Signals / Aug 25, 2025

From Flat Fees to Meters: AI Content Deals Get Real

This week, the signal is clear: the economics of AI content licensing are tilting from flat fees to usage-based models. Meta is showing it will pay for quality, Perplexity is trying to prove revenue sharing can work, and Amazon is closing the gates. Together, these moves show where leverage is shifting — toward whoever controls the pipes, the data, and the display.

Signals

Meta rents quality instead of faking itMeta licensed Midjourney’s image/video models to power creative tools across Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook. Our take: even giants will pay when their in-house efforts fall short. If they’ll license aesthetics, why not journalism or scientific data? FT · TechCrunch

Usage-based licensing isn’t fringe anymorePublishers are pushing beyond flat “training rights” into per-use economics — auditability, per-query rev shares, minimum guarantees. This means contracts are starting to look like utilities billing, not one-time sales. The Information · Nieman Lab

Perplexity tries the rev-share experimentIts new $5/mo Comet Plus will pool $42.5M, with 80% going back to publishers when their content powers answers. The takeaway: adoption is the risk, but they’re at least putting money where their mouth is. Bloomberg Law · Perplexity AI

Courts keep the pressure onA U.S. court kept News Corp’s copyright case against Perplexity alive in New York. What’s next? Lawsuits may not settle economics, but they give publishers leverage at the table. Reuters

Amazon closes the gatesAmazon is quietly blocking AI crawlers from its e-commerce site. Translation: access is moving toward whitelists and contracts. Clearly robots.txt is no longer sufficient. Modern Retail

Crawlers aren’t abstract — they’re measurableFastly reports Meta, Google, and OpenAI made up the bulk of AI crawler traffic April–July. Bottom line - if you’re not logging and managing this, you’re already behind. Fastly · SDxCentral

Why this matters

The licensing wave is moving into its next phase. Flat-fee deals are giving way to metered use. Platforms are shifting from “scrape first, ask later” to hard gates that require contracts. And legal pressure is making AI firms more willing to experiment with payouts.

For publishers, that means three things:

1. Get audit rights and usage metering in place.
2. Expect contracts (not robots.txt) to determine who gets access.
3. Recognize that even Meta will pay for quality — if you price and package it right.

The ecosystem is converging toward structured access and real-time licensing. The question is no longer if AI will pay for content, but how much, and on whose terms.