This Startup Wants YouTube Creators to Get Paid for AI Training Data

So far, when AI companies have trained on YouTube’s invaluable stash of videos, captions, and other content, they’ve done so without permission. An AI-focused content licensing startup called Calliope Networks is hoping to change that with its new “License to Scrape,” a program aimed directly at YouTube stars.

“There’s obvious demand from AI companies to scrape YouTube content. We see that by their actions. So what we’re trying to do is to create a tool that makes it legal and simple for them,” says Calliope Networks CEO Dave Davis. Unlike other big social platforms, like Reddit, YouTube hasn’t struck deals with AI bigwigs to scrape its videos. The appeal of the License to Scrape is that it sidesteps the company itself providing a large volume of YouTube content in one go by corralling a group of creators and negotiating a blanket license.

Davis has a background in traditional media licensing; he left a gig at the Motion Picture Licensing Corporation to launch Calliope, betting that the AI industry would eventually move away from permissionless scraping and toward licensing as a norm. He’s not alone in this belief; it’s a boom time for AI data licensing startups. Calliope Networks is a founding member of the Datasets Providers Alliance, a trade group that requires all creators and rights holders to opt into scraping.

Here’s how Davis hopes it’ll work: YouTube creators who want to license their data will enter into a contract with Calliope, which will then sublicense their work out for training generative AI foundational models. It’ll need a critical mass of content to make the deal attractive enough to the AI players first, so the program will need to get YouTubers on board before it can properly get up and running. Calliope would take a percentage of the licensing fees paid by the AI companies.

Although there’s nothing quite like this in the AI world yet, Davis modeled the scraping license format off other parts of the entertainment industry, like Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI) and the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), which both use blanket licenses for music.

“It’s early in the recruitment process,” Davis says. He estimates that Calliope will need to offer a minimum of 25,000 to 50,000 hours of YouTube content before it’s taken seriously by the AI industry. That this volume of footage is the likely threshold for blanket licenses demonstrates why banding together could be some creators’ best bet for making money for AI training—in this business, volume matters, and video generators are powered by a large amount of data.

There aren’t any marquee names endorsing the license yet, but Calliope has already drafted a few influencer marketing agencies like Viral Nation to get clients on board. “I’ve been getting really good feedback from creators,” says Bianca Serafini, Viral Nation’s head of content licensing. She is confident that a large number of the company’s client roster—which is close to 900 YouTubers—will participate. “No one has presented something like this to us before.”