News Corp Strikes $50M-Per-Year AI Licensing Deal with Meta
News Corp has agreed to a multiyear AI content licensing deal with Meta worth up to $50 million per year, covering US and UK media properties including the Wall Street Journal and New York Post. The three-year minimum deal follows News Corp's 2024 OpenAI agreement worth more than $250 million over five years, and CEO Robert Thomson has signalled further licensing deals are imminent.
Analysis
The News Corp-Meta deal is the largest AI content licensing agreement announced to date between a media company and a social platform, and it crystallises a strategic pattern that is rapidly becoming the dominant commercial response to AI's disruption of publisher economics.
The structure is straightforward: Meta pays News Corp up to $50 million per year for at least three years to use copyrighted content from its US and UK properties — primarily the Wall Street Journal, New York Post, and associated titles — to train AI models and power Meta AI's real-time content features. Meta has been building out similar arrangements with People Inc., USA Today, CNN, and Fox News, though the terms of those deals have not been disclosed.
For News Corp, this represents a second major AI licensing win following its 2024 OpenAI agreement, which was reported to be worth more than $250 million over five years. CEO Robert Thomson's hint at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference — that the company is "at an advanced stage with other negotiations" and that "you won't have too long to wait" — suggests a deliberate strategy of building a portfolio of AI licensing revenue streams rather than relying on any single deal.
The broader significance is what this deal does to the negotiating landscape for every other publisher. When News Corp and the New York Times are both pulling in tens of millions per year from AI licensing, the implicit floor for what constitutes an acceptable deal rises for everyone. Publishers who have been holding out — or who have been offered terms that fall well below these benchmarks — now have public comparables to point to.
The tension in this strategy is real, however. News Corp's Dow Jones and New York Post subsidiaries are simultaneously suing Perplexity for copyright infringement. The company is, in effect, licensing to some AI companies while litigating against others — a dual-track approach that reflects the industry's unresolved question of whether licensing is a pragmatic accommodation to an unstoppable technology or a capitulation that legitimises the original infringement.