The Rebooting Show The open web needs a new economic model
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Jan 27, 2026 Doug Leeds, digital media executive and CEO of RSL, explains why the traffic-for-content bargain is breaking as AI delivers answers without clicks. He discusses RSL’s open standard plus collective licensing, why pay-per-crawl fails, how licensing can scale like music royalties, and how collective leverage could help publishers and creators get paid.
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Don't Rely On Pay-Per-Crawl
- Avoid a one-time 'pay-per-crawl' price because publishers and AI companies value access differently before crawling.
- Use a usage-based or collective model instead to align incentives and fairly fund costly investigative journalism.
License Payments Should Follow Usage
- Collective licensing can mirror music's blanket-license model to pay publishers when their content is actually used.
- Paying on usage makes valuation clearer because you compensate creators when the AI delivers value from their work.
Mixing Content Causes Quality And Cost Issues
- AI firms mix massive amounts of content to avoid licensing and claim fair use, but that mixing causes hallucinations and misinformation.
- The large compute cost and quality problems should motivate licensing as a cleaner solution.