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Getting Paid in the AI Era: A Field Guide to the New Monetization Models

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Article by Anton Nashkerskyi (Sigma Software) and Krish Arvapally (Dappier) , for the Prebid LLM Taskforce. Part of the publisher series.

Earlier articles in this series covered AI traffic and crawler rules, and “Who Gets Paid When an AI Reads Your Page?” introduced the four payment models.

This article follows the money through each model: who pays whom, and on what basis. News Corp’s deal with OpenAI is reportedly worth more than $250 million over five years, while Cloudflare’s Pay Per Crawl lets a site charge AI crawlers from $0.001 per page.

Pay per access

The AI company pays for each page its crawler fetches. In Cloudflare’s Pay Per Crawl, which is in closed beta, the publisher sets a price of at least $0.001 and can vary it by content. Cloudflare acts as merchant of record, billing the AI company and paying the publisher, and does not publish its share. AWS offers a similar per-request charge in CloudFront, settled in stablecoins.

For a site on Cloudflare, it is a setting rather than an integration, and each charge matches a request the publisher can see in its own logs.

The main limit is that the price is per fetch, whatever the AI company then does with the page. A crawler that caches a page pays once, however many answers it later serves from that copy. Cloudflare has not named the crawlers that pay through it.

Pay per use

The buyer, meaning the AI company paying for content, pays for a permitted use, such as summarizing or displaying a page. A marketplace verifies the buyer, bills it and pays the publisher. On TollBit, the publisher sets a rate per 1,000 pages for each license type. TollBit suggests pricing against current RPM, what 1,000 human pageviews earn in ads, so AI access is priced against what the pages already earn. Its examples run $1 to $5 per 1,000 pages. TollBit takes no share of the rate and charges the buyer a fee on top. In Cloudflare’s Pay Per Use, in beta since September 30, the buyer proposes a price for each use and reports its use through an API. In Microsoft’s Publisher Content Marketplace, a pilot with a public interest form, publishers set licensing and usage terms for grounding uses. Microsoft says it pays for the value content delivers and in February was still testing pricing models. On Dappier’s RAG Marketplace, publishers list their content and set a price per query. FORA is an open protocol for the same kind of transaction. Publishers set their prices, and the exchanges that run it earn a margin on each access. A publisher or group can run its own exchange, taking on work a marketplace would otherwise handle.

The price can follow the use, so a full display of an article can cost more than a summary of the content. Marketplaces also record each use, such as TollBit’s transaction log of crawler, page and price.

The main limit is that the demand side of the marketplace is not quite built out, largely due to alternative access points through web scraping tools like Firecrawl. There are some early successes here: Cloudflare names Ceramic.ai and You.com as its initial partners, Microsoft names Yahoo as an early demand partner after testing in its own Copilot, and TollBit named the news app Particle as an early buyer in 2024. FORA has a working proof of concept.

Revenue share

An AI product shares part of its own revenue with publishers and allocates it by its own measure of each publisher’s contribution. ProRata shares 50% of its revenue with content partners. Perplexity’s Comet Plus, a $5 monthly subscription, pays publishers according to human visits, search citations and agent actions. Axios reported that publishers receive 80% and Perplexity keeps 20% for computing costs, with an initial pool of $42.5 million. Google’s invite-only pilot pays sites whose content it judges to have contributed significantly to an AI answer.

The main limit is that there is no uniformity in business model. This leads to fragmented relationships between demand partners looking to consume unique content and publishers supplying it.  Perplexity has not said how it weights its three factors, Google does not publish its calculation, and pooled payouts rise and fall with the operator’s own revenue.

Direct deal

The AI company pays the publisher under a contract, with no intermediary, so the publisher keeps the full fee. Dotdash Meredith, now People Inc., receives at least $16 million a year in fixed payments from OpenAI, plus a variable component. Meta will reportedly pay News Corp up to $50 million a year for three years, covering Meta AI answers and training. Amazon reportedly pays The New York Times at least $20 million a year.

The publisher negotiates terms directly, including covered uses and how payment is calculated.

The main limit is that deals take months to negotiate and have so far gone mainly to the largest publishers, leaving most of the long tail outside them, as the first article in this series found.

Beyond the four models

Some publishers also earn from AI on their own pages. An on-site answer engine lets readers ask follow-up questions about an article. Advertisers pay rather than AI companies: ads run with the answers, and the publisher shares that revenue with the provider or sells the space itself. Taboola’s DeeperDive, ProRata’s Gist Answers, Direqt, Inline AI and Dappier’s AskAI work this way.

Dappier shared how its version works. AskAI answers from the publisher’s content, licensed content or both. Ads in the conversation include programmatic ads, product listings and sponsored conversations, in which a brand’s AI agent answers readers’ questions. Dappier collects revenue from agentic ads and typically shares it 50/50 with the publisher, with payouts based on earned advertising revenue, similar to a traditional ad network. Dappier covers LLM, token and hosting infrastructure costs, allowing publishers to get started without taking on those expenses. An engine that draws on other publishers’ articles has to license them, so these products also add buyers for pay per use.

Where to start

  1. Know your volume. Count a month of declared AI crawler fetches in your logs, so you can test any quoted rate against your own traffic.
  2. Assess your own audience opportunity. For an on-site answer engine, weigh reader engagement, ad revenue and any licensing cost together.
  3. Ask who is buying. For any network or marketplace, ask which AI companies pay through it today.
  4. Compare what you keep. Check whether a fee comes out of your rate or is added for the buyer, and how a revenue share calculates your part.
  5. Check the terms. Confirm which uses are covered, for how long and whether it is exclusive, and agree how payments are booked, the minimum payout and any tax withholding.

What comes next

The next article, “The New Tollbooths: AI Content Marketplaces and Intermediaries Explained,” compares the marketplaces behind several of these models.

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