People Inc., one of the largest media publishers in the US, has signed an AI licensing agreement with Microsoft. The media giant (formerly known as Dotdash Meredith) made the announcement Tuesday as part of parent company IAC’s third-quarter earnings call.
As part of the deal, People Inc. will become a launch partner in Microsoft’s publisher content marketplace. This is the company’s second AI deal after the previous one agreement with OpenAI last year.
People Inc. CEO Neil Vogel described the new marketplace as “essentially a pay-per-use marketplace where AI players can directly compensate publishers for the use of their content, sort of on an ‘a la carte’ basis.”
He also praised Microsoft for its commitment to pay for content to support its AI efforts, adding that Microsoft’s Copilot will be the first buyer for the market.
“It’s a very strong endorsement of us being in the room with them and a very strong endorsement of the publishing market and the value of the content to do high-value AI,” Vogel said.
The announcement of the Microsoft deal was shared during IAC’s earnings, alongside news that Google Search’s AI Reviews are hurting publisher traffic. For the first time, People Inc. shared data with investors showing how Google Search, which accounted for 54% of its traffic two years ago, fell to 24% of its traffic in the previous quarter.
The deal differs from the OpenAI deal, which Vogel characterized as more of an “all-you-can-eat” model, but he said People Inc. she was happy with either model. What matters to the company is that its work is “respected and paid for,” he said. However, the company did not share the specific terms of the deal.
People Inc. has taken issue with the way AI companies have absorbed media without paying to power their AI products and train their models. Recently, Vogel criticized Google, calling the tech giant a “bad actor” for using the same bot to crawl websites for Google’s search engine and AI features. Publishers cannot block the bot as Google search still accounts for a large percentage of their traffic.
However, People Inc. uses technology from web infrastructure provider Cloudflare to block other AI crawlers, prompting AI players to approach it with content deals. In September, Vogel attributed its decision to leverage Cloudflare’s technology as a way to push AI companies to the negotiating table, noting that its progress on deals was “much further along” after adopting the solution.
He repeated those comments on today’s earnings call with investors, saying the ban on AI detectors was “very effective” and “brought pretty much everyone to the table.” Vogel suggested more deals will be announced in time.
IAC reported that People Inc. grew its digital revenue 9% to $269 million in the quarter, driven by performance marketing and licensing, which grew 38% and 24%, respectively. He also noted the acquisition of a food-focused network of media publishers and influencers Catering.
