A breakdown of the scraper economy: bulk harvesters, answer engines, search hybrids, and the infrastructure layer. The market hit $1 billion in 2025. Not one dollar flows back to publishers. (Matthew Scott Goldstein, LinkedIn)

“Not ‘how do I get paid for my articles by AI’ but ‘how do I architect my knowledge so it can reach customers I’ve never had access to before'”: A three-layer AI monetization framework, with O’Reilly as proof of concept. (Florent Daudens, AI in the News)

BBC, FT, Guardian, Sky News, and The Telegraph are launching Spur, a coalition to set shared licensing standards for AI use of journalism. Not a collective licensing body, but wants to shape what pricing looks like. More publishers welcome. (Charlotte Tobitt, Press Gazette)

Microsoft is launching a Publisher Content Marketplace to license articles into AI products like Copilot, promising publishers control, transparency, and usage-based payment for content that grounds conversational answers.

Sci-fi author and digital activist Cory Doctorow on the AI bubble: “The promise AI companies make to investors is that there will be AIs that can do your job, and when your boss fires you and replaces you with AI, he will keep half of your salary for himself, and give the other half to the AI company. (…) But AI can’t do your job.”

Google is rolling out Preferred Sources globally and has unveiled new AI features as well as new partnerships with news publications. SPIEGEL is one of the partners. (Google)

In left-leaning media outlets like n+1, resistance against AI is taking shape: “When we use generative AI, we consent to the appropriation of our intellectual property by data scrapers. We stuff the pockets of oligarchs with even more money. (…) There’s still time to disenchant AI, provincialize it, make it uncompelling and uncool.”

A visit to the nonprofit that powers most of today’s AI training: Common Crawl ingests the web, journalism and all, unapologetically. The article falls a bit short on fair use and other archives, but it’s a good read. (Alex Reisner, The Atlantic)

The current AI browser landscape and what it means for publishers: How content is used, and whether compensation or licensing is on the table. (Bertrand de Volontat, Nordot)

On Cloudflare’s very surprising ideas about AI and the future of web publishing: “That’s my counterprosal: AI should pay for the stuff it already uses, and people should keep putting up paywalls.” (Paul Ford, Aboard)

AI bots endlessly scrape publisher sites, causing costly downtime and meager traffic. (Charlotte Tobitt, PressGazette)

The publishers’ guide to being gaslit by tech platforms (the AI edition) (Seb Joseph, Sara Guaglione, DigiDay)

AI is killing the web. Can anything save it? asks The Economist, referring to business models that rely on traffic and advertising. Tollbit, a paywall for bots, reports its highest per-crawl rates at a local newspaper. Unique content appears to be part of the solution.

Google got The Economist and The Atlantic to provide content for NotebookLM (Sarah Perez, TechCrunch)

Alex Reisner reports on Silicon Valley’s “assault” on the media: “The world is changing fast, perhaps irrevocably. The institutions that comprise our country’s free press are fighting for their survival.” (The Atlantic)