By Alexandra Bruell
A new cottage industry to facilitate licensing deals between AI companies and news publishers is taking shape, with businesses including Microsoft, Amazon.com and Dow Jones's Factiva planting their flags.
The creation of new content marketplaces marks a significant evolution in the relationship between the likes of OpenAI, Meta Platforms and Perplexity and the publishers whose material they use to help their chatbots and other tools respond to queries.
News outlets have been pursuing a mix of litigation and licensing deals to manage, as tech companies scrape their websites for material. Large publishers including People Inc., Condé Nast, News Corp and the New York Times have cut deals allowing artificial-intelligence companies to use their content in exchange for payments running to tens of millions of dollars a year.
But smaller publishers are struggling to secure big checks. And larger outlets want to make sure they are compensated for content that is incorporated into the bevy of AI-powered products that companies are building. A large-scale matchmaking service may make that easier.
"The one-off deals are always going to be desirable, they're just not readily available," said Mark Howard, chief operating officer at Time, which has a licensing deal with OpenAI. "A vibrant marketplace with enough of the supply will attract demand."
Microsoft recently launched a pilot with eight publishers, including People, the Associated Press and Hearst. Yahoo and Microsoft's own Copilot AI product will participate as buyers. Microsoft has invested north of $10 million, including on payments to publishers, said Tim Frank, corporate vice president at Microsoft, and expects that number to rise.
"We very much intend to scale this," he said. The goal is to allow publishers to set their own pricing and terms, which could vary based on factors such as how new the material is or what type of content they are selling. In the future, Microsoft may take a fee for its role in coordinating the deals, Frank said.
Amazon is also building a marketplace for publishers to license their content to companies with AI products, according to people familiar with the matter. Amazon declined to comment on its plans beyond saying it has "built long-lasting, innovative relationships with publishers across many areas of our business."
Factiva, which gathers news for professional customers, is selling access to licensed content for AI use. The company now has deals to sell the AI rights to over 8,100 news sources in its system -- more than one-quarter of all its news sources. Factiva and The Wall Street Journal are both part of News Corp's Dow Jones unit. News Corp has a content deal with OpenAI. Two of News Corp's subsidiaries have sued Perplexity.
"The industry is working toward a new business model to value information in the era of gen AI," said Dow Jones Chief Executive Almar Latour.
A financial institution may feed the rights-cleared content into an AI tool to inform real-time trades, said Emma O'Brian, general manager of Factiva.
The new marketplaces are expected to advance a nascent business from technology companies including Tollbit and Cloudflare, which have helped publishers block AI bots from using their content without permission -- and charge a toll of sorts to serve as gatekeepers. For example, through Tollbit, Newsweek charges AI bots for access to its content using a "per-thousand-page-scrape" rate.
Publishers have gotten more sophisticated when it comes to blocking AI bots, said Jonathan Roberts, People's chief innovation officer. With so many companies building specialized AI products, and needing content to feed them, he said, "The size of the opportunity if we get it right is huge."
Write to Alexandra Bruell at alexandra.bruell@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
February 16, 2026 11:00 ET (16:00 GMT)
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