Tech Giants Look to Bridge AI and Publishing Worlds

Amazon and Microsoft are reportedly pushing into a new part of the AI world: arranging deals with news publishers.

That’s according to a report Monday (Feb. 16) from the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), which notes that the advent of new content marketplaces marks a major evolution in the relationship between companies like OpenAI, Meta and Perplexity and the publishers whose material helps their AI tools answer queries.

News companies have turned to litigation and/or licensing deals in response, with the likes of Condé Nast and The New York Times getting tens of millions of dollars per year from AI firms, the WSJ said. Smaller publishers, however, haven’t been as lucky, and larger companies want to be sure they’re properly compensated.

“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 agreement with OpenAI. “A vibrant marketplace with enough of the supply will attract demand.”

Enter what the WSJ calls a fledgling “matchmaking” service. Microsoft recently began a pilot with publishers such as People, the Associated Press and Hearst, whose content will be purchased by Yahoo and Microsoft’s Copilot.

“We very much intend to scale this,” said Tim Frank, corporate vice president at Microsoft, who noted that the company has invested $10 million in the program.

The aim is to let publishers set their own pricing and terms, which could vary according to factors like how new the material is or what type of content they sell.

The WSJ report follows a similar story last week from The Information, which said that Amazon was in talks with publishing executives about developing a marketplace that would allow publishers to sell their content directly to companies creating AI products.

The program would establish Amazon as an intermediary in the increasing dispute over how AI developers access, license and pay for digital content, the report added.

“Publishers increasingly favor usage-based compensation models that scale with how often AI systems rely on their content, rather than flat licensing fees,” PYMNTS wrote at the time. “Industry executives say such models could offer a more sustainable revenue stream as artificial intelligence usage grows, but many also worry that AI companies may not participate in sufficient numbers to make marketplaces economically meaningful.”