#publisher-compensation

#publisher-compensation

More than 70 companies gathered for the workshop, roughly half of which were publishers - a handful from Europe. The rest were a mix of big tech representing their respective LLMs, tech vendors and cloud edge companies Cloudflare and Fastly, who are now taking a far more active role in helping publishers block unauthorized bots, shifting from background tech enablers to vocal gatekeepers in the AI era.

For decades, publishers large and small have created the news, culture, entertainment, and educational resources that shape how society consumes information. Yet in recent years, the rise of artificial intelligence has added a new twist to the ongoing struggle for sustainable publishing. AI companies are building tools capable of generating responses, summaries, and insights trained on vast amounts of web content. The problem? Many publishers see little to no compensation for their role in shaping the data that fuels these systems.

Microsoft never sleeps when it comes to AI, as its $80 billion investments in data centers prove. Now, the company is exploring compensation options for publishers whose content is used by AI. As reported by Axios, Microsoft is creating what they call the Publisher Content Marketplace, or PCM for short. The program will launch with a select set of publishers during the pilot phase, with additional publishers being brought on over time. News was first broken at an invite-only publisher summit in Monaco last week.

When Google became the dominant search engine around 2004, not everyone was happy. Everyone from book publishers to music studios blasted the company for helping itself to copyrighted content without paying. The search giant eventually smoothed things over but now, twenty years later, Google has become the media industry's villain all over again-this time for gobbling that same content to train its AI tools.