Louis Dreyfus on how Le Monde made AI pay on its own terms
The chief executive of France’s leading newspaper was the first publisher in the country to sign with OpenAI. He explains the deals, the governance behind them, and why he thinks the model leaves the
Xavier Niel, the telecoms billionaire who used to co-own Le Monde and still sits on its board, is among the largest backers of Mistral, France’s national AI champion. So, when the newspaper set out to license its journalism to the AI companies, the logical move would have been to sign with the home team. Le Monde went instead with a selection of American firms, OpenAI first among them, and its board member did nothing to stand in the way. “He did not tell me you must sign with this one,” Louis Dreyfus, the paper’s Chief Executive, told me. “That is not how he works.” No newspaper in Europe has done more to make AI pay, and Le Monde has done it on its own terms.
Le Monde was founded in December 1944, and journalists have owned a significant stake in it since the start. That inheritance shapes everything Dreyfus has built since three investors recapitalised the near-bankrupt group in 2010 and asked him to run it. The newsroom holds veto rights over strategic decisions. Since 2010, the group has been led by a duo, a Chief Executive and an Editorial Director who share authority; the Editorial Director today is Jérôme Fenoglio. No Editorial Director can be appointed without 60% support from the newsroom, or removed mid-term without its approval.
Employees hold a third of the seats on the supervisory board, and the controlling owner is a foundation barred from selling its shares without the journalists’ consent, a French cousin of the Scott Trust that sits behind the Guardian.
Dreyfus is unsentimental about why any of this matters commercially. “If people doubt your independence, they stop paying for the news, and 80% of my revenue comes from readers. I cannot afford to lose their trust.” He likens it to a fashion house, where the Artistic Director and Chief Executive each hold a veto over the other. “It is difficult for people who are not in our industry to understand. They ask who the boss is. Well, there are two bosses.”
He is not a journalist himself, a point he treats as an asset after 33 years in the business, some of it spent running magazines in New York at Hachette Filipacchi, where each title paired a publisher with an Editor-in-Chief and lived or died on that pairing.
The first to sign
Le Monde was the first French publisher to sign a content deal with OpenAI, and Dreyfus says it remains the only one. The opportunity came at a conference in Paris where Sam Altman was speaking. Dreyfus put up his hand. Altman had said ChatGPT needed reliable data; Dreyfus pointed out that producing reliable content was his business, and that he charged for it, so there was a contradiction in wanting the data but expecting it free. Altman said he was open to talking. An email a few weeks later opened negotiations that closed in two months, brisk for a platform deal.
The terms did the work Dreyfus wanted. All Le Monde content surfaced in ChatGPT carries the source and a link back to the site or app, driving traffic and revenue. Anything the paper did not want scraped was ring-fenced: wire copy from news agencies, photographs, and video made by its own teams. Perplexity approached afterwards, its position slightly different because it runs no model of its own, and Meta, a long-familiar partner, followed. None of the agreements is a revenue share. Each carries a minimum guarantee with a small variable on top, giving Le Monde a fixed additional income for several years. Because the group pays no dividends, Dreyfus can route that money back into the newsroom, hand it to journalists, or offset past losses.
Niel’s backing of Mistral never became a thumb on the scale. Dreyfus says there was no pressure to favour Mistral, or any French option. Niel lets the chief executives of his portfolio companies run them as they see fit; when Dreyfus mentioned he was talking to Altman, the response was to wish him luck. An investor spread across that many businesses, Dreyfus adds, learns to leave a profitable one alone, and Le Monde has been profitable for a decade.
He is careful about what he will not confirm. Asked about reported expiry dates and headline values, he said he had disclosed neither. “I never mentioned any deadline, nor the amount,” he said, and he expects the platforms to renew.
At the WAN-IFRA Congress in Marseille, Dreyfus had told the audience that ChatGPT referrals convert to subscriptions at 17 times the rate of Facebook. Dreyfus puts that partly down to the deal itself, since every citation carries a link out. He rejects the assumption that chatbots will sate readers and remove the need for the source. People do not subscribe to learn who won an election, he argued; they subscribe to understand a war.
“They subscribe to read long-form journalism from our reporters in Ukraine, in Sudan, in Gaza. ChatGPT cannot provide that, but it can be another form of distribution, and we are eager for that.”
The audience arriving this way skews young, which he reads as an option for the future. Paying subscribers tend to be over 25, and the cohort now living inside these tools will age into that bracket.
Paying the newsroom
Dreyfus is proudest of a different decision: sharing the licensing income with the people who produce the work. He treats the output used by the platforms as eligible for neighbouring rights, and under an agreement with the Le Monde trade union, journalists receive 25% of it. Ordinary copyright at the paper is split evenly between company and staff; neighbouring rights, being a different instrument, are set lower.
His reasoning is practical. France has few independent newsrooms with the money to hire, so a Le Monde journalist is likely to stay for a career. He does not want a company that grows richer while the newsroom feeding it does not. There was a trust dividend too: when the deal was announced, reporters went looking for their own bylines in ChatGPT to check for errors and found the company quick to correct them.
Volume, not price
When Dreyfus arrived in 2010, audited circulation was roughly 240,000 and the newsroom numbered 310.
Fifteen years on, Le Monde has more than 680,000 subscribers and 570 staff journalists, having nearly doubled its newsroom and nearly tripled its paid circulation. A target of a million total subscribers has been discussed, though he resists the idea that the paper has missed it. “I don’t know if we missed the target,” he said. It is a goal for some point after next year, and not being listed or paying dividends, he has time. The gap will close mainly on volume, not price; average revenue per subscriber has risen every year. The harder task is convincing readers who assume Le Monde is not for them that it is accessible and less elitist than its reputation. The danger is it’s a very profitable paper talking to a small audience.
Le Monde in English, launched in 2022, is the clearest test of that ambition. It carries about 16,000 subscribers, roughly half in the United States, priced low on purpose as a second subscription beside the New York Times or the Washington Post, not a replacement. Dreyfus frames the investment as marketing: the task is to make English-speaking readers aware that it exists, and he wants international readers to reach around 15% of the digital base over time, up from about a fifth today. The edition is not machine-made. Its translation runs on OpenAI, chosen for quality over DeepL, not for any commercial reason, with more than 10 English-speaking journalists on staff editing the output. It currently carries a few adverts, which Dreyfus expects to change, given an affluent audience that luxury brands want to reach.
Selling the playbook
The most unusual move is Le Monde’s decision to sell its own expertise. Le Monde Insights, run by Chief Digital Officer Lou Grasser, packages the group’s experience in building a digital subscription business; licensing know-how is harder to sell, bound up in non-disclosure agreements, but subscriptions are teachable. The group also sells Sirius, the content management system it built in-house from 2014 and named after the pen name Hubert Beuve-Méry used for his wartime columns. It runs at Le Temps in Switzerland and Nice-Matin in the South of France, and Grasser fields enquiries from foreign publishers most months. Building a CMS is awkward for a newspaper, as Dreyfus concedes, but the reward is a product made by and for journalists. He is relaxed about competing with the likes of Arc XP, the platform spun out of the Washington Post, reasoning that a publisher which built a tool for its own survival may read the market better than a technology company would. “Considering the trajectory of Le Monde, I think people can trust us,” he said. To him, publishers in different markets are not competitors at all.
Dreyfus has run Le Monde for 15 years, long enough to have steered the last great transition and to be well into this one. He thinks AI is the larger shift and the more interesting one, because this time the paper is early rather than catching up. When he took over, its digital operation already existed but leaned on free content; now he has the chance to shape the rules before they set.
What he has not answered, and perhaps cannot yet, is whether a business this dependent on reader trust can absorb the tools it has let in. The deals bring money and, for the moment, traffic. They also hand a generation its news through an interface Le Monde does not own. Dreyfus is betting that readers will still want the reporter in Gaza and will keep paying to reach them. In Marseille, he sounded weary of being asked about AI. But few publishers have engaged it this early, or so thoroughly on their own terms.