The theory is basically this - AI is mostly free. Huge majority of the people, more than 99 out of a hundred people use it every day for free. And there really aren't any other business models that exist, that have been successful, incredibly successful for years and years and years don't have a large number of paying customers. Either millions of people paying you know, sort of some money, maybe it's $10.
Don't credit OpenAI's ChatGPT, credit corporate LLMs - enterprise RAG is what's creating royalty revenue for publishers. RAG - retrieval augmented generation - kicks in when a user (or system) prompts the LLM, which then pulls the relevant content from various sources to deliver the best answer. Over the last two years, it has been quietly expanding its licensing agreements for generative AI usage, with approximately 5,000 publishers from its 30,000-strong publisher network now opted in for this.