WHAT’S WORKING / THE ATLANTIC
Paid by the query
How The Atlantic is cutting usage-based deals with the AI data resellers that scraped it
OVERVIEW
COMPANY
The Atlantic
THE CHALLENGE
AI licensing deals paid a fee but sent almost no traffic or subscribers
THE CHANGE
Usage-based deals with agentic data resellers like Parallel and Firecrawl
THE TAKEAWAY
Pay per query could scale in a way flat fees don’t
The first wave of the relationship between publishers and AI companies was in the form of direct deals: flat licensing fees, paid by the AI company mostly to avoid lawsuits, but provided little else. There were written contractual obligations for tech companies to provide attribution, but that did not manifest in a real way. Publishers also quickly learned that these AI tools were not effective in driving traffic or subscriber conversions.
The second wave, back in 2025, brought about two dozen content marketplaces: attempts by companies such as TollBit to connect buyers and sellers. Many publishers were ready to show up to this party, but the AI companies – the buy-side – were not.
Now, we’re in the third wave: cutting deals with agentic data resellers such as Firecrawl, Parallel and AskNews – essentially, the companies that have scraped web data from publishers, mixed it all together into a soup so it’s not broken out by individual publications or titles, and then resold it to LLM developers including Google, Anthropic and OpenAI and other customers.
Subscribe to TRB Pro to read the rest.
Become a paying subscriber of TRB Pro to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content.
Upgrade