The defining media-business story of 2025 was that AI licensing stopped being an experiment and became a revenue line. Industry trackers counted dozens of new content-licensing deals between publishers and AI companies during the year, and analysts at Copyright.sh, reviewing 32 major agreements in December 2025, found licensing activity had more than doubled after Cloudflare began blocking AI crawlers by default in July 2025. That shift — from voluntary scraping to negotiated payment — is the story the rest of the year organized around.
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What did the Cloudflare change actually do?
In July 2025 the infrastructure company Cloudflare switched its default so that AI bots were blocked across its network unless a site owner allowed them — and a very large share of the web sits behind Cloudflare. The practical effect was bargaining power: AI companies needing fresh content to cite and summarize suddenly had to negotiate instead of crawl. Per the December 2025 Copyright.sh analysis, licensing activity more than doubled after the change. Publishers who had complained for two years that deals were being offered at take-it-or-leave-it prices reported a different tone in negotiations by autumn.
Who signed, and who sued?
Both — sometimes simultaneously. Press Gazette, which tracked the field through December 2025, reported Meta signing licensing agreements with People Inc., CNN and Fox News in the final month of the year, marking the Facebook parent's entry into news licensing after years on the sidelines. Digiday maintained a full-year timeline showing deals across 2025 from OpenAI, Google, Amazon and others with publishers ranging from global groups to regional chains. In parallel, litigation by publishers and authors against AI training practices continued working through US courts, and policy proposals for statutory licensing — mandatory payment regimes beyond voluntary deals — gained institutional backing, per Poynter's reporting on the global push. Sign and sue stopped being a contradiction; it became a strategy of keeping options open.
How material is the money?
For a few publishers, material enough to disclose. One content company with a deal reported by Media and the Machine expected roughly $20 million in AI licensing revenue for 2025 on the back of a $50-million-a-year overall business — an extreme case at the top of the market, not a median. Most deals remain undisclosed in value, which is precisely the problem for anyone modeling the opportunity: the deals that exist are not audited, and the ones rumored dwarf the ones reported. The honest figure for 2025 is "meaningful for large groups, speculative for everyone else."
What happened to subscriptions and referrals?
The quieter story: referral traffic from search and social kept sliding as AI answers absorbed informational queries, and subscription growth at news brands got harder everywhere except the top of the market. The structural response visible across 2025 was consolidation — publishers merging back-office functions, sharing platforms, and in several markets closing print editions to protect digital margins. None of that was new; what changed in 2025 was that licensing income, for the first time, offset part of the referral decline for the groups that could access it.
What should operators take from 2025?
Three things, each observable rather than forecast. First, default blocking changed the negotiating position — infrastructure decisions now set licensing terms as much as contract talks do. Second, the market split: large groups with premium archives signed; small and regional publishers, lacking leverage, mostly watched — a "double bind" the Open Markets Institute warned about in a report covered by Nieman Lab. Third, statutory-licensing proposals moved from academic papers into legislative conversations, meaning the rules of 2026 may be written by governments rather than negotiated deal by deal.
What generalizes from one year of deals is narrow: leverage produces payment, and leverage came from blocking, archive depth and litigation risk. What does not generalize is the dollar figures — they describe a handful of companies at the top of a young market, and the median publisher's 2026 licensing revenue is, as of this writing, zero.
For more context, read Why media consolidation accelerated in 2025 — and what the deal logic actually was.
For more context, read google news showcase program.
For more context, read perplexity publisher lawsuit.