If AI companies pay for your reporting, half of it is yours
Language models learn from journalism and quote it in their answers. When a company pays Black Executive Journal for that, half of the money goes to the contributors whose work is being used.
What counts as AI licensing income
- Training
- A fee to include the archive in the data a model is trained on.
- Live use
- Fees when an AI product retrieves and quotes articles to answer questions.
- Marketplaces
- Income from content marketplaces that sell access to AI developers.
- Crawling
- Pay-per-crawl fees charged to AI crawlers that read the site.
How the contributors’ half is shared
Each payment the journal receives is split 50/50 after any platform or processing fees: half to contributors, half to the journal. The contributors’ half is divided in one of two ways:
- By reported use. When the licensee reports which articles were used and how often, your share follows the use of your articles.
- By share of the archive. When a deal covers the whole archive without usage reports, your share follows how much of the licensed archive you wrote, measured by article length.
Co-authors split an article’s share equally. Your AI licensing share appears in the same ledger as your membership earnings, names the licensee and the type of deal, and is paid in the same monthly payout.
It’s your choice
AI licensing is opt-in. You turn it on from your Account page, and only contributors who have opted in are paid a share. You can turn it off again there.
Where this stands today
The sharing rules and the accounting are in place. No AI licensing income has been received or paid out yet, and the journal can’t promise when a licensee will pay or how much. When income does arrive, this is how it will be divided, and you’ll see each allocation in your dashboard.
The full terms are in the payout policy.
Apply to contribute
Tell us what you cover and show us three pieces. An editor reads every application.