News/Media Alliance signs AI licensing deal to unlock recurring RAG revenue for small and mid-sized publishers

Publishers will get paid based on how often their content is used by Bria’s enterprise clients. For example, a financial services copilot cites licensed editorial content when summarizing market conditions, or a legal AI chatbot surfaces news coverage of regulatory developments as corroborating evidence, according to Vered Horesh, Bria’s chief AI strategy officer.

Publishers that want to be proactive in cutting deals with AI companies may find it difficult to do so from the “big five” tech companies (Microsoft, Google (Alphabet), Meta, Amazon, and Apple), noted Matt Prohaska, CEO and principal of Prohaska Consulting.

“Anything that aggregates opportunity — just like nine different co-ops or collectives that we’ve built [and] helped over the years — and creates scale to get more attention from tech is a win, so this is a natural beneficial move to start helping and educating more [publishers],” Prohaska said. 

Horesh said the company’s clients span enterprise AI teams, foundation model developers, copilot builders, agent orchestration platforms, and companies deploying AI in legal, financial services and healthcare industries. Bria and NMA declined to name specific clients, citing the fact that many of these internal AI systems or products are still in development and clients prefer not to publicly disclose the data sources behind them. The AI systems range from RAG pipelines, enterprise copilots, agent-based research and analysis, and search and answer engines, Horesh added.

The deals are non-exclusive, and publishers can choose what content they want to license. Bria then aggregates all of the licensed content and determines how much of a publisher’s content was used for a given AI output, and revenue is split 50-50 between Bria and the publisher — based on an attribution model that Bria developed, according to Danielle Coffey, president and CEO of the News/Media Alliance. 

Coffey declined to share details on specific deal terms, though she described them as “very fair.”

While only a small percentage of publishers have the clout to secure AI licensing deals with the big LLMs, smaller ones struggle to get any kind of compensation.

But there are other avenues beyond the consumer LLMs. Enterprise demand for retrieval augmented generation (RAG) — the process where AI models mine the web for information to fulfill user queries when they’re typed into answer engines like ChatGPT is rising. More than half of enterprises are actively using AI agents to retrieve information to fulfill queries made by their thousands of employees, per McKinsey’s State of AI 2025 report.

It’s an opportunity big publishers like The Economist, the Financial Times and AP have already taken advantage of, regarding them as a fledgling but highly promising as a new, recurring revenue stream that will build over time. The News/Media Alliance wants to open that door for its own members to collectively have more options to meet this demand as it continues to rise.

This collective licensing opportunity could be particularly valuable for smaller publishers — like local news outlets or niche titles — that lack the resources to strike direct AI deals, while also simplifying access for enterprises that can’t scale one-to-one partnerships.

“While the courts decide the specifics around [the legal question of AI companies paying for content], I actually do think that there’s a chance for a healthy marketplace. We think that we need to end up… with a lot of bilateral business arrangements,” Coffey said.

NMA and Bria created a templated AI licensing agreement, which NMA members can use if they want to opt in. “We’re the bridge,” Coffey said. “We work on the legal terms… It’s kind of a triangular relationship. Members contract individually with Bria.”

It’s a similar system to the AI licensing model between publishers and AI startup ProRata, which pays out 50 percent of all its revenue to publisher partners on a recurring basis, depending on how often their content powers AI responses. News/Media Alliance also has a deal with ProRata.

Coffey noted that these collective deals can also be more efficient — instead of AI companies and publishers holding numerous meetings to come to licensing agreements, both parties can use the template created by NMA to get to signing the deal faster.

“The sheer practicality of it is why I think [collective deals are] attractive,” Coffey said.

This isn’t the first attribution model and AI licensing marketplace Bria has developed. Bria launched foundation AI models in 2023, trained with licensed visual content from stock image companies like Getty Images (which is also a minority investor in the AI startup). This deal with NMA is Bria’s first move into licensing news and editorial content.