With media companies scrambling to adjust to a world in which AI scrapes and repurposes their work, a new cohort of middlemen is emerging to forge licensing deals between content creators and AI companies.
By Rashi Shrivastava, Forbes Staff
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 it deserves, “ Burhan Hamid, CTO of Time, told Forbes. Time is one of some 400 firms including Adweek and Hearst Corporation that have signed up to use TollBit, which Hamid said has given him more information about which bots are trying to access Time’s content.
AI leaders in the space including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Google CEO Sundar Pichai have articulated the need for a new way of paying creators for their work in the age of AI scraping. Speaking at the New York Times’ Dealbook Summit in December, Altman said he sees value in micropayments as one potential method. “We need to find new economic models where creators can have new revenue streams,” Altman said. OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.
“There will be a marketplace in the future, I think. There will be creators who create for AI models and get paid for it,” Pichai said at the Dealbook Summit. Google did not respond to a request for comment.
AI companies can use TollBit’s platform to access publishers’ archives, filtering out content to which the publisher may not have rights or content it doesn’t want to license. It provides media companies with data analytics on how often bots are scraping their sites and sets up a “bot paywall” that automatically routes web scrapers to another page warning them that they don’t have permission to access the content. TollBit charges AI companies a transaction fee and provides them with a marketplace of licensed data and a dashboard to manage it. CEO Toshit Panigrahi, who cofounded the company with former colleague Olivia Joslin in 2023, said TollBit is in talks with major AI companies but didn’t name them.
“We need to make it easier for this machine to machine interaction without a human in the loop,” Panigrahi told Forbes.
Investor interest in the fledgling space is still small compared to the billions of dollars that have gushed into AI startups themselves and the companies providing them compute or processing power. TollBit has raised about $30 million in venture capital from Lightspeed Venture Partners and others. ProRata closed a $25 million Series A round last month.
Publishers see a clear need for such technology. Mike Beyman, head of strategy and operations at Adweek, said he hopes TollBit will make his firm’s content more readily available for AI builders who may not have the bandwidth to strike individual deals with hundreds of publishers. “My goal is to make sure that partners that are looking to work with us have as few barriers to entry and are able to compensate us for our content in a fair and agreeable manner,” he said.
But putting a price tag on the content used to train AI models is a daunting and complicated task. Patrick Hainault, a VP at Mansueto Ventures, the publisher of magazines Fast Company and Inc, said different variables like how unique or current the article is should also factor in while pricing content. “Pricing is a dark art on the best day, and in this new world there will be a lot of trial and error,” he told Forbes.
Bill Gross, founder and CEO of ProRata, claims to have found a solution for AI search engines. He invented what he calls an “attribution percentage” — a way to calculate what percentage of an AI-generated response comes from a particular content source and how much revenue should be shared with them. The company uses an algorithm to break down the AI’s output into different parts, detecting and ranking the most unique insights in an AI-generated response and paying its corresponding content owners accordingly.
“We can figure out, ‘Hey, your article was used in this answer for about 33% of the answer, and therefore you should get 33% of the 50-50 revenue share,’” Gross said.
ProRata recently launched its own search engine called Gist.ai that only uses licensed content from about 400 media partners including Fortune, The Atlantic and The Financial Times. While it’s still early stages, the aim is that at the end of every month, each publisher gets a report of how many times their content appeared in a chatbot’s answer, along with a check for its contributions.
Others like ScalePost AI are also making video and audio content from publishers available for AI use. The company helps facilitate monetization deals with AI companies and offers U.S. and international media companies a platform for monitoring bot traffic for each URL. “We are the source of ground truth of what’s happening on the link level,” CEO Ahmed Mallik told Forbes. [Disclosure: Tollbit, ProRata and Scale Post are in talks with Forbes.]
Scale Post also helps connect publishers with AI founders in real life through community events. In July, the company partnered with AI search startup Perplexity on its revenue sharing program, allowing publishers to sponsor related-questions and receive a cut of Perplexity’s revenue on answers that cited the publisher as a source. Scale Post’s platform provides participating publishers data on how their content shows up on Perplexity’s AI-generated answers. Perplexity told Forbes Scale Post has been a “valuable partner,” helping make introductions and expand its revenue-share program to about 20 publishers.
Scale Post has also created a so-called “bot module,” which identifies and catalogs about 800 different AI bots. “Every single web visit is accounted for and that’s a transparency that [publishers] care about a lot naturally,” Mallik said. “If we can track them, we can block them.”
Sarah Emerson contributed reporting.
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