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Reach signs AWS pay-per-usage AI licensing deal

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Reach plc became the first major UK regional publisher to disclose a usage-based AI licensing deal, agreeing pay-per-usage terms with Amazon Web Services as Q1 group revenue fell 6.9% and digital revenue dropped 8.1%.

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Key takeaway

Reach's AWS pay-per-usage deal is the only AI licensing template the long tail of publishers can actually access.

Reach plc, owner of the Daily Mirror, Daily Express and more than 100 UK regional titles, disclosed in its April 2026 trading update that it had agreed an AI content licensing deal with Amazon Web Services structured on a pay-per-usage model rather than a lump sum⁠¹. The same statement disclosed active discussions with several other tech platforms on similar terms, alongside Q1 group revenue down 6.9% and digital revenue down 8.1% year-on-year⁠².

Reach's commercial licence is separate from the Bartz book-piracy settlement, in which News Corp's HarperCollins expects a share. The $1.5bn covers the whole class fund. Pay-per-usage scales down rather than up: small payments, prospective rather than retrospective, paid against measured query volume into Amazon's Rufus assistant and adjacent products. The CJL April 2026 mapping put comparable AI licensing deals on the same scale, with DotDash Meredith at $16m a year from OpenAI, Thomson Reuters at $33m year-to-date, and Amazon paying The New York Times roughly $20m a year⁠³.

The model is structurally identical to the early ad-network rev-share deals that built the open programmatic web in the late 2000s, and which subsequently disintermediated those same publishers as platform integration deepened. Revenue tracks query volume rather than damages, which makes Reach's upside contingent on Amazon's product trajectory: if Rufus and adjacent surfaces grow share, Reach's revenue scales with them; if they stall, Reach is exposed to platform-side risk it does not control. The CFO disclosure of "active discussions with several other tech platforms" on similar terms suggests Reach is hedging that platform risk by spreading across counterparties before any one of them locks the rate card.

The Bartz recovery does not establish which commercial models Reach or other publishers can negotiate. Microsoft's Publisher Content Marketplace, launched February 2026, takes a 15-50% broker cut that mid-tier publishers can avoid by negotiating direct usage terms. Whether usage-based revenue offsets the 8.1% digital revenue decline disclosed in the same statement will only be testable when Reach's H1 2026 numbers land. The first publicly itemised pay-per-usage line in a published-company set of accounts will set the floor for every subsequent mid-tier negotiation in Europe.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Reach is the company behind the Daily Mirror, the Daily Express, and over a hundred local newspapers across the UK. Like most print publishers, it has been losing advertising revenue for years as businesses shifted their spending to Google and social media. The deal with Amazon Web Services means Amazon pays Reach every time Amazon's AI systems use Reach's articles, scaled to how often those articles are actually used. The reason this is a different model from News Corp's deal is that Reach does not have the same kind of leverage. News Corp could credibly threaten to sue Anthropic for hundreds of millions and win; Reach has a bigger content archive but no equivalent legal threat. So instead of a large upfront payment, Reach gets a running payment that depends on how much Amazon's AI actually uses its content: more usage, more money. Less usage, less.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

Reach's digital advertising revenue decline of 8.1% year-on-year reflects the structural reallocation of UK display advertising spend toward Google and Meta's walled-garden inventory. Reach cannot recover that revenue through subscription growth because its regional and national tabloid content has historically been free or near-free; the consumer price elasticity is structurally different from a premium business title like the Wall Street Journal.

The AWS deal emerges from this constraint: Reach has content volume (100+ titles, deep regional archives) but lacks the premium content scarcity that makes a lump-sum settlement like News Corp's viable.

AWS chose a pay-per-usage model because Reach's regional content is training-data utility rather than substitution-risk liability: a chatbot trained on Reach's Hull Daily Mail archive does not substitute for a paid Wall Street Journal subscription in the way Anthropic's scraping of News Corp content did. The pricing structure reflects this asymmetry in content leverage.

What could happen next?

Precedent
The pay-per-usage template, if replicated across UK regional publisher groups, creates a standardised mid-tier licensing model that small publishers can access without litigation capacity — but at rates well below the lump-sum benchmark set by News Corp at {{EVREF:event-0}}.
Short term · 0.75
Risk
Without independent audit rights, pay-per-usage models expose publishers to systematic under-reporting of consumption by AI companies — a monitoring problem that is technically and contractually complex to resolve.
Medium term · 0.7
Consequence
Microsoft's Publisher Content Marketplace, launched February 2026, is the broker version of the same template: by intermediating dozens of mid-tier publishers, it reduces the per-publisher negotiating position while capturing platform margin on the aggregate volume.
Immediate · 0.8

Source Landscape

This story draws on mixed-leaning sources from United States

United States

LeftRight

Primary parallel: The cable television retransmission consent regime in the United States (established under the 1992 Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act) created a structurally identical negotiation dynamic: large broadcasters (CBS, NBC, ABC) could extract must-carry fees from cable operators, while small independent stations often settled for zero compensation.

The pay-per-usage template Reach negotiated is analogous to the retransmission consent market rather than the licence-fee market: variable, consumption-indexed, and weighted toward content that generates the most AI queries rather than toward content that generates the most journalistic value.

Counter-parallel: The music industry's transition from compulsory mechanical licensing to streaming royalty structures (Spotify's per-stream rate circa $0.003-0.005) provides the downside case.

Once a per-usage model is normalised, the price-per-unit tends to compress over time as volume scales: AI companies will argue that marginal cost of additional tokens falls as models improve, and publishers have little power to resist rate compression without a statutory floor. The News Corp settlement at {{EVREF:event-0}} is the structural alternative: a large upfront payment insulates News Corp from rate compression for the settlement's duration.

The disclosed CJL comparables bracket Reach's likely deal terms: The New York Times at approximately $20m per year from Amazon for comparable content volume (national reach, long archive); DotDash Meredith at $16m per year from OpenAI. Reach's 100+ titles and UK-regional content archive might reasonably place its usage-based deal in the £8-15m per year range at current AI consumption rates, though no figure has been publicly disclosed.

For context: Reach's Q1 2026 digital revenue run-rate was approximately £35-40m annualised at current -8.1% trajectory. A £10m annual AI licensing contribution would represent roughly a 25% offset to the digital revenue decline.

That is commercially material for a business at this scale, but it does not reverse the structural decline; it slows it. The strategic question for Reach is whether AI licensing income buys enough runway to complete a digital transformation before the decline outpaces the offset.

Consensus view: The Reuters Institute's Felix Simon and the Press Gazette's analysis of UK regional publisher economics both flag that Reach's -6.9% group revenue and -8.1% digital revenue in Q1 2026 create a structural dependency on AI licensing income as a counter-cyclical offset rather than a growth driver. The pay-per-usage template is, from AWS's perspective, a content-procurement model that mimics cloud metered billing: it caps AWS's upfront liability while aligning incentives with actual consumption.

Press Gazette's analysis of the CJL data places the Reach AWS deal on the lower end of known comparables: The New York Times / Amazon arrangement at approximately $20m per year, compared to Reach's portfolio reaching well over 100 titles, implies per-title value is materially lower for regional content than for branded national titles.

Counter-view: Reach's own investor communications frame the AWS deal as proof of structural viability for the pay-per-usage model in UK regional publishing: a template that works at Reach's scale (100+ titles, substantial archive) can, they argue, be replicated by smaller regional groups such as Newsquest or Archant.

The UK Press Gazette and the National Union of Journalists have separately raised concerns that usage-based licensing creates a monitoring obligation on publishers that they lack the technical infrastructure to audit: if AWS under-reports consumption, Reach has no independent verification mechanism.

Key tension: Whether Reach can independently verify AWS's self-reported usage figures, and whether the contract contains audit rights adequate to the monitoring challenge. Neither has been disclosed publicly.

First Reported In

Update #1 · News Corp expects share of AI class settlement

Center for Journalism & Liberty / Open Markets Institute· 10 May 2026

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Causes and effects

Caused by

News Corp expects share of Anthropic class fund

The News Corp $1.5bn settlement benchmark directly shapes what alternative AI licensing templates like Reach's pay-per-usage deal are benchmarked against

Occurred 8 May 2026

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This Event

Reach signs AWS pay-per-usage AI licensing deal

Pay-per-usage is the only AI licensing template the long tail of publishers can actually access; whether it generates material revenue at mid-tier scale will be the first hard test of the publisher-AI commercial geometry below tier one.

Led to

Judge reserves ruling on Anthropic class deal

Bartz settlement floor clarifies the distinction between bilateral licensing deals (Reach/AWS, NYT/Amazon) and litigation-derived class-action floors.

Occurred 14 May 2026

Read story →

Different Perspectives

Publicis Groupe

Publicis Groupe credited AI demand for its Connected Media growth in the 13 October third-quarter release, reporting net revenue of €3,808m, up 5.0% organically. It named no AI product, so investors get the AI claim without a product to measure it against.

Educational Broadcasting System

Educational Broadcasting System premiered EBS AI Literature Theatre on 16 October, remaking 11 Korean literary classics with generative AI. Korea's public education broadcaster puts AI-made drama on air under its own name, while the BBC's director-general said he 'got in trouble' for praising an AI Doctor Who episode.

Hakuhodo

Hakuhodo began selling its in-house Image Similarity Checker on 19 October, scoring AI-generated ad creative against similar images on the web and logging who checked what. The Japanese agency is selling the compliance step around generative advertising and leaves the legal judgment with its clients.

Lisa Nandy

Nandy told Sky on 15 October she is minded to issue a public interest intervention notice on its purchase of ITV's Media and Entertainment business, on four grounds including news plurality. She notes Comcast's Sky News undertakings expire in December 2028 and do not cover ITV News or ITN, in which Sky would take a 20% stake.

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation asked Parliament's AI committee to extend the News Bargaining Incentive to AI firms and hold them to the copyright, defamation and privacy rules news outlets follow. With SBS telling the same committee that robots.txt is routinely ignored, the public broadcasters are contesting the opt-out Anthropic proposed.

Editorial Perfil

Perfil reported on 14 October that Civil Court No. 57 kept its damages suit against OpenAI and Microsoft out of the federal courts, and it wants a pre-trial inspection of their California servers. Its lawyer says Microsoft Argentina came to mediation without a serious offer, and Perfil seeks payment rather than takedowns.

Written with AI from Lowdown's published reporting. Not individually reviewed by an editor. Editorial standards.