The Economist licenses its content to enterprise clients’ private LLMs
By Jessica Davies • October 16, 2025 •
Publishers are increasingly licensing decades of archived reporting to corporate clients’ private LLMs — a potential path to recurring, usage-based revenue that monetizes evergreen content in the zero-click era.
Welcome to LLM deals 2.0. Publishers aren’t just cutting lump-sum “training” agreements anymore, they’re widening the remit to include usage-based licensing for RAG, private enterprise deployments and even collective licensing via intermediaries.
The Economist is among those to start licensing its content this way — having opened its API to corporate clients with their own data ring-fenced LLMs this August.
The Financial Times has also opened its archive to enterprise clients’ private LLMs. Meanwhile, Dow Jones’ Factiva unit licenses to around 30,000 news publishers across the globe and resells the content to its own enterprise clients for B2B purposes, including the creation of ring-fenced, private LLMs that RAG content from the publisher network.
Opening its API gives The Economist’s enterprise clients the ability to make use of its content in a more versatile way than simply reading articles in an app or on its website, according to The Economist’s president Luke Bradley-Jones.
“They’re able to start to query and access our content in a much more dynamic way and using other sources they may have available to them, but all on our internal closed user bases,” he told Digiday.
He wouldn’t divulge which enterprise clients had tapped this opportunity, or how much revenue it’s made this way, but described it as an “exciting” growth lever and added that it was “already growing at a really good lick.”
The Economist has an extensive business-to-business unit which incorporates Economist Intelligence (provides corporates and governments with forecasts and industry analysis); Economist Impact (partnerships and thought leadership for corporate/NGO clients and has had project sponsors including SAP and Cisco) and its B2B membership network Economist Corporate Network, which has over 3,000 individual members at large corporations across Asia.
Bradley-Jones said that each enterprise deal brings in thousands of new users and expands the publisher’s reach, making it an effective way to grow its audience too. “Once you get yourself embedded in companies’ workflows and internal platforms, you can become quite essential,” said Bradley-Jones. “And you actually see a really long-term engagement and retention rate amongst those companies. So as a means of establishing direct relationships, not just with customers on the B to C side, but also through corporate partnerships, that’s a really great way of establishing direct relationships, which should endure for the long run,” he added.
As AI search eats the open web, enterprise LLMs are creating a parallel market behind the firewall — where provenance and permissions matter more than clicks. Exact data charting the rise in corporate enterprises’ private LLMs is scarce, but there are various reports to show enterprise AI is maturing fast, having moved from experimentation to implementation. In 2024, RAG adoption within enterprise businesses surged from 31 percent to 51 percent year over year, per Menlo Ventures’ 2024 State of Generative AI report. That’s a strong signal that companies are wiring LLMs to their own and licensed external content, like news archives.
The Financial Times has also seized the opportunity, opening its archive to private LLM deployments and seeing strong interest from enterprises. The publisher confirmed it has begun to tap this new revenue stream, though it declined to share specifics on which clients.
While many LLMs rely on unlicensed, scraped data, there is a clear use case emerging, with clients requiring quality, trusted sources that can be integrated into their own internal AI solutions, allowing them to make better business decisions, stressed James Mann, managing director of FT Professional, the FT’s B2B service which provides premium access to its content to organizations, governments and educational institutions.
“We see great potential in extending our FT Professional licence agreements to give additional rights to use archive and live content, and we’re delighted to already be working with a number of trusted clients in this area,” he said.
