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The idea of agencies selling subscriptions instead of billable hours has kicked up significant debate over the past week. It started when S4 Capital’s Monks told me it expects roughly a quarter of its revenue to come from subscriptions by year end. Cue the hot takes that are nearly unanimous in one verdict: subscriptions aren’t the answer to the pricing problem facing agencies in a world of automated advertising.

That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be tested, though. If nothing else, they could be a useful stop gap on the road to the real holy grail: outcome-based pay.

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Content marketplaces promise publishers potential wins: more distribution, increased visibility, reduced unlicensed AI scraping and new revenue opportunities. But without meaningful demand on the buy side, the model risks becoming another supply-heavy experiment that doesn’t shift the revenue needle for publishers.

A variety of content marketplaces are emerging. From TollBit’s licensing platform to Dappier, and Prorata.ai as well as enterprise-focused Snowflake and Dow Jones’ Factiva, with Cloudflare also offering neutral tools to both sides. Now two big tech heavyweights, Microsoft and latterly Amazon, have stepped into the fray. 

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.

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