Publisher Content Marketplace: Get Compensated for Supplying AI with Information.
Microsoft proposes a solution to the issue of unreliable AI chatbot responses: enabling these systems to compensate publishers for trusted content access.
The Publisher Content Marketplace (PCM) aims to achieve three goals: enhancing the quality of data supplied to AI, generating income for information providers, and ensuring AI users receive superior answers.
“This creates a direct exchange of value: publishers will be compensated based on value delivered, while AI developers acquire scalable access to licensed, high-quality content that enhances their offerings,” the company stated in a blog post outlining its strategy.
Should this initiative succeed, businesses intending to leverage AI for tasks like procurement or customer service could have increased assurance in the accuracy of their outcomes.
Nevertheless, Zeyuan Gu, CEO of AI analytics firm Adzviser, raised concerns regarding content quality, noting ambiguity in how value would be assessed. He stated, “On the traditional web, value was evident. Publishers could track views, clicks, and session duration, receiving payment via real-time bidding linked to actual traffic. In an AI-centric environment, this signal becomes very indistinct. When a user poses a query and an AI provides an excellent response, it’s exceedingly difficult to ascertain which publisher’s material contributed to that answer.”
A potential challenge for businesses is whether Microsoft employs a unified crawler for both its AI content and search operations. If this is the case, content providers would struggle to prevent their material from being used by Microsoft’s AIs without also disappearing from its search engine. While unconfirmed, this practice is widely suspected, as noted in an Akamai report. In contrast, Google, a competitor in search and AI, reportedly utilizes distinct bots for its search index and Gemini AI, per Akamai.
IDC Research VP Wayne Kurtzman acknowledged this as an issue businesses understand and must tackle. He stated, “Improvements to content availability are coming, with personalization options rapidly advancing. This involves the danger of content blocking, which elevates the risk of generating inaccurate narratives; it’s a point all companies must consider.”
Kurtzman observed that the advent of AI is already transforming publishing. “Journalism is gradually shifting from the centuries-old ad-supported model toward a rapid revenue stream based on content licensing. However, some also envision journalism becoming more community-focused. One of these approaches might lead to a subset of the population lacking access to comparable reporting or insights.”
Microsoft has collaborated with several prominent US publishers, such as The Associated Press, Business Insider, Condé Nast, Hearst Magazines, and USA Today, in developing the PCM.
Microsoft stated, “We began with specific enterprise and consumer Microsoft Copilot scenarios, anchoring particular responses with licensed content and conducting experiments to validate our hypotheses before expansion.”
Prior efforts have also aimed to link AI access to online content with payment. Last year, CloudFlare launched a service designed to remunerate publishers for content usage, and in 2024, a new trade organization was established to facilitate content licensing for AI models.
Kurtzman of IDC emphasized the necessity of initiatives like Microsoft’s PCM. He noted, “Content creators require fair compensation for their efforts. Microsoft is endeavoring to achieve precisely that.”
However, Adzviser’s Gu believes significant progress is still needed for AI to confidently assess the quality of provided content. He commented, “Without a dependable method to attribute usage and impact at scale, I question how a marketplace can accurately value content for both publishers and AI developers. While I strongly endorse the objective, I remain doubtful that the measurement challenge has been resolved.”
