The idle seconds an AI agent spends thinking just became inventory. A new ad unit is filling the wait state itself, and it is a preview of where agentic advertising goes next.
Kickbacks, built by Andrew McCalip, a founding engineer at Varda Space Industries, replaces the generic “thinking” spinner inside coding agents like Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex with a short, clickable sponsored line, live for the few seconds the agent is processing a prompt. Developers who install it keep roughly half the ad revenue generated while their own machine displays the sponsored line. McCalip reports 25,000 downloads and 5,000 to 10,000 daily active users, with the average user earning about $25 a month and the top 10% clearing $75. A beta version adds optional data collection, name, email, and prompt context, in exchange for CPMs McCalip says can run up to five times higher.
Why this matters beyond a novelty product: it is the first ad unit built specifically for the gap AI agents create in a user’s attention, the seconds between a prompt and a response, rather than adapting a banner, video, or search format to a chat interface. That is the same territory Amazon is claiming inside Alexa+ and that OpenAI’s self-serve ad tooling is building toward: monetizing the interface itself, not just the content passing through it.
The original insight is in the incentive structure, not the ad format. Kickbacks pays the developer whose machine renders the ad, not a publisher or platform, which flips the usual programmatic chain and suggests a coming fight over who actually owns AI-agent ad inventory: the model maker, the tool builder, or whoever’s screen the agent happens to be running on.
Source: Kickbacks
