow someone on Substack, you download the Substack app, you go to the Substack website, but they are an intermediary between the audience and the content creator. We are Shopify, we are tools and infrastructure that sit in the background where we don't want to be the destination. We aren't the ones that's aggregating content and doing editorial. You could land on a content creator that is hosted on Beehiiv and have no idea that it's hosted on Beehiiv and that's intentional.

So what do you think people need to know about creators? I mean, I know this year Cannes has a whole thing around creators. Why do you think creators matter and what do you think businesses need to know about them that they're missing?

Yeah, so there's actually a study that came out last week with marketers, and they said 77% of marketers think that creator marketing is more impactful than traditional marketing. And I think in the age of AI, there's going to be more of a premium on genuine, authentic content creators who can reach their audience and have people that actually resonate with them. And so I think we're gonna see, I think we're at the very beginning of the creator economy. I think even just five years ago it was chasing vanity metrics of who has the most followers and how much can we pay them to post on Instagram. Now there's this explosion of very niche content creators and the long tail where you don't need millions of followers. You can have 10,000 followers and serve a very particular audience very well and build an incredible business around that.

So what you're saying it's about engagement versus just reach.

Sure, and reach is changing a lot now too, right? With the advent of TikTok and now Instagram reels, even if you have 100,000 followers, it's totally independent of how much reach your content's going to get because it's all algorithm driven. And that's actually why I'm very bullish on email. Email is an own audience channel. So when I send my newsletter every Tuesday to 130,000 people, 130,000 people receive that in their inbox. There's no algorithm dictating whether this is quality content to reach that inbox.

Why do you think owning your audience matters?

Because one of like, there's a few, quite a few examples. You know, there was a time where the business model on the internet was create good content and you monetize with banner traffic and like ads on your website. And so publishers would create a lot of content. Google would reward them and send traffic to their website. That was like the handshake on the internet of how you generate money as a publisher. Then people and publishers started publishing on Facebook and then on Twitter and in 2018 Facebook changed their algorithm and deprioritized that type of content, which led to Mashable, Mic, BuzzFeed, all mass layoffs and some of them going outta business. Twitter deprioritized external links in 2022 and Google in 2024 with their AI overviews cut traffic to publishers by 50 or 60%.

So what you're saying is that if you own your hostage, a platform can't keep you? No, if you own your audience, a platform can't keep you hostage.

If you're overly dependent on a single platform to drive and distribute traffic to you, you are vulnerable for a product manager on that team to change what they are going to prioritize. Whereas email is an open protocol and you can actually own that audience relationship.

So Tyler, you have said that being single is a superpower, single as in not having a relationship because you left a secure job, you left your girlfriend and you relocated for a job that really was pretty unsecure. What is it about you that makes you so in love with risk?

Yeah, definitely very risk tolerant. I think one of my biggest fears is being complacent and that means putting myself in different places and situations where I can continue to challenge myself. So when I was in university, I was doing research that was way over my head, but it forced me to learn a lot of things. I started a company while I was in college, I bet on myself in joining Morning Brew as the second employee when I had no business running a tech team as a self-taught software developer. And then I left my job at YouTube and started Beehiiv. And so I think to get the most out of like my potential as a human, it's putting me in difficult situations where I'm forced to learn. And that lack of complacency I think really helps.

What is it about you or about your childhood that puts you in that stage? 'Cause that's not easy.

Now we're really going to therapy.

That's not an easy thing to actually get to. Like most people have a very low risk tolerance. Like what is it about you that makes you run into risk?

I don't know. I think I've done it quite a few times where I made a bet on myself and going back to that Morning Brew decision, I had a very safe job near home working for Deloitte and I had $120,000 of student debt. So the safe thing would be to take the safe job. I joined three guys sending emails out of a closet size office in New York with 100,000 readers and I bet on myself. And that worked out extremely well, not only financially, but also from like a personal development standpoint. I learned so much going through that experience. And so I just, I see people around me that are more complacent and settling for what's easy in life. And I've typically taken the road of what's more challenging and pushed myself. And I feel like I've learned a lot more from those experiences.

What's one piece of advice you would give to somebody who's graduating from college at a time of, you know, a lot of uncertainty?

Well, you teed me up for that one because I think betting on yourself is so important and I think people, not enough people think through like what's the worst case scenario of what can happen? And I think in every one of those, even though I say I'm very risk tolerant, I walk through what is the worst thing that could happen in this situation? When I joined Morning Brew, if it didn't work out, I would move back home in with my parents. I would apply for jobs. I think I had an interesting story to tell and there would always be other jobs that I could get. And so I think especially graduating from college, you're so young, you have your full life ahead of you, being able to realize that there's such a easy fallback and that's the time to take risk. I'm pro risk all the way.

So if somebody wanted to be a content creator today, who's coming outta college, what's the one piece of advice you'd have for them?

Start collecting emails, but actually it sounds, like emails are the thing that you can take from platform to platform. Right now TikTok's hot, Instagram's hot, YouTube could shut you down at any time. Like platforms come and go, and because there's a lack of data portability, you need to really own your audience. When I saw at Morning Brew that we would press send every morning and make $80,000 per newsletter, I was like, I should have been collecting emails since I was five years old. And so I think the sooner that you can collect emails and start to build that muscle of creating content and reaching your audience, the better.

So there's a lot of people who are in an older stage, not just coming outta college, who are being laid off or having, you know, different disruption in their career. But there's sort of a reticence to becoming a content creator 'cause they didn't grow up as social first or even digital first. What's a piece of advice you would have for somebody who's entering that stage or considering that who's older, who may not be as natural to it as you might have been?

I think that people look at what is popular and think that that's so unattainable. I found a newsletter on our platform the other day, it's called "One Ahead". It is 10,000 readers, it's about magicians. So as like niche and like edge case long tail that you could possibly imagine. They're making $70,000 a year on subscriptions, serving magicians about different tips and secrets and trades of like being a professional magician. And I think the point of that story is that whatever your interests are, there's a, the world is so big and the internet is so big and there's a market for the content that you want to create. And so you don't have to be this massive influencer with millions of followers on Instagram. You can find something that you're passionate about, start creating content and find other people who want that content, and build a very healthy business around it.

So what you're saying is there's riches in the niches.

Absolutely.

Riches in the niches.

We're a huge fan of that, yeah.

Okay, you have some news that you wanna share.

I do wanna share some news. So.

Here we go.

Here we go. We just announced a partnership with Cloudflare to be the first content platform that allows creators to have control over what AI bots are crawling their websites.

Why does that matter?

So as everyone knows, OpenAI and Anthropic have built these incredible models. Everyone's using ChatGPT, everyone's using Claude, and where they've been able to get all of that data is from content readily available on the internet. So if I'm a content creator, I'm posting content on the internet, whether it's Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, they are crawling my content to make their models better. And so my content in particular is about founders and startups. So if they want more content about founders and startups, then they would crawl that content. If you do food reviews in Kansas City, they would crawl your content so they can recommend people on ChatGPT. And while it's incredible to have access to this information, it kind of breaks down the business model of, it used to be you would go to these websites, you would go to the "Wall Street Journal", the "Washington Post". But now that you can get that information directly from chatbots, there's less of an incentive to do that. And so Cloudflare has really led the way in trying to build this new business model where we can reward people through these different models for getting content and information from these content creators. So what we announced was the ability to, one, see what crawlers are crawling your website, and you can actually visualize that millions of the Google bot is hitting your website. Meaning that your content's really valuable to Google and Gemini, and there's nothing you can do about it. And then the second step is you can actually choose to block these different crawlers. And so it's giving more power to these content creators to have control over who has access to their information.

So what strikes me is that as everybody leans into the world of AI, you're sort of finding a disruptive path. As everybody leans into newsletters, you're actually not leaning into newsletters, but you're leaning into sort of the software and tools around that. What is it about you that sort of plays a counter game?

I wouldn't say that we're anti AI. Like there's plenty of AI features that we have in the platform that makes it easier for content creators to do their job. And even the partnership with Cloudflare isn't anti AI. There's a lot of our content creators who want to be surfaced in these LLMs and ChatGPT, and you can allow that. We want to encourage people to be more visible in these LLMs, but also have the control to block them if they'd like. What the common theme between both of them are is control. We are, I fundamentally believe the most creator friendly platform in the entire ecosystem. And everything from the ad network that we've built to being one of the few platforms that doesn't take a cut of revenue from creator earnings to the new Cloudflare partnership where you can actually decide what AI bots can access your content. The commonality between all of that is that we're creator first and wanna do whatever we can to make sure that our users are in the best position to succeed.