§55 · Lane 9 — AI Content Economy & Machine-Web Monetisation
Tow Center — The AI Licensing Market (ONA25 Brief) the empirical survey of the content-licensing marketplaces
Tow Center for Digital Journalism (2025) · Tow Center / ONA25
Bibliographic data
- Title
- The AI Licensing Market — CJL Brief (Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia; Online News Association 2025)
- Authors / Issuing body
- Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia University
- Venue / Publisher
- Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia University
- Year
- 2025
- Designation
- Journalism Research
- Licence
- Refer to publisher for full reuse terms.
How to cite
Tow Center for Digital Journalism (2025). The AI Licensing Market — CJL Brief (Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia; Online News Association 2025). Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia University. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5efcb64b1cf16e4c487b2f61/t/68d597b6be811a4e0417f32e/1758828470174/CJL+Brief_AI+Licensing+Market_ONA25.pdf.
A research brief surveying the AI content-licensing marketplaces — among them TollBit (about 500 paying publishers across more than 2,000 clients), ProRata/Gist, ScalePost and Sphere — recording publisher counts, take-rate and revenue-share models, and the points at which adoption and settled-dollar figures are not disclosed.
Why it matters for NETEVO
This is the named, authored market survey beneath any honest inventory of the content-licensing marketplaces. It is the empirical spine for the marketplace option in the monetisation analysis — who the operators are, how many publishers each has signed, and where the public record stops.
Its value is that it is candid about disclosure gaps: several operators report client counts but not settled dollars, and at least one lists adoption as confidential. That distinction — between a shipped capability and a proven revenue line — is the load-bearing caution carried into any assessment of whether metering and marketplaces are a real revenue mechanism or an emerging one.
It is United States-centric and journalism-sector-specific; for an Australian or New Zealand audience it maps the market structure forming overseas rather than a local market.
Where NETEVO applies this
- AI Traffic Monetisation Whitepaper — load-bearing — the empirical marketplace survey behind the metering-and-marketplace posture
Who acts on this
Reading this usually means something has forced the question — a listing, an audit finding, a procurement questionnaire, a regulator's letter. The role pages below set out what NETEVO does about it, including where we would tell you not to engage.