On Thursday, Disney and OpenAI announced a deal that might have seemed unthinkable not so long ago. Starting next year, OpenAI will be able to use Disney characters like Mickey Mouse, Ariel, and Yoda in its Sora video-generation model. Disney will take a $1 billion stake in OpenAI, and its employees will get access to the firm's APIs and ChatGPT. None of this makes much sense-unless Disney was fighting a battle it couldn't win.
Clearly, it has a social consequence when you have fewer journalists; clearly, it has a social consequence if the ability to write books in a meaningful, sustainable way is undermined. And there are people who are aware of that, Sam Altman, Sundar Pichai at Google, Tim Cook, you can talk with them in a way that they understand their business needs to have this constant creative flow,
The news was revealed to shareholders by People Inc. CEO Neil Vogel during parent company IAC's 2025 third-quarter earnings call on Nov. 4. Vogel described the Microsoft marketplace as an "a la carte" pay-per-use model, in contrast to the "all you can eat" lump sum deal it has with AI rival OpenAI. "We are very happy with either model - both can be viable as long as our content is respected and paid for," said Vogel.
Which raises a pressing question: Can online magazines survive when ads have plateaued and digital subscriptions still don't cover the cost of producing quality journalism? Maybe the answer is ... AI. Condé has content and data licensing deals with OpenAI, Perplexity and Amazon. But those deals could have steep half-lives, especially when a publisher's value is primarily tied to its library of content.
And he is wary of giving away too much without clear value in return. TMB - which owns brands like Reader's Digest, Taste of Home, and user-generated video licensing company Jukin Media - doesn't want to give LLMs wide access to its content. "We just don't want to hand over the keys," said Salamon at Digiday's Publishing Summit in Miami, Fl., in September.
In the U.S., when a publisher signs a licensing deal with an AI company, newsroom staffers don't get a cut. Many newsrooms have licensed their content to OpenAI in bulk, for example. A staff reporter's stories can be used as training data for the latest GPT model, or may surface in ChatGPT's response to a user question. Does that reporter deserve to be compensated directly for how their work is being used by OpenAI? In France, the answer is, increasingly, yes.
Answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity are replacing traditional search traffic with direct answers, depriving publishers of the revenue they would generate from attracting those visitors to their websites. The shift mirrors the decoupling that occurred with Google News two decades ago, when aggregators began to sever the direct publisher-reader relationship, reshaping the economics of digital media, according to Felix Danczak, head of AI and growth at the venture capital firm Pembroke VCT.
