News Corp explores multi-LLM licensing playbook

News Corp is scoping out the potential for a multi-licensing LLM portfolio strategy, according to sources familiar with the matter.  

The media group, which struck its first licensing deal (reportedly to the tune of $250 million spread over five years) with OpenAI in May 2024, is pursuing branching out — a logical move, since AI licensing deals tend to be non-exclusive by design.

News Corp CEO Robert Thomson described the media group’s strategy as a “woo and sue” approach in an August earnings call, and was understood to be directly negotiating with the LLM players during this window, although Digiday was unable to establish the exact names of whom he met with.

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Brands set to cut open web display spend 30% in response to AI search

Zero-click search adoption has critically affected web traffic from search engines to publishers in the year since Google first introduced its Overviews and AI Mode features.

In 2026, advertisers may very well respond by cutting their display investments with publishers on the open web by 30% in favor of CTV and paid social, per analysis by Forrester. The research outfit predicts that, as the addressable audiences reachable via publishers shrink, brands will look to find them elsewhere.

“We expect that fewer consumers will be landing on the web pages where most of that display inventory has historically existed, and so there will just be fewer monetizable audiences there to begin with,” said Evelyn Mitchell-Wolf, ad-tech analyst at Forrester.

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