Amazon to launch marketplace for media sites to sell content to AI firms

Given the AI industry's never-ending quest for licensable content, Amazon is gearing up to launch a marketplace allowing media publishers to sell and license their content directly to AI firms, providing a legally secure source of data to train AI models.

The exceptional growth of the AI sector has brought it face-to-face with a never-ending struggle to gather licensable data, often resulting in lawsuits and allegations of copyright infringement. In such circumstances, Amazon's bid to bring a place where media houses can put their content up for sale is indispensable.

According to a report from The Information, Amazon is in talks with publishing executives to discuss this new marketplace initiative. Ahead of its AWS conference for publishers, Amazon shared slides mentioning the proposed content marketplace, signalling its intent to move forward.

As per TechCrunch, an Amazon spokesperson did not deny the report but refrained from providing details, stating, “Amazon has built long-lasting, innovative relationships with publishers across many areas of our business. We are always innovating together to best serve our customers, but we have nothing specific to share on this subject at this time.”

A thing of note here is that Amazon is not the first major tech giant to be doing so, as Microsoft recently launched its Publisher Content Marketplace (PCM), offering publishers a new revenue stream while granting AI systems scaled access to their exclusive content. The PCM is claimed to empower publishers with a transparent economic content licensing framework.

This approach of Amazon is consistent with the AI industry's current efforts to address the legal challenges surrounding copyrighted material in AI data training.

Publishers have expressed concerns that AI-generated summaries, particularly those featured in Google search results, have reduced traffic to their websites to a substantial degree, while admitting that the new marketplace could provide a more sustainable business model.