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This startup wants to be the iTunes of AI content licensing

Getting AI companies to pay publishers for fresh data sounds great in theory. But will anyone bite?

After Google rolled out AI Overviews earlier this year, at least one report estimated that publishers would lose more than $2 billion in ad revenue because fewer people would have a reason to visit their websites. In April, TollBit also brought on Campbell Brown as a senior adviser, a former television anchor who previously acted as Meta’s head of news partnerships for the better part of a decade. There are three big reasons, the founders say: more websites are taking steps to prevent their content from being scraped ever since generative AI went mainstream, which means that scraping the web is getting harder and more expensive; no one wants to deal with ongoing copyright lawsuits; and, crucially, being able to easily pay for content on an as-needed basis lets AI companies tap into smaller and more niche publications because it isn’t possible to strike individual licensing deals with every single website.

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