The case for and against publisher content marketplaces 

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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