Common Questions

What is Reach plc's deal with Amazon about?: Reach agreed an AI content licensing deal with Amazon Web Services in April 2026, structured as pay-per-usage rather than a lump sum. Terms were not disclosed, but Reach said it is in active discussions with several other tech platforms on similar terms.Source: Lowdown briefing 2026-05-10 / Reach April 2026 trading update
Who owns Reach plc?: Reach plc is a publicly listed company on the London Stock Exchange (ticker: RCH). It was formed in 2018 from the merger of Trinity Mirror and Northern & Shell. No single controlling shareholder holds a majority stake.Source: Reach plc company filings
Why is Reach's revenue declining?: Reach's Q1 2026 group revenue fell 6.9% year-on-year and digital revenue fell 8.1%, driven by structural weakness in print advertising and digital display markets. The trend mirrors the broader UK regional press sector and is the main reason AI licensing deals matter to the company's survival.Source: Reach plc Q1 2026 trading update
What newspapers does Reach own in the UK?: Reach publishes the Daily Mirror, Daily Express, Daily Star, the Manchester Evening News, the Liverpool Echo, the Birmingham Mail and more than 100 regional and digital titles across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.Source: Reach plc corporate

Background

Reach plc is the UK's largest commercial publisher by title count, owner of the Daily Mirror, Daily Express, Daily Star, Manchester Evening News and more than 100 regional and digital titles reaching an estimated 35 million UK monthly readers. In April 2026, Reach disclosed an AI content licensing deal with Amazon Web Services structured on a pay-per-usage model, the first publicly confirmed deal of this type from a UK national publisher. The same trading statement reported group revenue down 6.9% and digital revenue down 8.1% year-on-year, the structural decline that makes AI licensing income a survival question rather than an upside.

Reach was formed from the merger of Trinity Mirror and Northern & Shell in 2018 and is listed on the London Stock Exchange. It employs roughly 3,800 people across print and digital operations. Unlike News Corp, which pursued litigation-backed settlement pressure against Anthropic, Reach's approach is transactional and prospective: small periodic payments tied to actual query volumes rather than a retrospective windfall. The Center for Journalism & Liberty's April 2026 report mapped the wider market, showing Amazon paying The New York Times roughly $20 million a year and DotDash Meredith receiving $16 million annually from OpenAI. Pay-per-usage scales those figures downward for mid-tier publishers.

Reach is the most visible test of whether the pay-per-usage AI licensing template can generate material revenue for a publisher that lacks litigation leverage. Its H1 2026 results will be the first hard data point on whether queried usage at mid-tier scale translates into a meaningful offset against print and digital advertising erosion.

How the World Sees Them

UK regional press bodies treat the Reach AWS deal as the first real evidence the pay-per-usage model can work for mid-tier publishers, though industry groups note the revenue scale is unknown and may not offset ongoing digital ad decline.

US digital publishers watching Reach's H1 2026 results treat it as the closest comparable data point for pay-per-usage licensing at scale — particularly relevant for publishers like DotDash Meredith who are in similar size brackets.