By David Buttle, Co-founder of The SPUR Coalition.
David Buttle is co-founder and spokesperson of The SPUR Coalition, the publisher group behind the Content Telemetry Standard, a framework for reporting how AI platforms use news and media content. In this email interview with MarTech Edition, he explains how publishers will check the usage reports they receive, what the coalition’s advertising working group will look at, and who is being invited to its Licensing Advisory Board.
Which AI companies are running proofs of concept with the Content Telemetry Standard, and what will they report?
We’ll have more detailed announcements to share on this very soon, but what I can say for now is that we’re expecting widespread adoption and implementation of the standard amongst intermediaries in the licensing market. These are the technology platforms responsible for connecting demand with supply from content publishers, so having buy-in at this level is critical to ensuring that AI developers are able to access content through fair and legal means.
How will a publisher check that an AI platform’s usage report is accurate?
Firstly, we’d hope that those who choose to adopt the Standard are doing so in good faith, and would therefore be sharing accurate usage reports as a matter of course. That being said, we are in the process of forming an Evidence Technical Committee which will be working on this exact question, further enhancing the initial framework to ensure that publishers can be confident the telemetry metadata reports they receive are accurate.
There is precedent in other industries (such as display and social media advertising) for closed ecosystems delivering auditing and evidence and the working group is comprised of a number of experts from those spaces in order to ensure we are learning from what has worked historically and finding solutions that can benefit both sides of the market. We’ll be sharing an update on this soon.
When will the advertising influence working group publish, and which question will it answer first?
The advertising working group is intended to track and engage with changes in AI answer engine monetisation models, with a particular view towards the way publisher IP delivers value to monetised responses for both advertisers and AI builders. It will not launch until Q1 2027 at the earliest, as the fundamental audit, evidence, and identifier work takes precedence. The advertising-in-LLMs ecosystem is also nascent, and we want to ensure we are monitoring its development and forming working groups as a general direction of travel is established.
How do you expect licensing deals to use the five usage stages when setting a price?
The first thing to say on this is that it will always be up to individual publishers to negotiate their own licensing agreements, and how they structure them is entirely their choice. Our role is to ensure they have the tools and information needed to centre these agreements around accurate usage data, and give them the best possible platform to establish fair, sustainable relationships with AI companies and intermediaries. Our coalition is now approaching 100 members, including some of the most powerful media organisations in the world, and they have all actively participated in the creation of this framework so I would expect to see explicit references to the Standard starting to feature in their licensing strategy.
A licensing deal may include a reporting requirement that includes any or all of the data points in the standard. That does not mean that they must be used for royalty calculations. Insight into how content is used and what value it delivers to audiences is valuable for content producers of all kinds and allows them to understand where to invest and what to create to ensure that they are continuing to produce valuable products.
Who sits on the Licensing Advisory Board, and how are members chosen?
Again, we’ll have more to announce on this soon, but we’ve invited a broad range of stakeholders from across the industry to join the Licensing Advisory Board. That includes demand-side platforms, the technical intermediaries I mentioned previously, as well as some Collective Management Organisations. While members will only be appointed via invitation, the aim is to ensure that the standards we’re developing reflect the needs of all parts of the ecosystem, so it’s important that we bring together as many different industry voices as possible.
