People Inc. forges AI licensing deal with Microsoft as Google traffic drops (techcrunch.com)

People Inc., a major U.S. publisher, announced an AI licensing deal with Microsoft making it a launch partner in Microsoft’s new publisher content marketplace — its second licensing agreement after a prior deal with OpenAI. Microsoft’s Copilot will be the marketplace’s first buyer, and the arrangement is described as a pay‑per‑use, “a la carte” model that compensates publishers directly for specific content use. The announcement came alongside investor disclosure that Google Search-driven traffic to People Inc. has plunged from 54% two years ago to 24% in the most recent quarter, a shift the company attributes in part to Google’s AI Overviews reducing referral visits. The deal matters for AI/ML because it signals publishers are carving out business models to monetize content ingestion by AI systems, creating precedents for how training and retrieval datasets are licensed. People Inc. contrasts Microsoft’s pay‑per‑use model with its OpenAI deal, which CEO Neil Vogel called more “all‑you‑can‑eat,” and has used Cloudflare tooling to block other AI crawlers — a tactic that accelerated licensing talks. For model builders, this implies growing pressure to negotiate paid access or design around paywalled/licensed content; for publishers, it demonstrates a viable path to regain revenue (People Inc.’s digital revenue rose 9% to $269M, with licensing up 24%).