00:00Today on Forbes, these start-ups are making sure AI companies pay up for taking content.
00:08Publishers grappling with AI start-ups scraping their content to train powerful large language models often have two choices.
00:16They can either sue the company for copyright infringement or strike a one-off deal to license their archives.
00:22Now, a new class of companies is offering a third option,
00:26promising to help publishers get paid when their work is cited or summarized by AI,
00:31providing some compensation for lost page views.
00:35One such company, Tollbit, acts like a digital tollbooth of sorts,
00:39charging AI companies a price every time they scrape a publisher's content.
00:44Another is ProRata, which develops technology to help AI companies compensate publishers
00:50based on how much of their content shows up in an AI-generated output.
00:54Then there's ScalePost, which is building a library of licensed content that AI companies can pay to access.
01:01The stakes are high for publishers right now.
01:04AI heavyweights like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity,
01:08which early in 2024 repurposed an exclusive paywalled Forbes investigation across multiple platforms,
01:15are notorious for ignoring the protocols they set to block web crawlers from scraping content.
01:21It has resulted in high-profile lawsuits by the likes of The New York Times and Dow Jones,
01:27who've argued this unauthorized scraping violates copyright law.
01:31Other media companies have decided to partner rather than fight.
01:35OpenAI, for instance, is paying .-Meredith at least $16 million per year to license its content, according to Adweek.
01:44And Thomson Reuters recorded $33 million in year-to-date revenue
01:48from AI content licensing deals in its latest quarterly earnings report.
01:53But as AI systems ingest content in real time so they're able to provide up-to-date information,
01:59and as AI-powered search engines become increasingly popular,
02:03publishers are concerned that revenue-generating traffic is increasingly being driven away from their sites.
02:09Burhan Hamid, CTO of Time, told Forbes,
02:14There's no secret that publishers are struggling right now,
02:17so we were looking for opportunities to get the value for our content that it deserves.
02:22Time is one of some 400 firms, including Adweek and Hearst Corporation, that have signed up to use Tollbit,
02:29which Hamid said has given him more information about which bots are trying to access Time's content.
02:35AI leaders in the space, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Google CEO Sundar Pichai,
02:42articulated the need for a new way of paying creators for their work in the age of AI scraping.
02:47Speaking at the New York Times Dealbook Summit in December,
02:50Altman says he sees value in micropayments as one potential method.
02:54Altman said,
03:02Also speaking at the Dealbook Summit, Pichai said,
03:12AI companies can use Tollbit's platform to access publishers' archives,
03:16filtering out content to which the publisher may not have rights or content it doesn't want to license.
03:22It provides media companies with data analytics on how often bots are scraping their sites
03:27and sets up a so-called, quote,
03:36Tollbit charges AI companies a transaction fee
03:39and provides them with a marketplace of licensed data and a dashboard to manage it.
03:44CEO Tulsit Panigrahi, who co-founded the company with former colleague Olivia Jocelyn in 2023,
03:50said Tollbit is in talks with major AI companies but didn't name them.
03:55Investor interest in the fledgling space is still small compared to the billions of dollars
04:00that have gushed into AI startups themselves and the companies providing them compute or processing power.
04:06Tollbit has raised about $30 million in venture capital from Lightspeed Venture Partners and others.
04:12ProRata closed a $25 million Series A round late last year.
04:17For full coverage, check out Rashi Srivastava's piece on Forbes.com.
04:23This is Kieran Meadows from Forbes. Thanks for tuning in.
04:36Thanks for tuning in.
