We’re at the start of the next rebundling. New business models, like those outlined in Project Liberty Institute’s report on the Fair Data Economy, are emerging that balance data rights with innovation and growth.

Consider the following models:

License & syndication. Media companies license content directly to AI firms. In 2024, News Corp signed a $250 million deal with OpenAI to use its content for training and queries. The New York Times struck a deal with Amazon while continuing its lawsuits against Microsoft and OpenAI. The Associated Press, Financial Times, and Dotdash Meredith have inked similar agreements.

Pay-per-crawl & API access. Cloudflare’s pilot program lets publishers decide whether to allow, block, or charge AI crawlers each time they request content (via the public protocol HTTP response code 200).

Attribution-based revenue sharing. Perplexity shares ad revenue with publishers when its chatbot uses their content, with partners like the Los Angeles Times and Adweek. Zendy compensates academic publishers based on citation frequency in AI responses.

Digital asset business models. On the individual level, people are beginning to sell their personal data, and a range of digital ownership models are emerging, including the Frequency blockchain.

Closed content ecosystems. Paywalls and subscriptions protect content from scraping while generating direct revenue. The New York Times has doubled digital subscribers since 2020 to nearly 12 million. Platforms like Substack offer smaller creators similar protection.

Community-supported content. Wikipedia’s and Signal’s donation model and Patreon’s creator memberships show the enduring power of direct audience support. Patreon has 290,000 creators, who collectively earn $25 million every month from their fans.