Will AI licensing replace publisher advertising revenue?

Not on current evidence. In Q1 2026, People Inc.'s licensing and other revenue was $40.7 million against $146.4 million in advertising, and that licensing line also includes Apple News+ and brand deals. AI licensing is paid by a few platforms, which caps its scale and pricing power in a way advertising, funded by thousands of brands, never was.

What is the difference between AI licensing and AI Search advertising?

AI licensing is a royalty an AI platform pays a publisher to use its content for training, retrieval or display. AI Search advertising is paid by brands to appear where AI engines form answers, with publishers whose content is cited sharing the revenue. One makes the publisher a supplier to platforms; the other keeps it a media owner selling to brands.

Will the CJEU Like Company ruling guarantee payments to European publishers?

No. The case, C-250/25, will decide whether press publishers' rights under the 2019 DSM Directive apply to chatbot training and outputs. A favourable ruling would give publishers a right to negotiate across the EU, but it would not set a price or create the buyers needed to compete for content.

Publisher AI Revenue vs Ad Revenue: The Wrong Swap

Q: How much does Google pay publishers for AI Overviews?

Google's AI Contribution pilot pays about 100 publishers, according to The Information. Reported payouts range from over $1 million a year for one early participant to under $1,000 over several months for small sites, often less than 0.1% of their ad revenue. Google has not published how payments are calculated.

Licensing and Google's AI payouts are growing fast from a tiny base. They are royalties paid by platforms, not media revenue paid by brands. That is why they cannot replace advertising.

Will publisher AI revenue replace advertising? No, and the reason is structural, not a matter of scale: every AI revenue line publishers book today is a royalty paid by a platform, while advertising is media revenue paid by brands. Minted's October 16, 2026 analysis asks the right question and reaches the right answer, then stops one step short. What replaces publisher ad revenue in the agentic web is still ad revenue, sold at a different point in the value chain.

Google's AI Contribution pilot pays some small and midsize sites less than 0.1% of their ad revenue, according to The Information, with no disclosed formula.
Licensing is growing fast from a small base: People Inc. booked $40.7 million in Q1 2026 licensing and other revenue against $146.4 million in advertising.
Every AI revenue model on the table, from licences to pay-per-crawl, is paid by a platform, which turns the publisher from media owner into supplier.
The publisher growing fastest is unbundling advertising from the session, not swapping advertising for royalties.
The missing stage in the AI value chain is the brand-paid one: advertising sold where content is cited by an AI agent.

What publisher AI revenue actually is

Publisher AI revenue is the income a media company earns when AI platforms use its content: licensing fees for training and display, usage-based payouts such as Google's pilot, per-crawl tolls via Cloudflare, and subscription shares such as Perplexity's Comet Plus. Its defining trait is the payer. In every case it is the AI platform, not an advertiser, so the publisher is pricing a supply contract with a customer that also competes for its audience.

Media revenue vs royalty revenue: the open web and the agentic web

In the open-web economy, a publisher sold attention to thousands of brands through auctions. Demand was fragmented, prices were set by competition, and revenue scaled with audience. In the agentic web, the publisher's new customer is a handful of AI platforms buying inputs. Demand is concentrated, prices are set bilaterally or unilaterally, and revenue scales with how badly a platform needs fresh content.

That is not a new revenue stream replacing an old one. It is a change of business model, from media owner to wholesale supplier. Wholesale works when you are the only source. Most publishers are not.

What Minted reported, and what we verified

Benoit Zante's piece for Minted catalogues the models in play and concludes none is close to taking over from advertising. The core figures hold. The Information reported that Google pays about 100 publishers through its pilot, from more than $1 million a year for one early participant to under $1,000 over several months for small sites.

The earnings comparison holds, with one correction. USA Today Co.'s Q1 2026 "digital other" revenue rose 125.6% to $33.75 million, against $80.9 million in digital advertising, which fell 3%. Some coverage reported the line as $18.8 million; that is the year-on-year increase, not the total, and a PPC Land headline claiming the group now earns more from AI than from ads is not supported by the filing. Both companies bundle Apple News+, syndication and brand licensing into these lines, so AI's real share is smaller.

Why platform payments cannot replace advertising

The case that AI licensing is already material

The optimist case deserves a fair hearing. Licensing is the fastest-growing line at both listed US publishers. Le Monde's Louis Dreyfus told Influencia its deals with OpenAI, Meta and Perplexity now form a significant share of group revenue. In France, APIG, representing nearly 300 dailies, filed a complaint against Google with the Autorité de la concurrence on August 11, 2026, and the CJEU's Like Company v Google case could extend neighbouring rights to chatbot answers across the EU. Law plus growth looks like a trajectory.

Why a royalty from a competitor is not a media business

Three things break the extrapolation. Concentration: royalties come from a few buyers who sell ads against the same answers, so every renewal is a negotiation with a rival. Decay: training value is front-loaded, and USA Today Co.'s own management calls the receipts lumpy. Ceiling: even a favourable CJEU ruling grants a right to be paid, not a rate, and Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone has argued micropayments will never be enough.

The tell sits in People Inc.'s numbers. Digital revenue grew 8% while sessions fell 17%, driven by non-session revenue at roughly 41% of digital, and most of that is not licensing but advertising sold outside the page view. The publisher doing best is not trading ads for royalties. It is unbundling advertising from the session.

The IAB framework Minted cites makes the gap visible: content can be valued at crawl, training, real-time retrieval, citation, agentic use and click. Every stage is invoiced to a platform except the click, the only one brands ever funded. As the click disappears, the agentic web needs a brand-paid stage, and the citation is the obvious candidate.

What publisher AI revenue means for brands and for publishers

For CMOs, media buyers and agencies: the pages being licensed are shaping your category

Brands sit in none of the AI revenue deals publishers are negotiating, yet the licensed pages are the ones shaping AI recommendations in their categories. Media buyers should map which publishers AI engines cite for their category queries and treat those pages as inventory to buy, not an earned-media lottery. Agencies that build that planning capability now will own the line item when it standardises.

For publishers: license the archive to platforms, sell the citation to brands

Take licensing money, but book it as a supply contract with a competitor, not as the successor to advertising.
Protect pricing power by keeping many buyers; the open-web auction protected you better than any single licence.
Measure which pages AI engines cite and for which queries; that report is the first draft of an AI-era rate card.
Build placements AI agents read and carry into answers, so brand demand, not platform goodwill, funds the content.

Three signals that will decide publisher AI revenue by 2027

First, the CJEU judgment in Like Company v Google, due after the Advocate General's opinion scheduled for September 3, 2026: it will settle whether European publishers can negotiate, not what they will earn. Second, whether Google publishes a formula for its pilot; a payout without a formula is a grant, not a price. Third, whether USA Today Co. and People Inc. break out AI licensing in future filings; while it stays bundled, investors are valuing a hope.

Conclusion

Hold on to this: publisher AI revenue, as currently built, is a royalty paid by platforms that compete for the same audience, and royalties from a few buyers do not replace advertising from many. Smalk AI builds the missing brand-paid stage: a Generative Engine Advertising network that places native ads for AI agents on the publisher pages AI engines read and cite, so brands buy presence where recommendations form and publishers earn media revenue, not just licence fees. What to watch next: the first publisher earnings release that reports AI-era advertising as its own line, separate from licensing.

Publisher AI Revenue Won't Replace Ads. AI-Era Advertising Will.