This week Getty Images announced a licensing deal with OpenAI (having already struck a similar deal with Perplexity late last year). Its share price surged.
I find that really interesting because of what it suggests about where value actually sits in the AI economy.
For years, we've been told that data is the new oil. Most people assumed the winners would be the companies building the AI models. The Googles, the OpenAIs, the Anthropics.
But what if the bigger winners end up being those who own the oil fields? The newspaper archives. The music catalogues. The image libraries. The research databases. The proprietary content that AI needs in order to be useful.
The same content that sparked three years of legal battles. The New York Times sued. Musicians protested. Photographers took it to court. Getty itself was in the middle of it.
Which makes the Getty-OpenAI deal this week all the more striking.
The same company that took Stability AI to court over copyright infringement is now licensing its content to OpenAI on its own terms.
The first phase of AI was about consuming content — fast, at scale. And whether that was legal is still being argued in courts. The second phase might be about paying for it.
Which means the value of original, earned, published content just went up. Not down.
For founders thinking about visibility — getting into the FT, Finextra, the trade press — this is part of why it matters more now than it did three years ago. Your earned media isn't just reaching human readers. It's feeding the systems that will define who gets cited, who gets found, and who gets trusted.
The content owners and might just turn out to be the quiet winners of the AI era.