Category: In the News

This week’s Media Briefing will dig into the growing alarm among publishers, as execs warn behind closed doors that third-party web scrapers are quietly fueling an AI marketplace they’re largely shut out of.

• The AI licensing black market
• TikTok’s head of publisher operations exits 
• Tech billionaires are buying media, AP and Lee Enterprises clash over licensing contract, and more

The AI licensing black market

Twice a year, a group of publishing execs meet to discuss the biggest issues they’re facing, brought together by media analyst and consultant Matthew Scott Goldstein. At the most recent meeting, the topic dominating the agenda was third-party web scrapers.

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Arc XP, The Washington Post’s publishing platform arm, is making it easier for publishers to turn AI bot traffic into a revenue stream, thanks to a new integration with TollBit that helps publishers block scrapers and monetize access.

While a number of large publishers have signed AI content licensing deals with tech companies, many mid and and smaller sized publishers lack the infrastructure, negotiating power and resources to do so. The idea behind this new integration is that it’ll be easier for those publishers to use TollBit’s marketplace, streamlining the sign-on process through Arc XP’s platform.

Arc XP customers will be able to use TollBit’s tools to monitor and control which bots are crawling their sites for content, as well as monetize the scraping they do allow by redirecting AI bots to TollBit’s paywall that charges for crawling. The alternative would be a multi-step engineering approach, according to Arc XP’s CTO Joe Croney.

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