Meta Inks Licensing Deals with Major Publishers
In a major strategy shift, Meta has signed multi-year licensing deals with publishers including CNN, Fox News, and USA Today. The agreements allow Meta to train its AI models on their news content, enabling real-time, attributed news responses within Meta AI. This marks a significant change from the company's previous refusal to pay publishers for content.
This pivot reverses years of Meta distancing itself from the news industry. The company previously shuttered its Facebook News tab in the U.S. and Europe and ended multi-million dollar deals with publishers, arguing that news was a small fraction of what users engaged with. The departure of news partnerships head Campbell Brown in late 2023 was seen as the end of an era for Meta's formal relationship with journalism. The new multi-year agreements grant Meta access to both new and archival content to train its Llama large language model. While financial terms have not been disclosed, the deals are seen by publishers as a positive step toward compensation for their content's use in AI. This follows a period where publishers began blocking AI crawlers from scraping their sites without payment. Meta's move follows similar strategies by its competitors. OpenAI has deals with News Corp, The Associated Press, Axel Springer, and others, estimated to be worth millions. Google also has partnerships with outlets like The Associated Press and The Washington Post for its Gemini AI, building on its $1 billion Google News Showcase program. This renewed alliance is not without risks for publishers. While it provides a new revenue stream, embedding news summaries directly into AI chat could reduce click-throughs and ad revenue for the original sources. The industry is closely watching how much referral traffic Meta's AI will actually generate for its new partners.
