The case for and against publisher content marketplaces 

Publishers generally see all these attempts as validation of a long-running warning: you can’t strip-mine the web and expect the supply to replenish itself. If the content economy collapses, AI systems trained on it degrade along with it.

But the debate isn’t whether publishers want marketplaces. It’s whether the economics support them. 

The case for content marketplaces 

Business incentives are becoming clearer 

It’s not for nothing that both Microsoft and Amazon regard marketplaces as a smart business play. While these content marketplaces will (hopefully) give publishers new ways to monetize, the bigger payoff is for Amazon and Microsoft: driving adoption and usage of their cloud platforms.

“Google’s position looks like the exception now, and Amazon and Microsoft are saying ‘we see big business opportunity here for our cloud businesses,’” said a publishing executive who requested anonymity. “This is becoming a cloud fight. We’re in a world now where [Microsoft’s cloud business] Azure has a strategy, [Amazon] AWS has a strategy, and [OpenAI’s answer engine] does not yet have a strategy, but two out of three of the world’s largest cloud businesses now have a plan to pay for content. That’s a massive shift,” they said. 

The key here isn’t that these companies believe it to be ethically right to pay publishers for access to premium data to inform AI models. But they know the best access to the best, journalistically vetted information will be a competition imperative. Bluntly put, they need to keep the sources of that data in business. And yet, Microsoft AI’s vp Nikhil Kolar told Digday that their plan is to extend their marketplace for publishers beyond traditional news and magazine outlets. 

Add to that the fact that crawling is actually woefully inefficient, as the likes of Cloudflare have gone to lengths to point out, and the incentives of LLMs and AI models generally start to look a little more aligned with publishers.

Pushing beyond the chaotic ‘Napster’ era

“Every publisher and content creator is for content marketplaces. The pros outweigh the cons,” said Scott Messer, principal and founder of Messer Media. But that comes with a massive caveat. “They mean nothing until there’s real revenue,” he noted, adding “But one of the sources of heat boiling that frog, is creating the transactional and legal frameworks where they can participate legally.”

Napster is now singled out as the cautionary tale for music streaming services: it decimated the music industry’s economic model, but the chaos ultimately forced the creation of a new structure capable of sustaining the future of streaming music.

“Spotify didn’t exist before Napster, and the word streaming was not in any record contract before Napster,” said Messer. Swap out Napster for LLMs and music creators for content owners and creators and it’s like memory lane. “That’s what we’re going through now,” he added. 

And marketplaces have to be built to move on to that next stage and give LLMs a place to transact, he stressed.

Momentum is building around licensing standards 

Any marketplace will struggle if every deal is bespoke. Shared standards around permissions, metadata, pricing signals, or usage reporting make it easier to plug publishers and AI buyers into a common system — what marketplaces need to scale. Plus, AI companies are wary of copyright exposure — if an industry-backed framework defines what “rights cleared” looks like, marketplaces become safer procurement channels rather than legal gray zones.

But there are now multiple wider-industry efforts underway. The ink is barely dry on the latest move here by publishers: a coalition of major U.K. brands comprising the BBC, the Guardian, Financial Times, Sky News and Telegraph Media Group revealed this week. It intends to create shared standards for how AI companies license and use journalism, while streamlining licensing by closing technical gaps around IP protection and ensuring high-value content is accessed through rights-cleared channels, according to its open letter published Feb. 26. 

Other efforts include the IAB Tech Lab’s Content Monetization Protocols, and Really Simple Licensing standard. All these efforts contribute to laying the groundwork for a more structured, transactional content ecosystem. And so if Spur (or similar frameworks) succeed in setting the rules, marketplaces could become the pipes — translating standards into scalable actions. 

The case against content marketplaces

The black market vs. the formal marketplace

The state of illicit scraping continues to spread like wildfire, despite publishers’ attempts to block it. Tollbit’s latest report highlighted just how “leaky” the content distribution pipes are. It has tracked around 40 distinct AI scraping services — and discovered a pervasive, shadowy supply chain.

Even with efforts to incentivize AI companies to pay, it’s hard to build a marketplace when buyers aren’t willing to pay. “I think the issue is that right now, the black market is the marketplace,” said Alan Chapell, privacy attorney and president of law firm Chapell and Associates, which specializes in privacy, antitrust and regulatory strategy.

So, as long as scraping is cheap, easy and largely consequence-free, a formal content marketplace is competing against a de facto free alternative, he noted. “So what percentage do you need to get the black market down to, to even make the marketplace viable?,” added Chapell. 

Messer recently posted a video on LinkedIn claiming that LLMs are buying content from black markets, and therefore technically funding cybercrime. “I did that not because I’m against AI but because I want you to use it as one more reason that LLMs should buy content directly from publishers — because these shady third-party scrapers are just that. Even if they’re legal organizations, they’re just middlemen extracting content,” said Messer. 

The Google question

Google has so far staunchly maintained its “fair use” stance with regard to copyright. While it has made a significant licensing deal with Reddit, it’s lagged other AI models in terms of meaningful licensing deals with publishers.

Put aside all the technical hurdles around standardization and getting these marketplaces up and running, and AI buyers on side. A central question is whether these marketplaces can scale if the web’s dominant traffic distributor and referral gatekeeper — Google — chooses not to participate.

Now it’s under deep scrutiny from U.K. regulator the Competition Markets Authority for use of publisher content within AI Overviews and AI Mode, along with the European Commission’s parallel investigation. Google has stated it’s exploring updates to its controls to let sites specifically opt out of search generative AI features.

Although the CMA has doled out some careful measures to Google, there are fears that the reins are then handed back to Google to “fix” the problem. 

“It is unfortunate that Google has so much power that they can literally tell the British government to go pound sand,” said Chapell. “What they [the CMA] did with the Privacy Sandbox is they negotiated something that allowed Google full control over how to fix the problem…and that’s what we’re seeing here,” he added.

Until there is a normative pressure (standards) and hard pressure (regulation, enforcement) Google and others can keep delaying, which slows the emergence of robust content marketplaces. That said, Chapell believes that separation of search and AI and some form of payment for premium content is “inevitable” but his concern is timing: if serious structural change is three to five years away, how many publishers will still be around to benefit?