Dow Jones expands AI marketplace to nearly 5,000 publishers
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Dow Jones CEO and Wall Street Journal publisher Almar Latour in an interview with Axios' Sara Fischer at Web Summit in Doha, Qatar, on Feb. 24. Photo: Courtesy of Web Summit
Dow Jones, the parent company to the Wall Street Journal, has quietly built an AI marketplace for publishers to license their content to corporations, Dow Jones CEO and Wall Street Journal publisher Almar Latour told Axios in an interview Monday.
Why it matters: The initiative, which sits under Dow Jones' business information and research company Factiva, now has nearly 5,000 publishing partners, up from nearly 4,000 in November and 2,000 six months ago, prior to launch.
Catch up quick: Factiva has existing relationships with over 30,000 news, data and information sources globally. It leverages that content to provide research and data tools to hundreds of enterprise companies globally.
- It launched a generative AI product called Smart Summary, which allows corporations to create short, informative summaries from a pool of Factiva's trusted content partners.
- The summaries are fully transparent and traceable, which makes it easy for Factiva to attribute them to its thousands of trusted news publishing partners, and compensate them accordingly.
Zoom in: For now, Dow Jones doesn't work with any AI companies to license publishers' materials, but that's something it's eyeing for the future.
- "That's coming," Latour said.
- Publishing partners span 200 countries and 32 languages, Factiva has said, ranging from global and national news outlets like the Associated Press and the Washington Post to the leading Swiss business news agency AWP Finanznachrichten AG.
The big picture: Dow Jones is one of several companies working to build marketplaces that can help publishers get compensated for their work in the AI era.
- TollBit, a two-sided marketplace for publishers and AI companies, raised a $24 million series A round.
- ProRata has built its own search engine that utilizes only high-quality, licensed content to service user queries. The startup claims it can accurately attribute and share revenues with content owners from AI chatbot subscriptions.
- Verify, a blockchain platform that helps media companies track how their content is being used online, was launched by Fox Corp. early last year.
Between the lines: Latour said Dow Jones' size and the scope of its existing relationships with publishers and corporate clients make it uniquely equipped to broker these types of deals in the AI era.
- The company started having conversations with publishers for the Smart Summary revenue-sharing program in 2023.
Zoom out: Dow Jones parent News Corp. has taken an aggressive approach toward implementing AI into its workflow while also defending its legal rights.
- The company announced a lucrative, multiyear deal to license its archived and current content to ChatGPT parent OpenAI last spring.
- But it later sued Perplexity, a generative AI search engine startup, for copyright infringement last October.
- Latour said Dow Jones prefers to strike deals when it can. "We are making sure that we strike large commercial agreements. That's by far our preference," he said.
Between the lines: Latour said what determines whether News Corp. will sue or partner with an AI company is determined by "a recognition of value."
- "At the core, we need to see a monetary value for the information that's being used, including a recognition for information that may have been used already without permission for a long period of time. And so you need to see compensation for that."
- Asked whether a Wall Street Journal report that indicates News Corp.'s deal with OpenAI is valued at more than $250 million over five years is accurate, Latour said, "Read the Wall Street Journal is all I can say."
