The publisher coalition SPUR grows to 80 members, including The New York Times, while Google pays another publisher for AI rights on terms nobody outside can check.
More than 40 publishers and trade bodies have joined SPUR, the coalition working toward shared terms for AI licensing deals, taking membership to 80 organizations in more than 20 countries. The new headline members include The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Economist, ITV News and The Observer, with AFP, L’Equipe, DPG Media and Which? among the others. Joining trade bodies include the UK’s News Media Association, INMA, the Interamerican Press Association and Magazines Canada.
SPUR launched in February with The Guardian, the Financial Times, the Telegraph, the BBC and Sky News. Earlier this month it published an open-source content telemetry standard, version 1.0, that tracks how AI systems scrape content, load it into an answer, cite it and display it, and how users engage with it. SPUR says it is building tools to help AI companies adopt it.
A standard becomes real on the day the biggest names stop watching and start signing, and this week the list got long enough to matter.
I learned this opening a whole city’s data: access works only when the rules of use are shared, public and enforceable. The same test applies here, and the open question is which AI company is first to agree to be measured by it.
Reach, the UK publisher behind the Mirror, Express, Daily Star, Manchester Evening News and Liverpool Echo, has joined Google’s news AI pilot, which gives Google access to its UK and Irish titles under what Google calls “enhanced content rights.” A Google news partnerships director described it as “a commercial partnership where we pay for enhanced content rights”; the amount was not disclosed.
The pilot tests AI-generated article overviews on Google News pages and audio briefings, with attribution and links to the articles. Other participants include the Financial Times, Der Spiegel, El País, The Guardian, The Times of India and The Washington Post.
The Operator’s Take: A career that began valuing broadcasting and publishing companies for M&A teaches that whoever holds the forecast sets the price, and here only the buyer knows how often the overviews run. A payment with no disclosed basis is worth only as much as the counts behind it.
Commercial · Economic Model Ask Google for the number of times your content appears in an overview or briefing, and tie your payment to that count instead of a flat fee.
Prebid, the open-source project behind header bidding, previewed a proposal at its New York summit that would let ad servers, including Google Ad Manager and its AdX exchange, bid directly into Prebid’s server-side auction. Today AdX can see the winning Prebid price before it competes, and one of the authors says the change would also cut two calls to one, roughly halving auction time.
The court declined to break up Google’s ad server but ordered AdX to bid independently and share winning and losing bid data with publishers, without saying how. The proposal is open for comment, the group hopes to formalize it by the end of the first quarter, and Prebid cannot force Google to adopt it.
The Operator’s Take: The court set the outcome and left the method open, and an open-source group is now writing the method. Whoever writes the integration also decides what publishers can see, so the bid-data fields deserve as close a read as the speed claims.
Advocacy · Detection & Telemetry File a comment asking that winning and losing bid records reach publishers in a form you can store and check yourself.