The Scraper Economy is already here. Publishers just aren’t getting paid.

As AI systems increasingly rely on publisher content to answer questions, a new marketplace for information has quietly emerged. The problem? Publishers are barely part of it.

This episode is sponsored by: Adobe Acrobat

On this episode of The Media Copilot podcast, host Pete Pachal sits down with Jonathan Woahn to zero in on a part of the AI content ecosystem that’s just out of sight.

The conversation explores the fast-growing “scraper economy,” where data brokers, indexing companies, and AI infrastructure providers are quietly monetizing access to the web at massive scale while traditional publishers struggle to establish sustainable licensing models. With this gray market of internet data growing, how can publishers both protect their content and take advantage of the now billion-dollar demand for it?

Pete and Jonathan also explore:

• Why the social contract between Google and publishers has fundamentally changed

• The rise of ethically sourced data and whether AI companies will eventually care where content comes from

• Why inference markets may become far more valuable than model training

• How publishers should think about MCPs, AI infrastructure, and product strategy

• Whether a legitimate marketplace for AI content licensing can actually emerge before scraper economics dominate the ecosystem

Along the way, Jonathan shares how his company, Cashmere, is helping publishers structure, license, and deploy content for AI systems while quietly brokering relationships between content owners and companies looking for legal, high quality access to trusted information.

Why this matters: