Startup

Dappier Creates Marketplace for Publishers to Monetize Content with AI Model Builders

26 June 2024

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Paikan Begzad

Summary

In the late 1990s, Napster disrupted the music industry by allowing easy access to music files without compensating artists. The advent of the iPod and iTunes revolutionized this by ensuring artists got paid for digital content use. Today, a similar issue arises with companies scraping content to train large language models without permission.

Dappier, an early-stage startup, aims to rectify this by ensuring publishers are compensated when their content is used for AI model training. The company has announced a $2 million seed round and the launch of a marketplace where publishers can set prices for their content used in AI training.

Co-founder and CEO Dan Goikhman describes Dappier as a "monetization stack for the emerging AI internet," offering a new method for publishers and data owners to be paid for their content's reuse.

“Our mission is to help media companies and information providers monetize their content as it's leveraged by AI agents and platforms globally,” Goikhman told TechCrunch. “We aim to create a payment infrastructure for content distribution.”

Goikhman and his co-founders identified an opportunity as media owners either sued companies like OpenAI for scraping content without permission or negotiated licensing deals. Dappier proposes a better solution: a transactional marketplace where content can be licensed on a per-query basis or monetized through ad support.

Publishers connect to a content store via an RSS feed and use that content to build models using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). They can then sell access to these models in the marketplace by setting a price, similar to CPM ad rates, or find other monetization methods, like offering an AI-powered search engine as a premium service.

This innovative approach provides publishers with a new revenue stream, especially beneficial during times when website advertising alone is insufficient. It could also benefit individual and small group newsletter publishers. Dappier is already in discussions with newsletter platforms to explore partnerships for this new monetization model.

The $2 million funding round was led by Silverton Partners, based in Austin, Texas, where Dappier is also headquartered.