People Inc., a major U.S. media publishing group formerly known as Dotdash Meredith, has entered into a new artificial intelligence licensing agreement with Microsoft.

The deal was announced on during the third-quarter earnings presentation of its parent company, IAC.

Under the agreement, People Inc. will serve as a launch partner in Microsoft’s publisher content marketplace.

This marks the company’s second major AI partnership, following a previous licensing arrangement with OpenAI last year.

Chief Executive Officer Neil Vogel explained that the new marketplace will function as a “pay-per-use model,” allowing AI platforms to directly compensate publishers for access to their content on a flexible, usage-based basis.

According to Vogel, Microsoft’s Copilot will be the first AI system to make purchases from the new marketplace.

“It’s a strong signal for us to be included at this level,” Vogel said. “It’s also a recognition of the importance of high-quality content in building AI systems that are valuable and reliable.”

The announcement comes at a time when People Inc. is grappling with a significant drop in referral traffic from Google.

The company revealed for the first time that Google search accounted for 54% of its total traffic two years ago, but declined to just 24% in the most recent quarter.

Executives attribute this decline in part to Google’s AI Overviews feature, which provides direct answers to search queries, reducing the need for users to click through to publisher sites.

Vogel contrasted the new deal with Microsoft to its earlier agreement with OpenAI, noting that the previous arrangement was more of a “full-access model.”

He emphasized, however, that People Inc. is satisfied with either approach, so long as its work is “properly respected and compensated.” The company did not disclose financial details of either agreement.

People Inc. has been vocal about concerns over the way AI companies have collected and used publisher content to train their models without direct permission or compensation.

Vogel previously criticized Google as a “bad actor” for using the same crawling bot to gather data for both search and AI services—making it impossible for publishers to block AI training without losing search visibility.

To counter this, People Inc. began using Cloudflare technology to block non-Google AI crawlers, a move Vogel says successfully compelled multiple AI companies to initiate licensing negotiations.

He reaffirmed during the earnings call that the strategy has been “very effective” and indicated that additional deals are likely to follow.

Meanwhile, IAC reported that People Inc.’s digital revenue grew 9% to $269 million for the quarter, driven by a 38% increase in performance marketing and a 24% rise in licensing revenue.

The company also highlighted its recent acquisition of Feedfeed, a food-focused media and influencer network, as part of ongoing expansion efforts.

Source: Techcrunch