“The AI era,” Sara Fischer writes in Axios, “is proving lucrative for media publishers looking to offset a slowdown in ads and subscription fatigue.”

My prediction for 2025 is that this will not be true for most news organizations, because they’ll find that no technology companies are interested in paying for their content. While in one sense unwelcome, recognizing this upfront might help focus editorial thinking on what really does matter — offering something people are willing to pay attention to and perhaps even pay for.

Yes, we’ve seen a spate of deals between various publishers and technology companies developing artificial intelligence, including deals for training data, inference, and more. But we are talking dozens of deals in a world with many thousands of news publishers. And looking at who these deals involve, the bulk of them are large English-language publishers, often upmarket ones. Most news organizations, however, are not large or upmarket. And globally, of course, most are not English-language.

Even for those few who have deals, a lot hinges on what one means by “lucrative.” There is often zero transparency about the nature and value of deals that publishers and technology companies strike. And when headline financial figures are announced (no doubt with strategic intent), it’s often unclear what mix of cash payment, projected revenue share, and credits is involved.

But we can examine one rare concrete case where there is some certainty about the cash value — the U.S. publishing conglomerate Dotdash Meredith. According to public financial documents from its parent company IAC and first reported by Adweek, OpenAI is paying around $16 million per year to license content.

That is no doubt welcome incremental revenue, and you could call it “lucrative” in the sense of having a fat margin, as OpenAI is almost certainly paying for content that was already being produced. But to put things into perspective, Dotdash Meredith is on course to generate over $1.5 billion in revenues in 2024, more than a third of it from print. So the OpenAI deal is equal to about 1% of the publisher’s total revenue.

If that strikes you as low, remember that OpenAI’s deal with Axel Springer, said to be worth about $10 million per year, is worth well under 1% of Springer’s media revenues.

Welcome, surely. Lucrative, in a sense. Game changer? Hardly.

Continued decline in print revenues alone will have a far bigger impact on both Dotdash Meredith and Axel Springer’s revenues in 2025 than their deals with OpenAI. And this is for two of the so far very few publishers who have actually gotten deals!

About a year ago, the Reuters Institute surveyed news and media leaders across the world on their expectations when it came to negotiations with AI companies on licensing. 35% of respondents expected most of the money to go to big media companies, and a further 48% said there would be very little money for any news company.

So far, you could say that both groups have been right. Most of the deals have gone to big media companies, and they have, in the grander scheme of things, involved relatively little money.

Given that various lawsuits and lobbying efforts will likely drag on, the main factor that could lead to a different outcome would be a dramatic political intervention. The question then is whether publishers can expect this — or should even seek it — from the very politicians they also say they hold to account. (Would, say, the U.S. news media want to rely on favors from the incoming Trump administration?)

So my prediction for 2025 is that most publishers will not get any meaningful revenue from licensing content to technology companies, and that those who do are likely to be large publishers who get at most a few percent of incremental revenue.

For most publishers, while perhaps a disappointing prospect, I hope this will also be liberating. If they don’t stand around waiting for the Godot of elusive AI licensing deals, they can focus on what matters — creating value not for tech companies’ training models, but for members of the public who want to make sense of the world beyond personal experience.