A report from The Information revealed that Amazon signaled to publishing industry executives that it is planning to launch a marketplace where publishers can sell their content to firms offering artificial intelligence products.
Amazon Web Services circulated slides that mention a content marketplace ahead of an AWS conference on Tuesday, the report said.
The slides show AWS grouping the marketplace with its core AI tools, including Bedrock and Quick Suite, when describing products publishers can use in their businesses, the report added.
The report comes as publishers and AI companies negotiate the rules for using online content, whether to train models or to generate answers for users, with publishers pressing for usage-based fees that rise with how much their content is used.
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An Amazon spokesperson said the company had “nothing specific to share” about The Information’s report, adding that it has built long-lasting relationships with publishers and that it continues to innovate.
Last week, Microsoft said it is working on a Publisher Content Marketplace (PCM), an AI licensing hub that shows usage terms set by publishers. According to an Axios report, this will launch as a pilot program with a limited set of publishers. The company hopes it will expand the pilot to more partners over time, working in tandem with them to build out the tools, policies and pricing models that could work for PCM.
Microsoft’s Copilot assistant will serve as the first AI buyer within the marketplace for publishers to sell their content. The company is trying to grow the marketplace’s demand-side offering to include other AI products. It discussed the pilot program last week at its invite-only Partner Summit in Monaco, however it did not share concrete timing for the pilot’s launch.
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This comes at a time when the media industry is trying to get into the marketplace business. Smaller startups like ProRata.ai and TollBit have started to build marketplaces, however they don’t yet have enough inventory to meaningfully compensate publishers. (ProRata.ai launched its own AI search engine to try to address that problem).
The Axios report states that most AI companies have focused on brokering licensing deals that pay publishers upfront for access to content, not on a per-use basis. While Google, which is the biggest search company by far, has hardly brokered any AI deals with publishers or shown an interest in participating in any AI marketplaces.
Microsoft has looked into other deals for Copilot, having launched Copilot Daily, an audio summarization of news and weather sourced from partners like Reuters, Axel Springer, Hearst Magazines, USA Today Network and the Financial Times in 2024. Meta has ramped up discussions with publishing partners about AI deals in recent months.