ProRata licenses generative AI to Boston Globe, Future and Vox Media
Several publishers, including The Boston Globe and Vox Media, as well as Fast Co. and Inc’s owner Mansueto Ventures, have signed up for ProRata’s revenue-sharing program.
ProRata is a company that operates Gist.ai is an AI-powered, licensed content-based search engine, launched in December 2024. The company announced today that it will announce another dozen publishers, bringing the total number to 500.
These publishers join those who have already announced ProRata deals, including The Atlantic Daily Mail Fortune The Guardian Sky News Time. Gist responds to search queries only using licensed content from publisher partner partners.
ProRata, unlike most AI deals with publishers that offer one-time licensing or lump-sum multiyear contracts based upon access to archives or datasets, pays out 50% of its revenue on a recurring, based on how often the content they provide powers AI responses. Bill Gross, CEO and founder of ProRata, said that the company’s revenue is entirely derived from advertising. However, the company plans to introduce subscriptions in its third quarter.
Publishers are entitled to up to 50% of revenue when they are cited in an AI-generated answer. Perplexity, an AI startup, pays publishers a maximum of 25%. This has made it a no brainer for publishers. Executives from Boston Globe, Mansueto Ventures, and Trusted Media Brands were attracted to ProRata’s attribution and payment-per-use models that compensate publishers based on the frequency in which they are cited as a response to queries.
In an email, Jacob Salamon, the vp of Business Development at Trusted Media Brands (which owns publications such as Reader’s Digest) said that they were continuing to experiment and adopt new models and options for their brands in the AI space. “We appreciate transparency, publisher credit, and the focus on monetization that [ProRata is] brings to the marketplace. ProRata aims to help all AI providers measure and display source attribution. It’s a long-term partnership that will benefit publishers. According to Digiday, this creates a more controlled environment that reduces the chances that the system will pull inaccurate, outdated, or low-quality data.
Patrick Hainault is the vp for corporate business development at Mansueto Ventures. “We feel that we’ll be among good company,” he said.
Another advantage for publishers is that when signing up to ProRata’s program, their proprietary data will not be used to train the large language model of a tech company. Hainault says that Gist.ai uses retrieval augmented genration (RAG) to access their content.
Signing publishers is a good start, but even large, legacy publishers don’t always drive user demand for AI products. Gist.ai has not yet become a household brand or a widely used search engine. For publisher revenue sharing to be meaningful, there needs to be significant user traffic.
Similarweb data shows that Gist.ai received 36,000 desktop web visits and mobile web visitors in April 2025. Bill Gross, founder of ProRata and CEO, claimed that visitors had doubled with the site attracting 100,000 visits in May. Gross claims that the real growth opportunity is not Gist.ai’s landing page but rather the distribution of the search engine on the sites of publishers.
Starting with the B2B publication Adweek, Gist.ai is set to be added in the next month to the websites of 10 publishers who are part of ProRata’s revenue-sharing program. Gross says Gist.ai is going to replace the onsite search function of some publishers or add AI-powered search options for others. He said that adding Gist.ai is free for publishers. Gross said
: “We call it distributed AI Search.” “We see [the Gist.ai page] merely as a demonstration and proof-of-concept.” But the real growth will be on all our partners’ websites.
Publishers are using AI technology to improve their own onsite searches since last year, according previous Digiday reports. Publishers can opt to have the Gist.ai box on their site only surface their content. They can also choose to have other publishers’ content surfaced as answers or their own content surfaced on other publisher’s sites using Gist.ai. Gross explained that the Gist.ai box could help drive traffic towards publishers’ websites and vice versa as Google Search referral traffic decreases. Publishers could theoretically also make money with this product. Gross said that answers to Gist.ai queries on publisher’s sites will be monetized by ads. ProRata will also apply its revenue-sharing model to this revenue.
These deals still represent money that publishers hope to earn when AI search engines are better adopted by users and platforms monetized. For now, AI companies are generating significant revenue through licensing agreements with large players like OpenAI.
We’re not anticipating a boom in the near future, but search is a huge market. Hainault said that if Gist.ai can capture a meaningful share of the market – thanks in part to the goodwill from publishers – it will become very attractive. Gross told reporters that ProRata would begin paying publishers by the end of June. Its ad-platform launched in March and runs ads on the sites of its publisher partners as well as Gist.ai. Gross said that ProRata had over 1,000 advertisers ranging from Pizza Hut and Norwegian Cruise Line. Gross declined to reveal how much revenue ProRata made from advertising.
Michelle Micone is Boston Globe Media’s chief of marketing and strategic initiatives. She said, “This pilot focuses on learning and represents an experiment to learn a new tool which allows publishers to get compensated for their journalistic work and allows us to better understand user needs, as search behavior continues to evolve.”
https://digiday.com/?p=580242
