Meta pays News Corp for the right to feed news into its AI

Just a couple of years ago, media companies and technology giants were engaged in a war of lawsuits and public accusations against each other. Today, they sit down at the negotiating table. Meta Platforms has concluded a licensing agreement with News Corp—one of the world's largest media empires owned by the Murdoch family. Under the terms of the deal, Mark Zuckerberg's company receives the right to use content from The Wall Street Journal, New York Post, MarketWatch, and other publications in the holding for its Meta AI chatbot, as well as for training language models.

To understand the scale of what's happening, it's worth recalling the context. News Corp is not just a collection of newspapers. It is a global media machine controlling dozens of publications in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. The Wall Street Journal remains one of the most influential business publications on the planet, and its archives represent a colossal array of structured, verified, and up-to-date information—exactly what language models lack for accurate and reliable answers. For Meta, this deal represents a qualitative leap in the reliability of its AI assistant: instead of generating answers based on outdated or unverified data, Meta AI will now be able to cite authoritative sources in real time.

News Corp, however, is far from new to such negotiations. As early as 2023, the company concluded a similar agreement with OpenAI, which, according to The Wall Street Journal, was valued at 250 million dollars over five years. Later came deals with Google and Apple. Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan, who runs the media empire, clearly chose a strategy of monetizing content through licensing rather than endless lawsuits. And this strategy, it seems, is bearing fruit: each new deal reinforces the precedent that quality journalism has a concrete market value in the artificial intelligence economy.

The financial terms of the agreement between Meta and News Corp are not officially disclosed. However, given the scale of similar deals and the volume of content Meta gains access to, analysts estimate the value at tens of millions of dollars annually. For Meta, whose quarterly revenue exceeds 40 billion dollars, this is a statistical rounding error in the budget. For News Corp, experiencing difficult times in traditional media business, this is a significant and, more importantly, stable source of income.

The deal raises a fundamental question about the future of the information ecosystem. On one hand, licensing agreements appear to be a fair compromise: publishers get paid for their content, and technology companies get legal access to quality data. On the other hand, a system is forming in which users increasingly refrain from visiting publisher websites, getting information summaries directly in the chatbot. This is a classic dilemma: short-term licensing income versus long-term loss of audience and advertising revenue. The New York Times, for example, has categorically refused such deals and preferred to sue OpenAI, arguing that no licensing payments can compensate for the destruction of a business model based on direct contact with readers.

There is also another nuance that is often overlooked. Meta is actively developing its AI assistant not just as a standalone product, but as an integrated feature within all of its platforms—Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp. This means that News Corp's news content will potentially be available to billions of users who have never opened The Wall Street Journal in their lives. In terms of reach, this is unprecedented distribution. But from a journalism perspective, a question arises: will the value of the original material be preserved when it is retold by a language model in three sentences without context, nuance, and authorial voice?

In a broader perspective, the Meta and News Corp deal is another brick in the foundation of a new media economy, where technology platforms become not just distribution channels, but primary consumers of journalistic content. The market for data licensing for AI, according to analysts' forecasts, could reach several billion dollars in the coming years. The question is only whether this will become a lifeline for quality journalism or its slow absorption by algorithms. For now, no one knows the answer to this question—including those who sign these multi-million-dollar contracts.