Microsoft to Launch Marketplace for Publishers to Sell Content to AI Companies

Microsoft is planning to launch a marketplace that will allow publishers to sell their content to artificial intelligence companies for use in chatbot training. The Publisher Content Marketplace (PCM) will initially only be available to a select group of publishers that can license their IP for the training of Microsoft’s Copilot assistant.

The tech giant aims to expand PCM to more publishers and AI models over time, according to Axios, and will gather feedback on the tools, policies, and pricing models under consideration.

Creatives and AI companies are searching for a way to coexist

The emergence of AI over the past few years has led to a clash between the tech and creative industries.

Tech companies want their models to be as useful as possible, which means feeding them vast amounts of fresh, human-created data. They’re also racing to innovate and outpace competitors, knowing that asking permission or paying creators could slow them down and cut into profits. 

Meanwhile, creators, wary of powering tools that may eventually compete with them, still see potential in being fairly compensated and in contributing to models that could drive meaningful progress in fields like medicine and education. 

Legal battles and copyright debates are unfolding around the world as courts and lawmakers grapple with how to resolve this fundamental tension between innovation and creative rights. Anthropic, Meta, Perplexity, Stability AI, Midjourney, and OpenAI (many, many, many times) — as well as Microsoft itself — are among the AI developers that have faced legal action from artists, news outlets, and musicians for using their work without consent.

Sam Altman’s startup has signed several licensing deals with publishers to avoid further trouble, paying for unlimited access to content rather than on a per-use basis. Microsoft has also partnered with several news outlets through licensing agreements that grant broad rights to use their content for its AI news summarisation tool, Copilot Daily.

Some AI firms, such as Perplexity, don’t even offer an upfront licensing fee, instead relying on usage-based revenue sharing tied to when their content is cited or accessed. 

Content marketplaces are just one solution being developed to give back control to creatives

Content marketplaces are one method of ensuring creators have control over how AI companies use their content and how much they get paid for it.

Nevertheless, most companies offering them, such as ProRata and TollBit, don’t yet have a large number of users, so they can’t offer significant revenue to their partners. While Microsoft’s Copilot may not have user numbers comparable to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, it has good potential to scale up by tapping into its existing Microsoft 365 and Azure user base.

Another solution is to implement controls that give publishers greater authority over the AI web crawlers accessing their content, such as Cloudflare’s pay-per-crawl system. Earlier this month, the cybersecurity company made it available to all its customers, with its CEO strongly arguing that wealthy AI firms should pay for content access so users, currently burdened by ads and paywalls, can view it for free.

Suppose publishers are not interested in having their content used for AI training, regardless of any potential earnings. In that case, they can use Cloudflare’s AI Labyrinth, which redirects crawlers to pages of unrelated AI-generated content. Reddit has also started blocking the Internet Archive from archiving most of its platform, as it believes AI companies are scraping the Wayback Machine. 

Microsoft unifies cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents storefront under one marketplace banner 

In other Microsoft news, on Thursday, Azure Marketplace and Microsoft AppSource were combined to create a single storefront for cloud and AI management. Users can shop among 3,000 AI apps and agents, including Azure AI Foundry and Microsoft 365 Copilot. 

“With Microsoft Marketplace, we reduced configuration time of AI apps from nearly 20 minutes to just 1 minute per instance,” said Jeff Zobrist, vice president of global partner ecosystem and go-to-market at Siemens Digital Industries Software, in a Microsoft press release. 

This Microsoft Marketplace is available today in the US and will be open to users worldwide at a later date.

Want to know how else websites are pushing back against AI scraping? Read more on eWeek about the growing movement to block training bots.

Editor’s note: TechnologyAdvice’s Megan Crouse updated the article to reflect the Sept. 25 news about Microsoft Marketplace.