Prebid

The New Tollbooths: AI Content Marketplaces and Intermediaries Explained

by

Draft by Anton Nashkerskyi (Sigma Software), Konstantin Mirin (Postindustria) and Jennifer Ong (TollBit), for the Prebid LLM Taskforce. Part of the publisher series.

The previous article in this series, “Getting Paid in the AI Era,” followed the money through the four payment models. In pay per use, and often in pay per access, a company sits between the publisher and the AI buyer. That layer grew this year: Microsoft announced its Publisher Content Marketplace in February, and Cloudflare began a Pay Per Use beta on September 30, alongside startups such as TollBit and Dappier and open protocols such as FORA. This article explains how these marketplaces work and where they differ.

What a marketplace does

A content marketplace sells a permitted use of a page, such as a summary with a citation, rather than raw access to it. It does seven things: it lists the content a publisher is willing to license, holds the terms attached to it, prices each use, verifies that the agent asking is the buyer it claims to be, bills the buyer and pays the publisher, records which page was used by which agent under which license, and reports that back.

How a licensed read is recorded differs by marketplace. On TollBit, the agent requests a token for one page and one license, naming the most it will pay. The token is a one-time grant that expires five minutes after issue, and the charge is recorded at the publisher’s rate when the agent fetches the page. On Cloudflare’s Pay Per Use, the buyer reports each use afterwards through an API. Under FORA, the agent accepts a signed offer from an exchange, receives a time-limited signed link to fetch the content, and then reports its use.

How they differ

Who pays the fee. In one arrangement, the publisher’s rate is its revenue and the buyer pays the marketplace’s fee on top, as on TollBit. In the other, the marketplace takes a commission from the sale: Sphere’s marketplace announcement describes a 20% commission, with the seller keeping 80%. Cloudflare and Microsoft have not published their fees.

Who sets the price. On TollBit, FORA and Dappier, the publisher sets it. On Cloudflare’s Pay Per Use, the buyer offers a price and the publisher accepts or declines. Sphere.ai, according to an April 2026 Open Markets Institute report, recommends prices from an originality score. The unit varies too: per 1,000 pages for each license on TollBit, per query on Dappier, per reported use on Cloudflare.

Which uses are licensed. TollBit’s standard menu separates summarization with citation from full display. Microsoft’s marketplace licenses content for grounding scenarios. On TollBit and Microsoft, the marketplace holds the terms. FORA has publishers declare them in files on their own domain, and on Cloudflare the buyer’s offer defines the use.

Where content is served from. A gateway in front of the publisher’s site, such as TollBit’s agent site, sees every licensed read. A marketplace that holds a copy, as Sphere does, serves from its own store, and its report becomes the record. Under Pay Per Use, buyers crawl the publisher’s own site as verified bots, report their own usage, and Cloudflare checks that each reported use belongs to an enrolled publisher.

Which buyers they reach. Buyers register agents, arrive through CDN integrations, or find content through search. Few are named so far. Cloudflare named Ceramic.ai and You.com as partners in its Pay Per Use experiments, Microsoft’s pilot started in its own Copilot, and TollBit has named the news app Particle as a buyer.

The players

TollBit runs a gateway between publisher sites and AI agents. Publishers using it include AP, Forbes, Penske Media, Time and USA Today, according to TollBit. Publishers keep the full rate they set, and the buyer pays a transaction fee on top. Rates are set per 1,000 pages accessed for each license, with custom rates resolved by bot, page, keyword, time and subdirectory. The standard licenses are summarization with citation and full-text display, with custom terms beyond that. Content is served from an agent site on a TollBit subdomain of the publisher’s own domain. It strips ads, trackers and any elements or wire content the publisher excludes, and returns markdown or HTML. Reports break down use by URL, agent, price and license type. Buyers are AI companies that register their agents with TollBit and fetch content from each publisher’s agent site using a signed token. They also arrive through CDN integrations such as Fastly and Akamai, and developers can find content through a cross-publisher search API that filters by domain and by whether a property has rates set.

Cloudflare Pay Per Use is in beta and is managed from the Cloudflare dashboard. AI companies identify their crawlers as verified bots and offer a price for a specific use. The publisher reviews offers there, decides whether to accept, and can stop participating later. The buyer reports each use through an API, and Cloudflare bills the buyer, pays publishers monthly and shows earnings by buyer and domain. Cloudflare’s post describes no content catalog for buyers. Instead, a buyer retrieves the list of domains that accepted its offer.

Microsoft’s Publisher Content Marketplace is a pilot with a public interest form. Publishers define licensing and usage terms, and AI builders discover and license content for specific grounding scenarios. Microsoft says publishers are paid on the value their content delivers and receive usage-based reporting. In February, it was still working through its business models. The pilot started with grounding answers in Microsoft Copilot, and Microsoft says it is now beginning to onboard other demand partners.

FORA is an open protocol under the Apache 2.0 license rather than a company. Publishers declare which exchanges may sell their content in a file on their own domain, exchanges earn a margin on each access, and a publisher or group can run its own exchange. It offers SDKs and a reference app.

Sphere.ai focuses on content for AI answers and on local news, according to the Open Markets report. In its marketplace, creators upload content and buyers receive it through Sphere’s API.

Dappier’s RAG Marketplace turns a publisher’s content into a model that AI products can query, with the publisher setting a price per query.

What comes next

The next article, “Speaking Machine: The Protocols and Standards Publishers Need to Know,” looks at the standards these marketplaces build on.

Sources

Category: Tag:

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply