July 28, 2026

Pay Gruber

In 1969 a group called The Winstons released a single called “Color Him Father.” It won a Grammy. The B-side was a throwaway gospel instrumental called “Amen, Brother,” and about a minute and a half into it the drummer, Gregory Coleman, plays a seven second solo.

What’s interesting about this? You probably have no idea who any of these people are. Or their songs.

But you’ve heard those seven seconds. Everyone has. The early days of hip hop went crazy with it. Salt-N-Pepa, 2 Live Crew, N.W.A. and on and on. It went way past hip hop. The Prodigy’s “Firestarter” opens with it. Oasis used it on “D'You Know What I Mean?” Jesus, whosampled counts 7,759 tracks with it. Even the Futurama theme uses Amen, Brother.

But the craziest part? The creators of those seven seconds didn’t see a dime from it.

Who owns a word? #

On Friday, May 29, 2026, John Gruber posted an article at Daring Fireball called “What Is a Dickover?”

This wasn’t entirely new material. In 2011, he called it a dickbar.

He gave us dickpanels in 2022.

Then in May he ran a poll on Mastodon, dickpanel vs dickover, and dickover won 51 to 49 out of 1,130 votes. He said in a footnote he would have picked it no matter how the poll came out.

So really, the poll didn’t coin “dickover.” Gruber did. But does AI give him credit? Or is he himself dickedover? dickovered?

(“Amen, Brother"ed?)

Let’s test #

I asked ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini the same question on July 27, 2026.

What is a dickover?

That’s what a normal person would type. Like they would into Google back in the day (12 months ago).

Uh. Can the link font to Gruber be even smaller? :/

Jesus. Claude makes their sources practically invisible.

I was pleasantly surprised Google seems like they are trying to make more effort to direct attention to Daring Fireball. We have links that look like actual links back to his site.

They all credit Gruber. Thank god. He’s already doing better than Gregory Coleman.

But credit isn’t compensation.

We’ve been here before #

Google shipped AMP in 2015 and pitched it as a favor to publishers. "Your pages are slow. So let us host your content for you!” And so people everywhere rewrote their sites in a new Google controlled way in which they promised to render your content faster and faster means more happy customers.

Except it sucked. In 2018 I rebuilt all our landing pages in AMP, and then watched our conversion rate drop 70%.

There’s a collection of reasons why AMP was bad. And fast forward to today - Google’s reliance on AMP is dead. But something about it is still naggingly better than the situation we have at the AI labs.

Monetization.

<amp-ad>

Even though Google was going to render your content, you could at least still get paid.

What sucks about our LLM world now is that not only is our source attribution shit in these things, when you search for dickover, you get everything you want answered already. None of us are clicking a source. And we definitely aren’t seeing who’s paying Gruber to bother crafting these things to begin with.

What I’m trying instead #

The reason I bring any of this up… I want to be one of those folks sampling “Amen, Brother” and Gruber’s work, but not be an asshole about it. Or a thief.

I built an RSS/AI news reader called PageForth. It uses Apple’s on device LLM to summarize and rank articles so I can pick exactly which ones I want to dig deeper into.

But I realized this can quickly be a jerky move. What if I could still get Gruber paid?

What if instead of a barely visible “source” link, I actually displayed the ads from your site the way Gruber intended?

I’ve tried to include ad scraping for Carbon Ads, Google, DoubleClick, Amazon, Outbrain, Taboola, and Buysellads. It renders the ad in a web view so the ad network’s JavaScript can still fire (if they even allow it to) and do the thing it intended to do: measure impressions and clickthroughs. And clicking on it is meant to lead you to the right attribution.

In Gruber’s WorkOS ad, you’d go to:

https://workos.com/blog/management-mcp-server?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=q32026

A week long ad on Daring Fireball costs $12,000 and he’s sold out for months. But if ChatGPT doesn’t send traffic to Gruber like Search used to, that sponsor gets none of the benefit. And pretty soon the 12k isn’t going to look like that great of a deal anymore.

Give us back an ad slot #

So AI Lab in the sky, please give us an <amp-ad> again.

Some json-ld, a meta tag, whatever shape you want.

<link rel="sponsor-slot"
      href="https://carbonads.net/serve/CE7DK23W"
      type="text/javascript">

Give publishers a standard way to declare: this is the ad that funds this article, and, fairly directly, your intelligence. Please render it where a reader might even seen it.

What’s next? #

PageForth’s version is rough. It probably doesn’t work half the time yet. And maybe even still pisses Gruber and his sponsors off.

But I wanted to have some control over the deluge of articles I can’t possibly read through.

I just didn’t want to be a dick about it.

Kudos