Microsoft never sleeps when it comes to AI, as its $80 billion investments in data centers prove. Now, the company is exploring compensation options for publishers whose content is used by AI. As reported by Axios, Microsoft is creating what they call the Publisher Content Marketplace, or PCM for short.
The program will launch with a select set of publishers during the pilot phase, with additional publishers being brought on over time. News was first broken at an invite-only publisher summit in Monaco last week.
Those in attendance would be part of the initial group. Over time, Microsoft will aim to expand this offering to other publishers as it develops more effective tools and pricing models for PCM. Moreover, Microsoft is now the largest source driving the AI marketplace.
In an ever-growing marketplace, offering deals up front for content creation outlets, such as the deals Microsoft struck when creating Copilot Daily, is nothing but good news. Microsoft looks to be the first company to make such offerings, as others like Google have seemingly shown little interest in striking AI marketplace deals.
While Google has signed a deal with the ever-meme-generating Reddit, it hasn't taken any steps to create a similar marketplace using its AI tooling. With AI overviews taking clicks away from sites, some form of compensation needs to take place if AI has any hope of not devouring itself.
Take, for example, the search for "What happened with Xbox and Costco?" With an AI overview, AI tooling looks to scrape websites for this information before providing it at the top of your results, much like if you were to ask Copilot. The website itself, in many instances, is now missing out on key revenue from ads, or even more so, traffic that could lead to the sale of certain items, such as games or hardware peripherals.
Any form of traffic halting costs a website money, and if a website isn't generating income, said website goes away. What happens when there aren't enough outlets to continue generating said overviews for AI? This is where the idea of AI eating itself alive comes to mind, as its own prowess would cause a loss of information and a devolution of its use altogether.
A step into a marketplace meant for publishers of this information could lead to a recovery of said income. As Microsoft reportedly stated in its own slideshow for this offering, "You deserve to be paid on the quality of your IP."
All sources of AI information deserve to be paid for their IP, and Microsoft, in a turn that I'm sure 'Micro$oft haters' will dislike, is doing an excellent service to the industry with this move.
While Microsoft's Copilot is reportedly used less frequently than ChatGPT or other similar AI chatbots, as noted by Axios, its key usage is built into the foundations of their enterprise support.
Sources I have access to have reported that their companies have pushed for greater use of Copilot. Even generating weekly or monthly reports of its use within the company. This includes the likes of Fortune 10 companies.
With an increase in dedicating resources to publishers seeking to generate income through Copilot and a greater push for the service within companies that use the product, Microsoft appears to be making all the right moves at the right time.
Leave it to Microsoft to (sometimes) make consumer-friendly decisions in the business space.
As for everyone else, are you part of a company or enterprise that's pushing for the use of Copilot in-house, one where this may have an effect? Let us know below in the comments or on social media!
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