- Nonprofit Internet Licensing Collective (ILC, formerly RSL Collective) signs Yahoo Scout as first commercial customer; Yahoo Scout will gain ongoing access to high-value, permissioned content from top sources to inform and enrich Yahoo Scout AI answers
- ILC offers AI companies the industry’s first single blanket license agreement covering content from billions of web pages with costs that scale alongside usage and growth. Publishers join ILC for free to be paid fairly for their work, with control over which licenses they approve. Both start at internetcollective.org
- New Mather Economics report predicts the “missing” market for collective AI content licensing could be tens of billions of dollars in publisher revenue, surpassing the 2025 digital display advertising market in the next three years
San Francisco, CA, Nov. 12, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Today, a group of more than 3000 media brands, content owners and publishing platforms, including the leading sources powering frontier AI models, launched the Internet Licensing Collective (ILC), a nonprofit, publisher-led collective rights organization making AI content licensing practical at internet scale. Yahoo Scout, a new AI answers tool from Yahoo, is confirmed as ILC’s first commercial licensee. Publishers and AI companies can join or simply learn more by visiting internetcollective.org.
Drawing on collective licensing models used for decades across music and media, ILC combines a single blanket license with the infrastructure AI companies need to access high-quality, authorized content at a scale individual negotiations cannot match. Publishers participate at no cost, choose which licenses to join, retain the freedom to negotiate direct deals and receive transparent compensation based on how their content is used and the value it contributes to AI products.
“AI answers are only as good as the sources behind them,” said Eric Feng, SVP and GM of Yahoo Research Group. “Our agreement with ILC is one way we’re continuing to innovate and work to support publishers as we build on the trusted experience Yahoo Scout delivers to our users.”
Separately, publishing analytics firm Mather Economics today released The Price of Intelligence, the first-ever independent analysis of the economics of collective content licensing for AI. The report estimates collective licensing for AI could generate publisher compensation equal to 15% to 35% of AI company revenue, a potential market worth tens of billions of dollars that in three years could surpass the U.S. display advertising market.
“Content is the third essential input to AI, alongside compute and power, and it’s the one AI companies have had the least efficient way to pay for,” said Matt Lindsay, PhD, President & Chief Economist, Mather Economics. “Private licensing is the fastest path to a sustainable content ecosystem, faster than waiting for courts or regulators to sort it out. Collective licensing is the missing layer, and it benefits everyone.”
“The internet doesn’t need another black-box payment experiment,” said Doug Leeds, co-founder of ILC. “ILC was built by content owners to be the opposite: a transparent, durable licensing system with clear, incentive-aligned allocation rules. This is real infrastructure for a thriving AI economy—not a hedge against it.”
Continued Leeds, “Yahoo Scout, an AI answers tool from one of the internet’s largest platforms with more than 30 years in search and a long history of supporting publishers and the open web, has chosen to participate in this new scalable way to access and pay publishers for high-quality content. This is just the beginning.”
Spotify Moment for the Internet
When the music industry faced a similar existential crisis caused by Napster, collective licensing enabled Apple Music and Spotify to build sustainable products that harnessed new technology and grew the market. Because AI uses content differently, extracting and remixing it rather than simply playing it, publishers designed ILC’s collective licensing framework to reflect how Internet content is used by today’s AI systems.
The ILC framework was developed by the ILC Publisher Steering Committee with the following key pillars:
- One license, one agreement. A single blanket license eliminates the burden of individual negotiations. AI companies license only what they need, such as training, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), grounding, agentic applications and/or AI-generated overviews.
- Publisher control. Publishers and content owners decide which content they offer through ILC, to which AI companies, and for which uses. Participation is non-exclusive: publishers and platforms with existing direct AI licensing deals keep them. ILC does not bind a publisher or platform to any specific license, and each publisher may select which licenses to participate in at any time.
- Fair, transparent royalty allocation. There is no black box: ILC distributes licensing revenue according to its Allocation Rules, designed to reward publishers based on the value their content contributes to AI products. The methodology considers how content is used, the economic value of the AI product, and how frequently publishers’ content is relied upon. Payments are based on the value contributed, not just the size of a publisher’s catalog, ensuring that independent and specialized publishers are rewarded fairly when their content materially improves an answer.
- Nonprofit, with revenue going to rights holders. ILC administers the repertoire, verification, reporting, and royalty distribution at cost. After operating expenses, projected at or below 10% and consistent with comparable collective licensing organizations, the remaining revenue passes directly to rights holders.
Said Leeds, “ILC was purposely created as a nonprofit to support the specific use cases of AI. There’s no markup or outside investors profiting off the value publishers and AI companies create together. Every dollar received by the Internet Licensing Collective, after costs, goes to content owners. That’s the only way to ensure our core mission: an equitable system built to last.”
The Price of Intelligence: Sizing the Opportunity
Separately, independent publishing analytics firm Mather Economics today released The Price of Intelligence: Sizing the AI Content Licensing Opportunity and How Collective Licensing Can Unlock It, an economic analysis of what licensed content is worth to AI companies. Mather Economics initiated the study independently; it was not commissioned or funded by ILC. The full report is available for download at mathereconomics.com/price-of-intelligence.
Among the report’s findings:
- A revenue stream that could rival or exceed digital advertising. As a starting point, Mather estimates the market for AI content licensing through a collective model like ILC is in the tens of billions and could surpass the total 2025 revenues of the US display advertising market in the next three years. The analysis was based on the current annual run-rate revenue from the two biggest frontier models only, not the overall AI industry. Dollar estimates scale proportionally with revenue so readers can apply the model’s percentage results to other revenue assumptions.
- Compounding value over time. The value of the ILC repertoire will grow as AI firms approach full consumption of available public human-generated text data, a milestone projected before 2032.
- A proven model, not a new one. Revenue sharing is proven to work across music, television, and other industries: Spotify pays close to 70% of revenue to rights holders, YouTube shares 55% with creators. ILC applies the same logic to AI use of publisher content.
- A defensible number, not a guess. Building on established AI scaling laws and economic models of AI demand, the report estimates that AI companies have an economic willingness to pay between 15% and 35% of revenue to retain access to licensed content.
- AI companies benefit. A functioning license market gives AI firms a scalable way to secure rights, reduces repeated bilateral negotiation, removes risk, supports ongoing content production and secures a stable, continuous high quality supply to fuel AI product development.
To view ILC participating publishers and learn how to join for free, visit internetcollective.org.
About the Really Simple Licensing (RSL) Open Web Standard
ILC (formerly the RSL Collective) co-authored the RSL open web standard with leading online publishers and platforms and launched in 2025 with the support of more than 1500 internet publishers and technology companies, including Yahoo. That number has since grown to over 3000 supporters.
Today, RSL remains the only comprehensive, machine-readable language that enables website owners to communicate specific licensing terms to AI companies across the full range of AI content uses. It works alongside simple opt-out blocking tools to address not only training, but also the AI uses most directly affecting internet publisher revenue, including grounding, agentic use and AI Overviews. In addition to RSL, ILC supports any standard publishers and content owners wish to use.
About Internet Licensing Collective (ILC)
Internet Licensing Collective (ILC) is a nonprofit collective licensing organization powered by a growing collection of more than 3000 media brands, content owners and publishing platforms. Building on the Really Simple Licensing (RSL) Standard, an open web standard that lets publishers set machine-readable rules and payment terms for a wide variety of AI content use cases–including those most directly impacting internet publisher traffic and revenue–ILC solves the efficiency gap by giving AI companies a straightforward path to high-quality, permissioned content from millions of publishers with a single blanket license, while preserving publisher control over what content is included and which licensees are authorized. Learn more at internetcollective.org.
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press@internetcollective.org
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