People Inc., one of the largest media publishers in the United States, has signed an AI licensing agreement with Microsoft. The media giant (formerly Dotdash Meredith) made the announcement Tuesday as part of parent company IAC’s third-quarter earnings call.
Under the agreement, People Inc. will become a launch partner for Microsoft’s Publisher Content Marketplace. This is the company’s second AI contract, following a previous deal with OpenAI last year.
Neil Vogel, CEO of People Inc., described the new marketplace as “essentially a pay-as-you-go marketplace where AI players can directly compensate publishers for the use of their content on an ‘a la carte’ basis.”
He also praised Microsoft’s commitment to paying for content to support its AI efforts, adding that Microsoft’s Copilot will be the first buyer in this market.
“To be sitting with them is a very strong endorsement for us and for the publishing market and the value of content for creating high-value AI,” Vogel said.
The announcement of the partnership with Microsoft was shared during IAC’s earnings call, along with the news that Google Search’s AI Overview is having a negative impact on publisher traffic. People Inc. shared data with investors for the first time showing that Google searches, which accounted for 54% of the company’s traffic two years ago, have fallen to 24% of its traffic over the past quarter.
The deal is different from the OpenAI deal, which Vogel characterized as more of an “all you can eat” model, but People said it was happy with both models. It’s important to the company that its work is “respected and paid for,” he said. However, the company did not disclose specific contract terms.
People Inc. took issue with how AI companies are ingesting media without paying to fuel their AI products and train their models. Vogel recently criticized Google, calling the tech giant a “bad actor” for using the same bots to crawl websites for its search engine and its AI capabilities. Publishers can’t block bots because Google search still accounts for the majority of traffic.
But People Inc. uses technology from web infrastructure provider Cloudflare to block other AI crawlers and encourage AI players to approach them with content deals. In September, Vogel said the company’s decision to leverage Cloudflare’s technology was a way to bring AI companies to the table, noting that the deal progressed “much further” after adopting the solution.
He reiterated those comments during an earnings call with investors today, saying the AI crawler’s blocking was “very effective” and “got almost everyone on board.” Vogel indicated that more deals would be announced in due course.
IAC reported that People Inc.’s digital revenue increased 9% to $269 million in the quarter, driven by performance marketing and licensing, which represented growth of 38% and 24%, respectively. The company also mentioned its acquisition of FeedFeed, a food-focused media publisher and influencer network.
