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Publishers Launch Payment System to Make AI Companies Pay for Content

Reddit, Yahoo, Medium, and Quora have backed Really Simple Licensing, a system built to ride a wave of legal turmoil that is already costing AI companies billions.

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DS

Datamation Staff

Sep 11, 2025

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A group of publishers has unveiled a licensing standard aimed at making AI companies finally pay for the content they have been harvesting for free. The timing is no accident. Reddit, Yahoo, Medium, and Quora just backed Really Simple Licensing, RSL, a system built to ride a wave of legal turmoil that is already costing AI companies billions.

The news lands days after Anthropic’s record-breaking $1.5 billion settlement. That deal signaled something simple, the era of free AI training data is closing. Publishers now have a lever to demand their cut, if they can actually enforce it.

On RSL’s website, Tim O’Reilly, CEO of O’Reilly Media, says, “Today, as AI systems absorb and repurpose that same content without permission or compensation, the rules need to evolve. RSL builds directly on the legacy of RSS, providing the missing licensing layer for the AI-first Internet.”

The revolutionary standard transforming data economics

RSL could reset how the web works. It lets websites choose from three payment setups that target different parts of the AI pipeline. Subscription models for regular access. Pay-per-crawl charges every time an AI bot hits a page. Pay-per-inference fees that compensate publishers when an AI system actually uses their content in a generated answer.

The pipes are already being laid. Fastly is developing “gatekeeper” technology that grants or blocks AI crawlers based on whether fees are paid. At the same time, Cloudflare, which powers about 20% of the internet, is testing its own Pay Per Crawl system and turning on default AI crawler blocking.

There is a catch. RSL depends entirely on AI companies’ voluntary cooperation. No cooperation, no enforcement. Simple as that.

Everything changed for AI companies

The RSL rollout piggybacks on a legal earthquake. Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement is the largest publicly reported copyright recovery to date, delivering $3,000 per work for around 500,000 copyrighted books allegedly taken from piracy sites.

That case redrew the map. While recent court decisions delivered early victories for AI developers on fair use, the Anthropic matter drew a hard line. Pirated content plays by different rules than lawfully acquired material. Judge William Alsup ruled in June that using lawfully purchased books for AI training was “among the most transformative we will see in our lifetimes,” yet fair use provides zero protection for companies relying on pirated works.

The ripple effects reach beyond Anthropic. The $3,000 per-work compensation is four times the statutory minimums, and legal experts are already anticipating that number will shape other pending cases against AI firms.

What unfolds next will reshape the internet permanently

Publishers are moving away from one-time training deals toward dynamic, use-based pricing. Industry licensing experts confirm that the per-usage slice of these agreements has become the main course.

Three business models are taking shape. The crawl fee route sets micro-payments like a penny per crawl, then layers in revenue sharing when content influences AI outputs. Several publishers have already transitioned to this use-based model. Real-world adoption is speeding up, Gannett joined Perplexity’s Publisher Program in July, opting for retrieval augmented generation that pays based on real-time usage rather than training.

The stakes for the wider web are huge. AI-generated answers eliminate the need for clicks, which erodes the funnel that powers subscriptions and conversions. Publishers see the threat and are tightening the gates, industry observers report that publishers are becoming “more aggressive with crawler restrictions”.

For anyone navigating the modern internet, big changes are coming. Marketers should expect more paywalls and stricter access as this fight escalates. RSL is more than plumbing, it is the opening move in a war over whether AI companies keep consuming data without restraint or finally face the bill they have been dodging.

DS

Publishers Launch Payment System to Make AI Companies Pay for Content

The revolutionary standard transforming data economics

Everything changed for AI companies

What unfolds next will reshape the internet permanently

Datamation Staff

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