The Economist licenses its content to enterprise clients' private LLMs

"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."

"Opening its API gives The Economist's enterprise clients the ability to make use of its content in a more versatile way than simply reading articles in an app or on its website, according to The Economist's president Luke Bradley-Jones. "They're able to start to query and access our content in a much more dynamic way and using other sources they may have available to them, but all on our internal closed user bases," he told Digiday."

Publishers are licensing archived reporting to corporate clients' private LLMs to create recurring, usage-based revenue and monetize evergreen content in the zero-click era. Licensing models now include usage-based fees for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), private enterprise deployments, API access, and collective licensing through intermediaries. The Economist, Financial Times and Dow Jones' Factiva have opened archives or APIs to enterprise customers and reseller networks to support ring-fenced LLMs. API access allows enterprise clients to query, integrate and combine publisher content with their own sources within closed internal environments. Publishers position these enterprise licensing strategies as growth levers and B2B revenue streams.

Read at Digiday