Market questions, answered with sources

Reported unit prices run from $0.001 per word of generic text and 2 to 16 cents per stock image to $1 to $4 per minute of video footage, $5,000 per book title in one Microsoft offer, and $70 to $150 per hour for expert graders.

Almost never. Programmes that pay for company records publish ranges per company, set mainly by headcount and years of history: Replay $10K to $1M+, Handshake AI $100K to $4M+, Polyshares typically $100K to $2M.

They are marketing figures. Replay's terms say they are not an offer, and Handshake AI and micro1 call their estimates indicative. Closed deals with disclosed values are rarer and listed separately.

Among licences, Reddit's contracts total $203.0 million over two to three years, and News Corp's deal with OpenAI could exceed $250 million over five years. The Anthropic book settlement (at least $1.5 billion) is damages, not a licence.

Yes. Google paid $10 million for Spirit Airlines' data in bankruptcy, including 100 million emails and 500 million Teams messages. Smaller reported figures include about $25,000 for one startup codebase.

Most licences are private contracts. Values surface through company filings (Wiley, Informa), court records, or press reports that rely on unnamed sources, and many of those give only a floor.

Programmes with public terms include Replay, Handshake AI, micro1, Polyshares, Turing, Grepped, Mercor, Troveo, Pewter and SimpleClosure. Most supply AI labs they do not name.

Three shapes: a single payment (Turing, up to $1M), payment on delivery or approval (Mercor, Polyshares, Grepped), or a recurring share (Replay on top of upfront cash, Troveo on every resale).

Some say no (Polyshares, Troveo, Mercor). SimpleClosure takes an unpublished success percentage, Datarade charges 15% to 30%, and Pewter is paid by the licensing firm. Grepped does not publish its fee.

Programmes describe building reinforcement-learning environments where AI agents practise real tasks. micro1, Ooak Data and Surge AI all describe this use.

Large content licences often are not: Informa and Calliope Networks describe theirs as non-exclusive. Pewter lists some perpetual exclusive deals, and Troveo says most of its data is exclusive to it. Most programmes do not say.

It varies: Slack starts deleting year-old messages when a paid plan ends, Zendesk deletes 90 days after cancellation, Microsoft 365 within 180 days, Atlassian 60 days after deactivation. Google stops exporting Gmail at once.

The glossary defines SFT, RLHF, RL environments, eval sets, licence types, revenue shares, clawbacks and the difference between pseudonymised and anonymous data.