Crawling for Compensation: Moving to a Paradigm of Publisher Remuneration for Content Ingestion

Our Data Analyst & Sustainability Lead, Dimitris Beis, has created a timely explainer on the relationship between publishers and AI platforms - what’s changing, what’s at stake, and what a workable remuneration model could look like.

In a market where Large Language Model (LLM) powered experiences increasingly satisfy users at the aggregation layer, publishers face a twofold challenge: protecting traffic and ensuring fair value exchange when their content is crawled, trained on, or retrieved in real-time. Dimitris unpacks the data and emerging solutions and outlines what must happen next.

Inside the document:

• Overview of the Problem - Relating to both traffic- and value-level disputes.
• Proposed Solutions - Including an explanation of IAB Tech Lab’s proposed framework and observations on how a content marketplace would work.
• Next Steps - Requirements for closing the gap between the value extracted from publisher content and the current lack of remuneration.

This publication is ideal for publishers or anyone working in the digital advertising ecosystem who is interested in shaping AI and content strategy in Europe.

Our Artificial Intelligence Working Group is looking for European publishers to collaborate with. To learn more about the Working Group and how you can get involved, please reach out to Dimitris Beis at beis [at] iabeurope [dot] eu.

Download the document below.