AI Licensing on Media Forum

Cloudflare's September 15 AI Crawler Block Turns the Ad Tag Into an Access Key

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The most consequential change to how AI systems reach news content this year will not arrive from a courtroom, a licensing negotiation, or a regulator. It arrives from a settings default at a content delivery network, on September 15.

The rule itself is narrow. Cloudflare will change what happens by default to crawlers that blend three jobs into one user agent: indexing pages for traditional search, fetching them for AI agents, and pulling them for model training. On any page that carries advertising, those blended crawlers get blocked unless the site owner decides otherwise. The new default applies to new Cloudflare customers, to new sites set up by existing customers, and to everyone on the free plan. A crawler that will not declare which job it is doing on a given request gets blocked outright on ad-supported pages.

AI Content Licensing in 2026: Who Is Actually Getting Paid, and Who Never Will

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Every few weeks another AI licensing deal gets announced, and every few weeks a certain number of independent publishers read the headline and wonder when their turn comes. It’s worth being blunt about the structure of this market, because the answer for most of them is never, and the reasons are not about quality.

Start with the money that has been disclosed. News Corp’s arrangement reportedly runs around $50 million a year across the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and its international titles. Reddit’s combined API licensing revenue from Google and OpenAI sits near $130 million annually. Wiley has disclosed more than $44 million across several separate agreements. Add up only the publicly reported figures across the whole market and you’re in the high hundreds of millions, which understates the true total, because most contracts are private and several of the biggest (Vox Media, The Atlantic, Reuters, AFP, Condé Nast, Hearst) never carried a public price.

AI Companies Are Paying Two Different Prices for the Same Books: License or Settlement

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The content licensing market now has enough disclosed deals to compare, and the comparison produces an odd result. There are two prices for training material, they differ by an order of magnitude, and which one you pay depends less on what you used than on when you decided to ask.

The license price is visible. OpenAI has signed roughly two dozen publisher and data agreements, the largest reported at two hundred and fifty million dollars over five years with News Corp. Reddit disclosed two hundred and three million dollars in aggregate data licensing contract value in its listing documents. Perplexity took a different route entirely, running a revenue-share program for publishers whose material it cites, backed by a reported pool in the tens of millions.