When Napster emerged within the late Nineteen Nineties, it made it easy for people to grab music files without compensating the content owners. The iPod and the iTunes music store modified that by allowing artists or publishers to receives a commission for reusing their content in a digital context. Fast-forward to today, and there are corporations scraping content to coach large language models without permission.
Dappier, an early-stage startup, desires to be certain that publishers receives a commission when their content gets used, and today announced a $2 million seed round and the launch of a marketplace where publishers can set a price for using their content in model training.
Dappier co-founder and CEO Dan Goikhman, calls his company a monetization stack for the emerging AI web, providing a brand new way for publishers and data owners to get compensated for reusing their content.
“Our goal is to assist media corporations and knowledge providers monetize their content because it’s being leveraged by emerging AI agents and platforms all around the globe,” Goikhman told TechCrunch. “The thought mainly is, how do you create a payment infrastructure for content because it’s distributed?”
Goikhman and his co-founders saw a chance as media owners reacted to corporations like OpenAI scraping their content without permission in a pair of the way: they’d sue or they’d negotiate an “open kimono licensing deal.”
“And we thought that there was perhaps a greater path to present content creators and data providers for monetizing their content, which is to create a transactional marketplace where content will be licensed on a per query basis or monetized on an ad-supported basis,” he said.
They do that by letting customers connect with a content store via an RSS feed, and use that content to construct a model using RAG (retrieval-augmented generation). A publication can sell access to the model through the marketplace by setting a price in the identical way you’ll set a CPM ad rate, or they might find other ways to monetize the content resembling making an AI-fueled search engine available as a premium offering, as one example.
The approach gives publishers a brand new technique to monetize their content at a time once they are clearly struggling to earn a living through website promoting alone. This is also a helpful step toward multi-pronged monetization for people and small group newsletter publishers, not only the larger publications. Goikhman says the corporate has been in contact with the newsletter platforms to speak about partnering with them around this latest technique to monetize their content.
Today’s $2 million round was led by Silverton Partners in Austin, Texas, where Dappier also relies.
