People Inc.'s Jon Roberts on the AI licensing boom - and the revenue lag

""I think there's a boom in companies who claim they will sell your content for money, and not yet a boom in the money from those deals. So there seems to be more of these marketplaces every minute. But not all of them are going to be meaningful.""

""With OpenAI and with Meta, they're the consumer. They're the end user. We're working with their AI labs. They know that the better the inputs they have, the better the outputs they're going to have.""

""A strong AI bot-block strategy is the backbone of developing a marketplace for content licensing. People Inc. blocks all bots, unless they're on a 'permissioned list.'""

AI content licensing marketplaces are rapidly increasing, presenting new opportunities for publishers, though actual revenue from these deals is still limited. Jon Roberts from People Inc. highlighted the distinction between different AI licensing agreements, noting multi-year contracts with OpenAI and Meta as consumer-focused, while Microsoft operates on a pay-per-use model. A robust AI bot-block strategy is essential for developing a successful content licensing marketplace, as it ensures that only authorized bots access the content.

Read at Digiday