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.