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This week’s Media Briefing looks at the growingly crowded AI space, with trade groups, vendors and startups all vying to set AI standards and build marketplaces that help publishers monetize their content.

• Inside the AI ‘land grab’ – and why it may benefit publishers
• The Economist launches video show, OpenAI and Meta introduce AI video feeds and apps, and more.

Inside the AI ‘land grab’ – and why it may benefit publishers

It’s starting to feel like every corner of the industry wants to be the one to write the rulebook on AI and help publishers get paid for it — and the space is getting almost as dense as the buzzwords themselves.

From trade groups racing to set AI standards to vendors rolling out content marketplaces — and everyone else piling in with provenance tech and licensing schemes — the space is filling up fast.

Four publishers Digiday spoke to said they are regularly inundated with pitches from AI start-ups and ad tech vendors, all pitching content marketplaces. It shows what promise there is in building the tech that turns LLMs’ hunger for quality content into sustainable revenue for publishers. 

“I think at last count, it was like over a dozen, and it may be over 15 known potential marketplaces that are out there talking to the media companies right now, in all various shapes and sizes, various value propositions,” said a publishing exec at a media group, who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of LLM agreements in place. “Some of them are from developers and engineers that came out of the LLM labs. Some of them come from big tech. Some of them come more from a marketplace background. But it’s great. It’s great that they’re all out there, heads down, focused on this all day long, every day.”

Even the standards space is starting to look more crowded. The IAB Tech Lab continues to try and build momentum with publishers, having had a well-attended workshop in Dmexco Cologne in September, with the next NYC workshop set for this morning Oct. 2. And on Sept 8. the Really Simple Licensing group launched an open content-licensing standard intended to let web publishers define machine-readable licensing and compensation terms for how AI systems use their content, using the existing robots.txt to embed licensing rules (whether AI companies honor it is another matter). 

Publishers seem unfazed by the landscape’s current overcrowding, viewing it as simply part of the journey. “Six months ago, we didn’t have any bodies who were thinking about this, and we may have too many. But OK – I’ll take that momentum,” said another publishing exec who agreed to speak on background. 

In digital, attempts at creating measurement standards or privacy-first technical standards have often led to half a dozen or more attempts from various bodies or individual companies to lead the charge. After a time, usually a frontrunner begins to emerge. 

Certainly, publishers don’t seem to be picky about who leads the setting of standards for AI detection, attribution and remuneration. They just want standards, period. 

“It would be nice if there was one clear standard that everybody adopted, and that was just the thing that turned on overnight, but that’s just not the way the standards work,” said Fastly co-founder Simon Wistow. “Different people come in with different ideas, not everybody is aware of everything that’s going on….but at some point, something emerges as the kind of consensus winner. I wish it were cleaner, that’s just the way it’s always been.”

All eyes are now on how Microsoft’s AI content marketplace for publishers to see how it pans out, with an early pilot only just kicking off. It hasn’t yet disclosed details on which publishers are participating. Hot on its heels are the CDN vendors – Cloudflare and Fastly – which have started taking a more aggressive role in shielding publishers from unlicensed AI scraping. They’re also joining the trade group fray through initiatives like the IAB Tech Lab’s CoMP framework and the newly launched Really Simple Licensing collective, which has Reddit, Yahoo and People.Inc as members. 

Then there’s Perplexity – not building pipes or standards, but pushing its Comet browser as a showcase for how licensed content could surface in AI-assisted browsing. Layer onto that the crop of dedicated startups, like Prorata.ai, which pitches itself as the automated licensing pipes between publishers and AI firms, and Tollbit, which offers an infrastructure layer that lets publishers control and monetize how their content is accessed by AI models – the list of players continues to grow. 

“A year ago, the only company doing anything in this space – trying to figure out how to make money from AI – was Tollbit, ” said Paul Bannister, CRO at Raptive. “Now there’s like 14 companies, three new trade groups, other trade groups getting involved, giant companies like Microsoft trying to build their thing. Cloudflare has got in there. People clearly think this is going to be an enormous market five years from now, so everybody is diving in.” 

Microsoft’s move to provide an AI marketplace  has caused a stir among publishers. The tech company is working with a small number of publishers on a pilot and it’s very early days, but it’s got the infrastructure clout and baked-in demand side that makes its efforts highly appealing, according to two publishers Digiday spoke to. 

Naturally, for publishers, there’s an element of déjà vu: whenever there’s a new technology, the pitches come fast and thick — another gold rush of middlemen promising to turn tech disruption into revenue. 

Using programmatic tech to enable AI payments has come up in informal conversations and workshops when industry peers have gotten together to hash out ideas of how automated AI remuneration could work based on RAG usage, but publishers have been quick to quash that notion, according to Bannister. “There is a land grab of all these companies that are profit-motivated with the exception of the trade groups, which are less profit-motivated,” he said. 

A good option would be a utility-style service that takes a small cut – say 5 percent – as a clearing house, processes transactions and distributes payments. What publishers don’t want is a tangle of middlemen skimming off big fees without adding much value, which is how programmatic ended up, he added. 

Many of the AI marketplace pitches made to publishers have been attractive and useful, according to one publishing exec at a major business pub who agreed to speak on background. He said that due to the volume of pitches, vetting needs to be thorough and, of course, is time-consuming. “Not all will make it, we know that, so we’re looking at those that check all the boxes and seem likely to succeed. And we pit that against onboarding costs, which aren’t trivial,” he said. 

The less fun part is that, despite the excitement from the many startups offering solutions, there seems to be very little engagement from the major LLMs, said the first anonymous publishing executive. “Ultimately they’re the ones that’ll be paying the bills. Until they jump into the fray and open their wallets, the solutions are all sort of “waiting for Godot.”

What we’ve heard

“We’re outgunned from a technological standpoint, from a resources standpoint, from an engineering standpoint – and right now, even collectively, we’re outgunned.”

– An anonymous publishing exec on publishers’ leverage in negotiations with LLMs and AI marketplaces to get paid for their content.

Numbers to know

5.7%: The IAB’s forecast for 2025 U.S. ad spend growth, revised down from 7.3%, citing tariff concerns and broader economic headwinds.

⅕: The share of U.S. adults who now regularly get news on TikTok, up from just 3% in 2020.

$20.6 million: The total compensation in fiscal year 2025 for Robert Thomson, CEO at News Corp.

6.5%: The year-over-year decline in Hearst UK’s 2024 total revenue, to £104.6 million, due primarily to declines in digital ad revenue from search changes.

What we’ve covered

A day in the life of Eater’s EIC Stephanie Wu

• Wu uses Slack reminders, a color-coded calendar and Google Docs to stay on top of her to-do list.
• She achieves “Inbox Zero” regularly – parsing through 200 emails a day.

Hear more about how Wu gets it done in the latest Digiday Podcast episode here.

Cloudflare updates robots.txt for the AI era – but publishers want more

• Cloudflare’s new Content Signals Policy effectively upgrades the decades-old honor system and adds a way for publishers to spell out how they do – and don’t – want AI crawlers to use their content once it’s scraped.
• But none are blind to the glaringly obvious: without enforceability, the risk remains that AI platforms will still extract value from their work without compensation.

Read more here.

Watch every session from the Digiday Publishing Summit, Fall 2025

• AI Mode isn’t just the name of Google’s newest search product. It also describes the present period of digital media — and the theme of this September’s Digiday Publishing Summit.
• If you weren’t able to join us in Miami to attend DPS in person — or want to relive the sessions — you’re in luck. 

Watch full video recordings of each session, exclusively available to Digiday+ members, here.

Creators brace for AI bots scraping their work 

• As AI bot traffic grows, content creators are taking steps to protect their intellectual property from being scraped against their will. 
• Six content creators and creator talent managers told Digiday that AI scraping was an increasing concern going into the end of 2025. Three are taking steps to block AI bot traffic and legally defend their content.

Read more here.

The New York Times crafts personality-led video in Cooking push to drive subs

• The New York Times’ Cooking vertical has debuted a new baking video series and newsletter franchise, making the featured recipes free to access as part of a push to attract younger audiences into its subscription funnel.
• The Times plans to monetize the videos and newsletters with ads, the tactic is ultimately part of the Times’ subscriber acquisition strategy. 

Read more here.

What we’re reading

The Economist launches new video product

The Economist announced “The Economist Insider,” twice-weekly shows hosted by senior editors with guest interviews featuring world leaders, thinkers and policymakers.

Financial Times’s AI-personalized paywall messaging has quadrupled conversion rate

Using AI to personalize its paywall messaging has led to a nearly 300% increase in the Financial Times’s subscription conversion rate, Press Gazette reports.

The New York Times shares newsletter strategy tips

The New York Times emphasizes that a successful newsletter should use engaging visuals, adopt a strong “host” voice, keep content short and foster an intimate tone, according to Press Gazette. 

OpenAI launches video generator app

OpenAI has launched a new social media app called Sora 2 that allows users to create short videos with audio from text prompts and AI-generated scenes, rivaling TikTok and Youtube, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Meta launches short-form AI video feed

Meta has introduced Vibes, a new feed in the Meta AI app for sharing and creating short-form, AI-generated videos, TechCrunch reported.