OpenAI is paying the digital media company Dotdash Meredith at least 16 million per year to license its content, according to public financial documents reviewed by Adweek. We already knew about this burgeoning partnership, but we didn't have a financial figure. The actual payout could rise above 16 million per year, as it only reflects the "fixed" component of the payment. The "variable" component will be calculated in the future, according to a recent earnings call led by the chief operating and financial officer of Dotdash Meredith's parent company IAC. "If you look at Q3 of 2024, licensing revenue was up about 4.1 million year over year. The lion's share of that would be driven by the OpenAI license," CFO Chris Halpin said.

OpenAI is partnering with another publisher as it moves towards a licensed approach to training materials. Dotdash Meredith, the owner of brands like People and Better Homes & Gardens, will license its content for OpenAI to train ChatGPT while the publisher will use the AI company's models to boost its in-house ad-targeting tool. As part of the arrangement, ChatGPT will display content and links attributed to Dotdash Meredith's publications. It also provides OpenAI with fully licensed training material from trusted publications. That's a welcome change after the company got in hot water for allegedly using content for training purposes without permission.

Dotdash Meredith is the largest premium publisher in the world. Every day tens of millions of people come to us for help and inspiration. Our library of hundreds of thousands of articles help our users, and help us understand the evolving needs of a world recovering from the pandemic and dealing with day to day challenges. As a classification expert, you will work with this incredible dataset to group and classify our content, and understand our users' needs. This understanding will be used to power our content investments, user facing initiatives, and how we work with partners.