Publishers grappling with AI startups scraping their content to train powerful large language models often have two choices: they can either sue the company for copyright infringement or strike a one-off deal to license their archives.
Now a new class of companies is offering a third option, promising to help publishers get paid when their work is cited or summarized by AI, providing some compensation for lost page views.
One such company, TollBit, acts as a digital toll booth of sorts, charging AI companies a price every time they scrape a publisher’s content. Another is ProRata, which develops technology to help AI companies compensate publishers based on how much of their content shows up in an AI-generated output. Then there’s ScalePost, which is building a library of licensed content that AI companies can pay to access.
The stakes are high for publishers right now. AI heavyweights like OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity, which earlier this year repurposed an exclusive, paywalled Forbes investigation across multiple platforms, are notorious for ignoring the protocols they set to block web crawlers from scraping content. It has resulted in high-profile lawsuits by the likes of the New York Times and Dow Jones, who’ve argued this unauthorized scraping violates copyright law. Other media companies have decided to partner, rather than fight. OpenAI, for instance, is paying DotDash Meredith at least $16 million per year to license its content, Adweek reported. And Thomson Reuters recorded $33 million in year-to-date revenue from AI content licensing deals in its latest quarterly earnings report.
But as AI systems ingest content in real time so they’re able to provide up-to-date information, and as AI-powered search engines become increasingly popular, publishers are concerned that revenue-generating traffic is increasingly being driven away from their sites.
“There's no secret that publishers are struggling right now, so we were looking for opportunities to get the value for our content that........