What problem are you helping solve?
We’re helping publishers navigate this new AI world, helping them join either Perplexity’s Publisher Program or maybe just enter content licensing deals with AI companies.
Content is valuable, but AI companies are also needed, and then there’s the issue with fair use—there are all of these questions.
Our platform is designed to scale partnerships between AI companies and publishers, handling everything [from] onboarding publishers to pricing and legal matters, essentially [functioning] as an extension of the partnership’s teams for both the AI companies and publishers.
Consider us the party that provides a publisher with data and analytics on what content and how often their article appears in search queries. And you can’t ignore bots [by AI companies]. We also have a product—it’s like a building block for publishers that are focused on tracking and managing bot traffic.
Top 30 publishers are already using this tool to detect and block unwanted bot activity, but also to gain valuable analytics on their website traffic, like who is visiting their site, and why. Publishers really care about traffic, and this tool helps understand how bots are behaving.
Are you raising funds and, if so, how much?
We have raised seed funds but are not yet ready to share the details.
How do you plan to grow?
We’re simply seeing a need from the AI side for partnerships with the publishers and a lot on the publisher side to monetize their content.
Perplexity, for one, said it wants to have 30 new partners by the end of the year. That’s immediate growth right there.
There are also different types of AI verticals within legal, fintech, healthcare companies that have to piecemeal, knock on doors and get specific publisher content. It’s a complicated process and an expensive process. At the same time, there are also different content types that would be used by AI companies beyond news media, such as voice, video, and audio.
Ultimately, it’s adding more partners from both sides.
How does ScalePost make revenue?
We have a rev-share system with publishers, taking a percentage of revenue from publishers making money through our model. To that, we have a software fee model. Since we have a couple of different products, it varies across products, as well. [The firm didn’t share more details on how it makes money.]
How do you see the future of AI and publisher relationships evolving? Will there be more lawsuits or AI companies scraping data?
Publishers are making decisions based on their own risk profiles and corporate strategies. But a market [helping publishers and AI companies work together] is being created as we speak. And like any early market, there are first movers and inherent risks. We strongly believe that this will become the standard model moving forward, where AI companies and others needing content can access it easily.
However, the legal landscape is still uncertain and may stay that way for some time. It’s possible that all three scenarios could coexist: Some publishers might do nothing about AI, others might pursue legal action and some may enter into agreements with AI companies.