About

Web publishing is on the brink of a major shift. For the past fifteen years, the industry has been reshaped by mobile apps and the dominance of centralized social‑media platforms. Now, as AI agents increasingly become a means by which people discover content and information online, web publishers face an impossible choice: block AI crawlers and become invisible, or sign content deals with AI mega-platforms. While the latter can keep a publisher afloat, it accelerates the web’s transformation from an open, permissionless network into a corporately owned, centralized platform.

The development of open protocols offers us a way out of this conundrum by giving publishers agency over their content and a direct connection to readers. Open social protocols to build community, novel ways to enhance AI applications, and new payment methodologies are just some examples of the areas that need exploring.

Protocols for Publishers is an event and workshop series that brings together publishers, developers, and researchers to create and explore open protocols for a sustainable, agentic web.

The 6 Tent-poles

PfP's mandate covers six interconnected domains that define the publishing value chain. In-person presentations and discussions, executive summaries, and the newsletter all tend to touch on the following six topics:

1. DISTRIBUTION: How content reaches readers across platforms and protocols
2. DISCOVERY: How readers find content, whether through search, AI assistants, social, curation, or something new
3. MONETIZATION: How publishers sustain themselves economically
4. AUDIENCE: The quality of the publisher-reader relationship, how feedback can pass between parties without platform mediation
5. TRUST: Identity, provenance, and attribution
6. DATA: Measurement and analytics but also control over your data and how it is used

Each of these domains are highly inter-related: Is a piece of content true? Can we trust it? How does it spread across platforms? Can readers find it? How do they engage with it? Can we measure what worked and learn? Is there money flowing in to fund the next piece?

PfP's goal is to strengthen each link of the value chain with protocol-based solutions, making the entire publishing ecosystem more sustainable, diverse, and less brittle.

If you are a publisher or a protocol developer or researcher, sign up to connect with a growing community of practice working together to build experiments and solutions that benefit the entire ecosystem of the open web.