The arrival of Napster in the late 1990s made it easy for people to obtain music files without compensating content owners. The iPod and iTunes Music Store changed that by allowing artists and publishers to earn money by reusing content in the digital environment. Now, there are companies that scrape content without permission to train large language models.
Dappier, an early-stage startup that wants to ensure publishers are compensated when their content is used, today announced a $2 million seed round of funding and the launch of a marketplace where publishers can set a price for using their content in training models.
Dappier co-founder and CEO Dan Goikhman calls his company an emerging AI internet monetization stack, saying it offers new ways for publishers and data owners to get paid for reusing their content.
“Our goal is to help media companies and information providers monetize their content as it is consumed by these emerging AI agents and platforms around the world,” Goikman told TechCrunch. “The idea is basically, how do you create a payment infrastructure for that content as it's distributed?”
Goikman and his co-founders saw an opportunity in that media owners responded in two ways to companies like OpenAI removing content without permission: by suing or by negotiating “Open Kimono License Agreements.”
“And we thought there might be a better way to give content creators and data providers to monetize their content, and that is to create a trading marketplace where they can license their content on a per-query basis or monetize it on an ad-supported basis,” he said.
To achieve this, customers connect to a content store via an RSS feed and use that content to build models using RAG (Search Augmentation Generation). Publications can sell access to their models through the marketplace, setting a price in the same way they set CPM ad rates. They can also find other ways to monetize their content, for example by offering an AI-powered search engine as a premium service.
This approach offers publishers who struggle to make money from website advertising alone a new way to monetize their content. It could be a beneficial step toward multi-sided monetization for large publishers, as well as individual and small group newsletter publishers. Goikman said the company is in contact with newsletter platforms in discussions about partnering on this new way to monetize content.
Today's $2 million round was led by Silverton Partners, based in Austin, Texas, where Dappier is also based.