USA Today Co.’s AI licensing deals drive ‘notable’ revenue in Q1, despite pressure on traffic and programmatic

While the company did not break out what percentage of this revenue was from AI licensing deals, USA Today Co. CEO and chairman Mike Reed said in the earnings call on Thursday that these deals had a “notable impact” on the company’s first quarter revenue.

It’s the first clear signal USA Today Co. has given that AI licensing deals are a meaningful growth driver for the company. USA Today Co. has AI licensing agreements with Meta and Microsoft, as well as Perplexity. The company is in active talks with other companies about AI licensing deals and emerging marketplaces, Reed said. 

“We continue to maintain an active pipeline across the AI ecosystem, including foundational model providers, startups and emerging licensing platforms. As a result, we expect this category to contribute meaningfully to our growth over time,” he said.

‘Lumpy’ AI licensing revenue

However, USA Today Co.’s execs cautioned that Q1 may be an outlier, with AI licensing deals expected to bring in uneven revenue going forward, rather than consistently rising. 

“We’re taking a long term approach rather than near term, because in the very near term it’s a little bit lumpy or unpredictable. But over the long term, lots of opportunity,” Reed said.

Trisha Gosser, USA Today Co.’s CFO, also tempered expectations, saying the company expected “variability” in AI licensing deal revenue, and that there was a particularly “strong contribution” in Q1.

But Reed told investors he expects the company will bring in more revenue from AI content licensing deals, with real-time content becoming more valuable than the publisher’s content archive, which can only be used once to train a large language model.

“I actually think that the value of our licensing agreements will grow over time. We are expanding the amount of content we have that is digitized in our archives, which hasn’t been available for training. So we think that’s also an opportunity for more revenue,” he said. “We feel really good about the sustainability and the ability to grow the AI licensing category over the long term.”

Declines in page views, programmatic

But it wasn’t all good news for USA Today Co. Though total digital revenue grew 5.2% year over year to $261.9 million in the quarter, company execs cited declines in page views and programmatic revenue.

Reed told investors that USA Today Co. drove 180 million uniques and 1.4 billion page views in Q1 — slightly up from the 179 million uniques in Q4 — and that the publisher had not seen “any large declines” in overall audience.

But when comparing page views year over year, it was a different story. Gosser pointed to “softness” in page views and programmatic revenue as the main reasons for the 3% year-over-year decline in digital advertising revenue in the first quarter. USA Today Co. had 195 million unique visitors in Q1 2025, according to a quarterly earnings call, representing a 7.7% year over year drop in visitors in Q1 2026.

Gosser said there were “modest” page view declines on USA Today Co.’s local sites, driven primarily by lower referrals from Google Discover and the publisher pushing its paywall in front of site visitors to grow its subscription business. (USA Today Co. has 1.5 million digital-only paid subscriptions, according to the publisher’s earnings presentation, and grew digital-only subscription revenue by 6.2% year over year to $45.9 million in Q1.)

“We’re seeing improved conversion rates, and believe this is the right trade off, as we optimize for revenue per user rather than raw traffic volume,” she said.

Kristen Roberts, president of USA Today Media, said AI Overviews had a small impact on digital advertising revenue compared to the changes to Google Discover, which she said surfaced less local content this quarter. 

And yet, Gosser expressed confidence that the digital ads business would improve later this year.

“We delivered our strongest quarter of new digital business signings in Q1 which, combined with stabilizing retention trends, is expected to drive a notable improvement in our Q2 digital advertising and digital marketing services revenue trends,” Gosser said.