“When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.” – Swahili proverb
❓ What You’ll Learn
- Why does a 1-person extension pay developers $25 a month to watch a loading line?
- Which 2 of 6 networks selling ads in a coding agent’s loading line died within a quarter?
- What is Amazon buying inside ChatGPT that caps every third-party network?
- What does a free coding extension report about you for $75 a year?
- Where does a solo operator earn once the loading line is gone: auditing AI brand answers, running ChatGPT campaigns or feeding shopping agents?
💎 Why It Matters
The time a developer spends waiting on an AI agent is now ad space.
🔍 Problem
While a developer waits on a coding agent or a user waits for an AI answer, the ad slot on that screen often sits empty.
💡 Solution
AI ad networks sell a sponsored message in the loading line or a labeled ad inside an AI app’s answer.
The network splits the money with the app that shows the ad.
🏁 Players
AI Ad Networks
- Kickbacks • Auctions the Claude Code status line and pays the developer half the winning bid.
- Codebacks • The one wait-time network showing its sponsors and bids in the open.
- Koah • A labeled ad inside a third-party app’s answer, paid per query, like AdSense but for chat apps.
- Gravity • Fills chat apps with retail advertisers and is testing ads only a shopping agent reads.
- Taboola • Opened its ad demand to any chatbot, bringing a public company’s scale to a field of startups.
🔮 Predictions
- The average payout on the largest wait-time network, the kind that sells ads in a coding agent’s loading line, will fall below $10.
- Kickbacks paid about $25 in July and an impression needs 10 watched seconds.
- Claude Code runs tasks in the cloud and developers do other work while the agent runs.
- Anthropic will block outside companies from inserting ads into the Claude Code spinner.
- Its Super Bowl ad said “But not to Claude.” 4 months before a third party auctioned that line.
- Claude Code shipped a spinner-tips override, so it already treats the line as its own surface.
- OpenAI will sell ads inside apps, the way it already sells them inside ChatGPT.
- OpenAI has tens of thousands of advertisers its app builders cannot reach.
- Koah calls itself “AdSense for AI” — the format a major AI lab could copy into one SDK.
☁️ Opportunities
- Run managed ChatGPT Ads campaigns for small advertisers who cannot run self-serve.
- OpenAI removed the $50,000 minimum on 2026-05-05 and opened self-serve in Europe in August.
- Kone.vc sells as an OpenAI SMB channel partner.
- Turn a Shopify catalog into agent feeds, sold to brands too small for Amazon DSP.
- ZeroClick relaunched as machine-readable storefront agents find and pay through.
- IAB’s roadmap standardizes agent buying and most brands with 200 SKUs still have no feed shopping agents can read.
- Publish a CPM index for AI ads that advertisers and networks pay for.
- Idlen targets a €35 CPM for advertisers and promises €20 to €50 to developers.
- ChatGPT ads launched at $60 CPM.
- Sell banks and insurers audits of what AI apps say about them, since a wrong answer there triggers compliance review.
- 17% conflict with brand facts and Ally reports AI-referred visitors 3.5 times more likely to open an account.
- The audit runs on public AI prompts and needs no ad slot in the app.
🏔️ Risks
- Rented Surface • Build your exit before the platform blocks the integration, because a patched-in ad line only lasts as long as that company allows.
- Data Sale • Read what data your extension collects before you install it, because Kickbacks’ own policy treats it as a data sale under California law.
- Zero Fill • Check a network’s live campaign counter before you integrate, because IdleDev’s counter showed zero active campaigns in September.
🔑 Key Lessons
- Move into what survivors pivoted to: brand audits, shopping-agent catalogs and attribution, since each changed what it sold within a year.
- Treat every payout claim as what the network pays to win you and ask what you give up in return.
🔥 Hot Takes
- The most watched line on Earth is a loading spinner and its owner never sold it.
- Wait-time ads depend on idle seconds, and the AI company building faster models is cutting those seconds.
😠 Haters
“Faster models kill the inventory before anyone builds a business on it.”
Expect the developer to stop watching before the seconds run out: 2 of 6 wait-time networks are already gone and the runs are moving to the cloud. Sell ads to the agent that keeps running after the developer stops watching, as Gravity already does.
“Ad networks get eaten by platforms. Why is this different?”
Expect the platforms to buy the networks or bypass them, so build to be acquired. Google bought AdMob to reach apps it did not own and Amazon now buys ChatGPT with no network between. AdMob’s founders sold to Google.
“$25 is pocket change and the extension sells your data to get it.”
Ask whether you are better off with the $25 or without it. Read it as a rebate on the agent subscription you pay, priced using the data the extension collects about you. Read that policy before you install and take the rebate if it beats the telemetry for you.
🔗 Links
- Kickbacks.ai: get paid for waiting • The launch thread, with a first-session earnings report.
- AI coding ads: the privacy cost of Kickbacks.ai • What the extension reports about you.
- WTF are GEO and AEO? • The organic side of the AI-answer surface.
- Inside x402: 100M Agentic Payments on Base • The rails ZeroClick and Gitlawb Ads settled on.
📈 What else?
Trends PRO #0182: AI Ad Networks has more insights.
What you’ll get:
- 17 Players (240% more)
- 7 Predictions (133% more)
- 8 Opportunities (100% more)
- 3 Key Lessons (50% more)
- 4 Hot Takes (100% more)
- 9 Links (125% more)
With Trends Pro you’ll learn:
- (📈 Pro) Which 2 buyers went straight to OpenAI and skipped all 17 networks?
- (📈 Pro) Which sponsored answers will Perplexity, Google and ChatGPT filter out first?
- (📈 Pro) Who will sell an ad no human ever sees?
- (📈 Pro) How many wait-time networks shut down before any lab moved against them?
- (📈 Pro) How do you report which conversation sold it when the platform will not?
- (📈 Pro) Which surface your agents already call has no network on it?
- (📈 Pro) What does a direct sponsor on your own loading line pay against a network’s split?
- And much more…
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