Publishers are increasingly licensing decades of archived reporting to corporate clients’ private LLMs — a potential path to recurring, usage-based revenue that monetizes evergreen content in the zero-click era.
Welcome to LLM deals 2.0. Publishers aren’t just cutting lump-sum “training” agreements anymore, they’re widening the remit to include usage-based licensing for RAG, private enterprise deployments and even collective licensing via intermediaries.
The Economist is among those to start licensing its content this way — having opened its API to corporate clients with their own data ring-fenced LLMs this August.
The Financial Times has also opened its archive to enterprise clients’ private LLMs. Meanwhile, Dow Jones’ Factiva unit licenses to around 30,000 news publishers across the globe and resells the content to its own enterprise clients for B2B purposes, including the creation of ring-fenced, private LLMs that RAG content from the publisher network.
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