There’s a contradiction emerging in how publishers get paid when AI uses their content. The licensing deals that OpenAI, Meta, Amazon, and others have been signing these past few years appear to be slowing down, at least for the publishers still waiting on one.

Publishers are speaking about this openly. Digiday hosted a London town hall recently, and one publishing executive said discussions with AI companies have slowed down. Also, Katya Gorchinskaya, a Ukrainian journalist and media consultant who built J·Index, a database of thousands of AI implementations in newsrooms, separately told the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism that the market for deals with model makers is effectively closed.

At the same time, AI demand for content continues to go up. I recently spoke with Jonathan Roberts, chief innovation officer at People Inc., for The Media Copilot podcast, and he revealed that the number of different bots that try to scrape content from the company’s media properties (including People, InStyle, and Investopedia) now numbers in the tens of thousands every day. The company blocks all but 38 of them. At that Digiday London event, Fiona Spooner, managing director of consumer revenue at the Financial Times, said one trial account tried to access about a million articles in eight hours from 700,000 IP addresses.

I also see this in my GEO client work: the media properties often start from the position that having bots hammer your site all day is cost-prohibitive, so they block them outright.

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