The relationship between the media industry and the technology sector has been fraught at least since the arrival of search engines in the late 1990s. It became more so with the advent of social media a decade later.
Again and again, news publishers have struggled to come to terms with new technologies that challenged traditional concepts of distribution and copyright while simultaneously devouring the advertising business that previously sustained them.
In due course, the two sides reached uneasy and unstable accommodations that recognised how the balance of power had shifted from publishers to platforms.
Media organisations learned the dark arts of search engine optimisation and other forms of algorithmic trickery. They invested heavily in social promotion strategies tailored to the demands of Facebook, Instagram and the rest. In return, they gained traffic. They also built a dangerous dependency on technology companies that had no particular interest in whether they survived or died.
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Now, as the age of artificial intelligence (AI) takes hold, the stakes are even higher. A flurry of lawsuits, legal settlements and licensing agreements is taking place between publishers and AI companies, while regulators are poised to enter the fray in the months ahead. What all this will mean for news media is anyone’s guess.
The number of deals is growing fast. OpenAI has assembled the largest publisher network of any AI company, with 18 licensing agreements globally covering outlets from the Guardian to the Washington Post, Reuters and the Financial Times.
Under the typical arrangement, publishers license their content for use in ChatGPT responses. They receive attribution, links back to their sites and access to OpenAI’s technology to build their own AI tools.
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Having shut down its Facebook News tab in 2024 and abandoned direct payments to publishers two years before that, Meta has now signed nine content licensing deals, including ones with CNN, Reuters, Le Monde and News Corp, the last of which is reportedly worth up to $50 million a year according to the Wall Street Journal.
The objective is clear. A Meta AI assistant that can answer real-time news questions keeps users inside Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp instead of sending them to a browser. Rather than being a destination within Meta’s products, news becomes fuel for the AI layer baked across all of them.
Google has been less accommodating. Its first publisher AI deals arrived only last December as extensions of existing commercial partnerships. Meanwhile, the roll-out of its AI Overviews feature has already wreaked deep structural damage on publisher economics.
According to Chartbeat data tracking more than 2,500 news sites, Google search referrals to publishers declined by a third globally last year. Zero-click searches, where users get answers without visiting any third-party website, now account for roughly 60 per cent of all Google queries, rising to 69 per cent for news.
US broadcast organisation National Public Radio has described the AI search overhaul as an “extinction-level event” for online news publishers. The publisher of Rolling Stone and Variety has filed a federal antitrust lawsuit accusing Google of cannibalising publisher traffic through its answer-engine strategy.
Another AI company, Perplexity, pursued an even more aggressive approach, building its product with a “skip the links” premise before being sued by the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, News Corp and publishers from Japan to Denmark. It is now attempting to make peace with a $42.5 million revenue-sharing fund while its legal battles run their course.
Meanwhile, Anthropic, maker of the Claude assistant, has stayed out of publisher deal-making almost entirely, though it agreed last year to a $1.5 billion settlement with authors and book publishers over its use of pirated material to train its models.
The sums involved are not trivial by media industry standards. But set against what Big Tech is spending on AI, these are rounding errors. News Corp’s $50 million annual Meta deal, the largest reported so far, represents roughly 0.08 per cent of what Meta spent on the infrastructure that will use the content. The asymmetry is glaring.
No Irish news publisher features in any of the AI licensing deals signed to date. The major agreements have been with anglophone giants and large European titles, with smaller national markets remaining, for now, ignored.
NewsBrands Ireland, which represents 16 national publishers including The Irish Times Group, told the Oireachtas Committee on Artificial Intelligence in February how generative AI is “powered by journalism it refuses to pay for” and that the financial viability of quality journalism was under existential threat. However true this may be, it is grimly reminiscent of previous complaints about search and social that fell on deaf ears.
Some regulatory relief may eventually arrive. Under the European Union’s AI Act, transparency requirements for general-purpose AI models could force disclosure of what content was used to build the systems now summarising journalism without paying for it. Ireland must establish its own AI Office by August. Coimisiún na Meán has been designated as the regulatory authority for AI in audiovisual media services. Whether its powers will extend to publisher compensation in any meaningful way remains to be seen.
Publishers have been here before. They adapted to search, then to social media, each time trading dependency for traffic in a bargain that eroded both their independence and their revenue base. They did this because the brutal reality was they had no choice. The AI companies now seem to be offering a version of the same deal.
The question Irish and international news publishers have to ask themselves is whether, having been through these cycles already, they are entering these arrangements with their eyes open. History does not suggest grounds for optimism.
