Perplexity announces new publisher participants in AI subscription revenue share program, The Root returns to Black ownership, and more.<\/p>\n
Publishers may stand to gain from a blur of AI standards, protocols and marketplaces<\/p>\n
It\u2019s become publishers\u2019 eternal dilemma in the AI era: to block or not to block \u2014 weighing the need to protect content against the lure of potential licensing and visibility deals.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This debate still dominates discussions at many of the working groups established between publishers and LLMs, like the IAB Tech Lab\u2019s last week, among others. There is still no clear one-size-fits-all solution. For publishers, the decision to block or not block AI crawlers isn\u2019t just about principle \u2014 it\u2019s about leverage.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Cut off access, and they gain bargaining power, but risk invisibility. Leave the door open, and they stay discoverable, but give away value for free. Your classic catch-22.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But there are new levers for publishers to test in the AI era. Moves by CDN vendors like Cloudflare to crack down more aggressively on bots, combined with the emergence of AI marketplaces like Microsoft\u2019s, the push toward pay-per-usage, and intensifying competition among LLMs, are slowly shifting the conversation toward standards and licensing. Publishers are still far from holding the upper hand, but compared to a year ago, the outlook no longer looks quite so bleak.<\/p>\n
Tech infrastructure partners providing the necessary friction<\/p>\n
Until recently, publishers were virtually defenseless against unconsented AI scraping \u2014 with robots.txt serving as little more than a polite request most crawlers ignored. And of course, there is the trickiness of Google\u2019s AI and search crawler overlapping, making it hard for publishers to opt out of appearing in AI Overviews without risking their search rankings.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Now, thanks to CDNs like Cloudflare stepping in to create real friction, publishers are at least able to contemplate how much access to allow. Call it smart marketing on Cloudflare\u2019s part, but their buy-in has shifted the outlook for publishers. When Cloudflare made blocking AI crawlers by default a possibility for publishers in July, it caused a lot of internal chatter within the major LLMs, according to a publishing exec who spoke on background due to the sensitivity of the topic. It got their attention.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Trusted Media Brands uses Tollbit and Cloudflare\u2019s AI bot-blocking mechanisms to put up some barriers to LLMs scraping content without payment. Though some AI bots still bypass these bot-blocking efforts, these \u201cgates\u201d help give TMB a bit more leverage when negotiating AI content licensing deals, according to Jacob Salamon, vp of business development at TMB.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt asserts us legally\u2026 If there is a major settlement or a major [legal] decision, we can say, \u2018Look, we\u2019ve established those rates. We were bypassed. And now there\u2019s much more ground for a claim,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s more common now for publishers to have not one, but four or five licensing LLM partners. Three publishers Digiday spoke to said they had this number, though they didn\u2019t want to be named due to the sensitivity of the agreements. That\u2019s not due to Cloudflare\u2019s moves, but there has been a more open attitude towards speaking with publishers about compensation for usage of their content for RAG purposes since the default block move in July<\/a>, they say.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a collective deference to Cloudflare here, amongst publishers, for picking up the gauntlet,\u201d said Justin Wohl, vp of strategy at Aditude and former CRO for Salon. \u201cTheir scale and positioning as a network positions them to better speak to these needs of the technology, more so than just from the business of an individual publisher,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Robots.txt has had a much-needed upgrade in the last month. Cloudflare introduced \u201ccontent policy signals<\/a>\u201d to let publishers specify whether material could be used for search, training or AI inputs, while the newly released Really Simple Licensing protocol embeds machine-readable licensing terms into robots.txt so publishers can spell out not just access rules, but how their content can be used once it\u2019s scraped. Of course, the common flaw is that these can still be flouted by crawlers. But some believe it does at least move a step towards setting more legal parameters.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI think what Cloudflare is trying to do \u2013 organize blocking at the CDN level and creating friction, and hopefully creating enough friction and enough blocking \u2013 that\u2019s the intention of trying to generate some aspect of leverage,\u201d said a publishing exec at a media group, who requested anonymity in exchange for candor. \u201cRight now, it\u2019s been proven that the technological firepower of the LLMs to get around any of the mechanisms that we\u2019re currently using is that they can do it,\u201d they said.\u00a0<\/p>\n LLMs are hitting a new competitive streak\u00a0<\/p>\n Meanwhile, LLMs continue to rack up deals. Amazon now has an extensive roster of AI licensing partners for Alexa+ and, more recently, its shopping assistant Rufus. Google has reportedly been speaking<\/a> more with publishers, as has Meta<\/a>. This is partly because the AI community itself is hitting limits, stressed Brooke Hartley Moy, CEO of Infactory, a company that helps publishers monetize their content archives through AI-ready APIs.<\/p>\n After an early period of exponential gains, model performance has plateaued, she noted. LLMs are still groundbreaking, but ultimately constrained by the quality of the human-made content they\u2019re trained on. Once you\u2019ve scraped the open web, synthetic content isn\u2019t enough to keep driving big leaps forward. That\u2019s forcing AI builders to recognize they need publishers as partners, not just free suppliers. \u201cThere\u2019s a feeling of, oh, actually we can\u2019t just take and raid what we need. We need to work hand in hand with content creators and publishers, because if not, we\u2019re going to be faced with an increasingly slow amount of pace and growth on the large language model side,\u201d Hartley Moy said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Microsoft has now made its intentions clear when it comes to how it wants to work with publishers. Its AI content marketplace is in its very early stages of working with a small ring of publisher partners, but its instant ability to plug into the demand side has caught publishers\u2019 attention.\u00a0<\/p>\n Two publishers Digiday has spoken to in the last few weeks have said that they believe Microsoft\u2019s message to be clear: we believe you should be compensated for the quality of your IP.\u00a0<\/p>\n Naturally, it\u2019s rare for a big tech company\u2019s motives to be altruistic. It\u2019s not some burst of ethical good intentions towards publishers. It\u2019s because they believe this is a massive competitive advantage if they\u2019re running the entire global information marketplace to \u201cgrind AI,\u201d as one publisher exec put it. They already lost the search race to Google. They don\u2019t want to lose the AI one.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI expect that Microsoft\u2019s potential struggles to be taken seriously here parallel their last few years of having Bing Chat and Co-Pilot in Edge not really take much market share versus ChatGPT,\u201d said Wohl.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n In the next six months, we\u2019ll likely see a blur of more standards, protocols, infrastructure changes, and a flurry of new content AI marketplaces as companies jostle to establish the future economic model for the open web. As for publishers, they know they need all the help they can get.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re outgunned from a technological standpoint, from a resources standpoint, from an engineering standpoint \u2013 and right now, even collectively, we\u2019re outgunned,\u201d said a senior executive at a publisher. After all, the big tech companies are chasing stakes worth trillions in market value \u2014 a scale the media industry simply can\u2019t match.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u201cYou\u2019ve got to believe they are all building products that are going to need our content for credibility and consumer values, and if your [publication] doesn\u2019t provide any value to them, then you have bigger questions about your viability as a business,\u201d they added.\u00a0<\/p>\n What we\u2019ve heard<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s in the millions\u2026 10-30% are coming from bots.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013 A head of business development at a publisher discussing weekly traffic coming from AI platforms and bots.<\/p>\n Numbers to know<\/p>\n 26.7%<\/a>: The share in The Economist going up for sale by British philanthropist and investor Lynn Forester de Rothschild.<\/p>\n $150 million<\/a>: The price Paramount paid to buy Bari Weiss\u2019s site Free Press.<\/p>\n 500<\/a>: The number of Guardian staff that attended meetings to figure out how to combat a \u201ctransformative project\u201d to combat the challenges of AI and referral traffic \u2013 more than half of its total editorial staff.<\/p>\n \u201cTens of millions<\/a>\u201d: The number of queries The Washington Post\u2019s chatbot has received.<\/p>\n What we\u2019ve covered<\/p>\n Publishers and tech giants push weekly talks on AI content use<\/p>\n Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Google all had seats at the table alongside 35 publishers at the IAB Tech Lab\u2019s LLM working group in NYC last Thursday.\u00a0<\/p>\n The clearest action point: the initiative has shifted to weekly meetings as it races to find standards on how AI uses and pays for content.\u00a0<\/p>\n Read more about the efforts here<\/a>.<\/p>\n AWNY 2025: Creators emerge as the industry\u2019s new power brokers<\/p>\n At this year\u2019s Advertising Week, the ascendance of content creators within both the ad industry and wider culture is on full display.<\/p>\n This year, Advertising Week has four content tracks dedicated to creators \u2014 its highest number of creator tracks ever.<\/p>\n Read more about the rising presence of creators at AWNY 2025 here<\/a>.<\/p>\n In the AI dealmaking rush, Trusted Media Brands is at the table but holding back<\/p>\n Trusted Media Brands is in talks with big tech over AI licensing deals, but is holding off on signing any contract for now.\u00a0<\/p>\n The sticking point is scope: tech companies are still pushing for broad access to content.<\/p>\n Read more about TMB\u2019s AI dealmaking strategy here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Inside The Economist\u2019s plan to grow revenues in a post-search, AI-driven future<\/p>\n The Economist is sketching out its roadmap for a post-search world by investing in formats that are more difficult for machines to mimic, like video and audio.<\/p>\n The company is also holding a hard line against licensing deals with AI firms it views as competitors.<\/p>\n Read more about The Economist\u2019s plan here<\/a>.<\/p>\n What we\u2019re reading<\/p>\n AI platform Perplexity announces publisher participants in subscription revenue share program<\/a><\/p>\n CNN, Conde Nast, Fortune, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post have all signed up to receive a share of revenue from Perplexity\u2019s subscription model tied to its AI-powered browser Comet, Press Gazette reported.<\/p>\n Washington Post exec editor on the challenges of the newsroom overhaul<\/a><\/p>\n Washington Post executive editor Matt Murray talked about the challenges of overseeing an overhaul of the newsroom, the staff exodus, and owner Jeff Bezos\u2019 role (or lack thereof) in these efforts, in an interview with Status.<\/p>\n The Root returns to Black ownership<\/a><\/p>\n Ashley Allison, a Democratic political strategist and CNN commentator, is acquiring The Root from G\/O Media for an undisclosed sum, CNN reported.<\/p>\n