50/50 And Fair: Publishers Moving Forward With AI Licensing Deals

From its leadership on standing up against Big Tech companies not wanting to pay for publisher content to its longstanding efforts in showcasing the value of news and magazine media, the News/Media Alliance has long been a guiding light for publishers.

That work has only continued even stronger in the AI era, with the trade association calling out illegal AI scraping and supporting responsible AI by asking Washington to require compensation, transparency, attribution, and general AI practices that ultimately aren’t anti-competitive.

NMA’s next step in this brave new AI world was recently announced, as the group is partnering with Bria to give its members an AI licensing agreement they may opt into, which would put them into what Digiday said is a 50/50-split revenue share system based on the degree Bria uses their content.

“This agreement shows a path towards a future in which our industries grow and thrive together,” says NMA president and CEO Danielle Coffey, “with AI companies benefiting from the high-quality content that our publishers create, and publishers receiving a fair portion of the revenue that their work produces for AI companies.”

Coffey called AI’s use of publisher content without compensation “devastating for our industry,” saying this alternative simplifies matters for AI companies to “reduce transaction costs and responsibly source their content.” In addition to benefiting from fair attribution and revenue shares, publishers can also opt-in for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), the process Digiday described as “where AI models mine the web for information to fulfill user queries,” as opposed to that model being trained on content.

The deal is a particularly significant win for small publishers, according to A Media Operator in its newsletter, as they would otherwise be less likely to cut deals on their own. To become truly “meaningful,” the newsletter argues, this type of agreement will need to join “similar style deals with many more players.”

“No one platform is going to drive meaningful revenue, but if publishers are getting cuts from a number of different providers, it becomes more interesting,” A Media Operator wrote.

The 2,200 media organizations in NMA can access this program (as well as the licensing agreement offered for ProRata AI and its answer engine) here.