WAN-IFRA Tells Delhi: Publishers’ AI Bet Is Collective Licensing

Stig Ørskov, CEO of WAN-IFRA, told the Digital Media India 2026 conference in New Delhi on 24 June that news publishers will need to license their content collectively to AI platforms, or accept the terms that get set for them, in a five-point diagnosis of where the industry stands. By WAN-IFRA’s own count, the two-day conference drew more than 35 speakers to debate referral traffic, zero-click search, third-party platforms, and the format war between text and video. The keynote was reported by the trade publication Indian Printer and Publisher.

Orskov pointed to the SPUR Coalition as the way forward, a non-profit of 36 publishers and affiliate organisations that WAN-IFRA formally joined this month. The case he made is that publishers cannot negotiate from their current position alone.

The Maturity Map: 22, 58, 20

Orskov opened with a single slide of three numbers that, he said, capture where publishers actually sit on AI. 22% of newsroom AI usage is still in the nascent stage, 58% is emerging, and 20% has reached an advanced stage. The 22 covers teams that have barely started, the 58 covers newsrooms running pilots from draft summaries and transcription to recommendation pipelines without a full operating model, and the 20 is the share that has wired AI into the production stack itself.

That asymmetry is the backdrop for the rest of his case. Most publishers are still piloting, not running AI at scale, and the companies that fund and license their content are already operating at scale. The traffic picture, he said, shows organic search under pressure and AI referrals growing, with ChatGPT leading and Perplexity close behind. The replacement is incremental, with one platform’s referrals rising as another’s search traffic fades.

The maturity map and the traffic picture set up the rest of the keynote. Orskov’s framing, built from both, is that publishers cannot negotiate from this position alone. The answer he proposed runs through collective licensing and the SPUR Coalition, the topics of the next sections.

Where publishers sit on AI, per Ørskov at DMI 2026:

• 22% of newsroom AI usage is in the nascent stage
• 58% sits in the emerging stage
• 20% has reached the advanced stage
• ChatGPT leads AI referrals to publishers
• Perplexity is growing slowly, per Orskov

From ‘AI in Media’ to ‘Media in AI’

The phrase Orskov used to compress the shift is short enough to fit on a slide. He told the room the question is no longer whether publishers use AI. It is how AI surfaces the journalism publishers already produce. Publishers in his framing now supply the content that AI products cannot ship without.

The two-day programme covered the decline in referral traffic, the rise of zero-click search, the pull of third-party platforms, the squeeze on young audiences, and the migration from text storytelling to film and documentaries. The agenda listed each as a separate market shift that publishers are navigating, in Orskov’s framing. Each is also a separate signal that the reader encounters the news first through someone else’s product.

There is a shift from AI in media to media in AI.

Stig Ørskov, CEO of WAN-IFRA, at the Digital Media India 2026 conference in New Delhi, 24 June 2026. His wider argument, delivered across the same keynote, is that the shift forces publishers to negotiate as a class, with collective action replacing solo platform contracts.

The SPUR Coalition’s 36-Member Bet

The vehicle for that class-level negotiation is the SPUR Coalition, a non-profit built to shape the technical and commercial environment in which AI platforms use publisher content. WAN-IFRA, the global trade body that hosted DMI 2026, joined SPUR as an affiliate member in June, the same month Orskov delivered his Delhi keynote.

The expansion is recent and steep. SPUR launched publicly at the end of February 2026 with five UK founding members, with the BBC, the Financial Times, the Guardian Media Group, Sky News, and the Telegraph Media Group as the first cohort and CMA Media and Mediahuis joining at the launch. The coalition added 30 members in a single June announcement, including The Globe and Mail, Quebecor, Postmedia, Torstar, CBC/Radio-Canada, La Presse, Ringier, Der Standard, Bonnier News, and Sanoma Media Finland.

A second track is technical. SPUR’s telemetry work, described in the WAN-IFRA announcement, is the infrastructure for tracking AI systems’ use of publisher content in real time. The coalition said in June that the SPUR telemetry standard is finished enough to launch soon. Orskov, quoted in the same announcement, put the strategic case in one line.

“There is a real first-mover advantage in helping define the standards rather than inheriting them,” he said. Anna Bateson, CEO of Guardian Media Group and a SPUR founding member, made a parallel point in the same announcement. Welcoming the new cohort, she framed the expansion as the scale required to turn SPUR’s mission into a global mandate.

What Publishers Want to Be Paid For

Orskov’s list of monetary paths for publishers on AI platforms, drawn from the same keynote, is a menu of four shapes. The four items he named are licensing deals, user-based revenue, pay per crawl, and collective licensing.

Publisher revenue models Orskov put on the table at DMI 2026:

• Licensing deals for AI training and retrieval on publisher archives
• User-based revenue tied to how AI products expose publisher content to end users
• Pay per crawl charges levied on AI crawlers per request to publisher servers
• Collective licensing through publisher bodies acting as a single counterparty

None of the four works without the real-time tracking layer SPUR is building. Pay per crawl requires the publisher to see the crawl. User-based revenue requires the platform to report the user. Collective licensing requires an industry body with both the data and the mandate to negotiate on behalf of multiple newsrooms.

Orskov’s argument in Delhi is that tracking and pricing have to be built together. A coalition of this size is closer to the scale a major AI platform cannot route around. The new cohort includes Canada’s Globe and Mail, Quebecor, Postmedia, Torstar, CBC/Radio-Canada, and La Presse, alongside Austria’s Der Standard, Switzerland’s Ringier, and the Nordics’ Bonnier News and Sanoma. Together they make SPUR a body that can sit across the table from a US AI platform with a single set of standards. That is the operative size, in Orskov’s framing, for setting pricing terms.

Audio, Video, and the Format Race

The fifth of Orskov’s five burning issues is the format war, and it is the one most exposed to third-party platforms. His framing is that audio and video are the formats on which the next decade of audience growth is being contested. That growth, in Orskov’s framing, is going to creators and platforms. Publishers are not capturing their share of it.

News publishers are getting a smaller share, in part because third-party digital platforms are cashing in on the audio-video format, per Orskov’s key takeaways. The conference agenda included the transition from text storytelling to film and documentaries as a core theme, sitting alongside AI and referrals. A second warning, on the same list of takeaways, was the need to integrate news creators in the traditional newsroom and to compete for the creator pipeline alongside the format pipeline. The conference covered winning young audiences as a separate track, with the format shift tied to the audience shift.

India’s Print Anchor, and the Diversified Revenue Push

India is the country Orskov used to anchor his case for revenue diversification. He told the DMI audience that, barring India, where the news model is still print-heavy, there has been a global shift to digital, with revenue also consolidating in events, B2B platforms, grant funding, membership, and business content licensing. The Indian print market is the one major market where the global digital shift has not fully landed, which is also why Orskov used it as the test case for his now-or-never audience-first argument.

That mix is also the template. Orskov’s key takeaways, drawn from the same Delhi keynote, put balanced and diversified revenue models at the top of the list, ahead of AI control, ahead of audience-first, and ahead of format. For publishers whose AI use sits at the nascent end of Orskov’s map, the SPUR coalition, the technical standard, and the four pricing models are the components of a fifth revenue line. That line would pay for the journalism AI is now trained on and routed through, on terms publishers help set.

Orskov’s wider argument in Delhi is that no single revenue line carries the business. The five-point framework he opened with still runs through every section of the two-day programme. Per the DMI 2026 event page, the conference schedule ran with 35 or more speakers and 5 or more sponsors across the two days in New Delhi.