Local Media Consortium Partners with TollBit to Help Local News Publishers Monetize AI Traffic and Protect Content
- TollBit
- 4 hours ago
- 3 min read
Partnership gives LMC members tools to charge AI companies for content access and analyze AI traffic
NEW YORK, December 18, 2025 – The Local Media Consortium (LMC), a strategic alliance of leading local media companies, today announced a partnership with TollBit, the leading platform helping publishers and creators monitor, manage, and monetize AI usage of their content. The partnership will provide LMC’s 5,000 local news members, such as Townsquare Media, Las Vegas Review Journal, and Circle City Broadcasting to name a few, with technology to monitor, control and monetize the growing volume of AI bots and agents accessing their content.
Human traffic to websites has steadily declined since AI tools became widely available—from 62.8% in 2019 to 50.4% in 2023—and fell another 9.4 percentage points from Q1 to Q2 2025, according to data from TollBit’s Q2 Bot Report. This poses a problem for publishers, putting their traffic, revenue and audience engagement at risk.
As AI bots become the dominant visitors on the web, their demand for content and data is exploding; right now, without a fair exchange of value, this threatens traditional audience based business models. TollBit’s infrastructure enables this fair exchange of value between AI developers and creators of content and data. TollBit enables its 5,750+ existing publisher partners to monitor bot traffic, control what bots can access and monetize this new class of agentic visitor while offering them a way to scalably and directly access rights cleared data and pay for it directly. By establishing this trusted transaction layer between websites and AI companies, TollBit creates clear rules of engagement, ensuring that data is accessed responsibly, creators are compensated, and the Internet economy remains sustainable.
“While AI can provide a myriad of benefits to journalism, it also presents media companies with unprecedented challenges as AI bots consume news content without compensation. This is especially challenging for smaller local publishers with limited budgets,” said Fran Wills, CEO of the Local Media Consortium. “As the LMC proactively identifies solutions to help publishers tackle AI challenges, this new TollBit partnership is a big step toward ensuring that LMC’s members are compensated fairly and that their data is accessed responsibly.”
“As AI content scraping proliferates, publishers risk losing revenue from subscribers and advertising partners as there are declines in human visitors," said TollBit cofounder and CEO Toshit Panigrahi. “Our partnership with the Local Media Consortium ensures that thousands of local publishers can participate in and benefit from the AI economy. Together, we’re creating a fair system that honors the role of journalism while fostering responsible AI innovation.”
About the Local Media Consortium The Local Media Consortium delivers more than $50M in annual economic value through digital partnerships and strategic initiatives on behalf of more than 150 local media companies in top markets across the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico, and includes more than 5,000 newspaper, radio, TV and online-only news outlets. By harnessing the combined volume and scale of its members, the LMC reduces costs and increases revenue with technology and service providers like Google, Meta, Monster, and others. The aggregated LMC audience footprint spans 200 million unique monthly visitors, and its member companies serve more than nine billion pageviews to consumers. More information is available at http://www.localmediaconsortium.com.
About TollBit
TollBit offers AI agents and bots an easy and compliant way to compensate websites directly for content access. The platform seeks to address the shifting economics of the AI Internet by ensuring that websites continue to have a sustainable revenue stream from AI visitors. Follow TollBit on LinkedIn for updates on the emerging AI-powered web.
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