Traffic is down across the media industry, and AI is the main reason why.  That was the throughline connecting the second-quarter earnings from The New York Times, News Corp, USA Today Co., and People Inc., all of which were reported this week.  In response to the declines, each company is implementing some version of the same three-part playbook: licensing their content to AI companies where they can; suing or blocking where they cannot; and squeezing more revenue out of the readers they have.  In describing his approach to the problem, News Corp CEO Robert Thomson has called the strategy a "woo and sue" framework. When combined with a focus on increasing average revenue per user, the resulting strategy reflects the primary ways in which leading digital media firms are responding to AI disruption. Traffic blues The starkest declines in traffic came from People Inc., the publisher formerly known as Dotdash Meredith, which said that core sessions declined 22% in the second quarter.  Executives at the firm noted that Google Search now accounts for roughly 21% of its traffic, down from about 66% historically. "You can see the impact of declining sessions in our numbers," said CEO Neil Vogel. "They would be better but for it, but we're still working through it." USA Today Co. reported a similar dynamic, with average monthly visitors falling to 158 million in the second quarter, down from 180 million in the first, driven partly by falling referrals from Google Discover. The Times, for its part, pointed to AI Overviews and answer engines like ChatGPT as headwinds reducing referral traffic to publishers generally, even as its own subscriber numbers kept climbing. Woo and sue On the "woo" side, all four companies are striking licensing deals with AI companies, though the maturity of those arrangements varies.  News Corp has the most developed licensing portfolio, including an estimated $250 million, five-year agreement with OpenAI and a separate partnership with Meta.  USA Today Co. has licensing deals with Meta and Microsoft, though executives have cautioned that this revenue is "lumpy" and unpredictable.  The Times' own generative AI licensing deal, with Amazon, dates back to May 2025, but it remains its clearest example of the strategy. People Inc. said licensing revenue grew 23% in the second quarter, part of a broader push into non-session revenue that also includes Apple News and events. The "sue" side is mostly News Corp. The company is pursuing litigation against Perplexity and Brave over content use. And through its ownership of the HarperCollins book publishing business, it expects to receive a share of the $1.5 billion settlement Anthropic reached with authors and publishers, according to Thomson. "They illegally, gormlessly sourced and repurposed copyrighted material for sale to third-party businesses," Thomson said of Brave. People Inc. is taking a different approach, pushing to get Google to separate its search and AI crawlers rather than pursuing litigation outright. (It is separately suing Google over antitrust concerns related to its adtech business.) The Times, meanwhile, is still pursuing its 2023 copyright suit against OpenAI and Microsoft, a case that has already cost the company more than $28 million in legal fees, according to court filings. Pursue ARPU If licensing revenue is both small and erratic, the more reliable growth area this quarter was generating more revenue from existing users.  The Times posted the clearest results on this front, growing digital subscription revenue 16.4% to $408 million. In total, the company added 280,000 net new digital subscribers, and digital advertising revenue rose 20.7%.  USA Today Co. reported record digital-only subscription ARPU, a result of deliberately pushing more paywall encounters even as raw traffic fell, according to the company. People Inc., meanwhile, reported that revenue per session actually rose despite the 22% drop in core sessions, with non-session revenue—including subscriptions, commerce, and events—up 16% and largely offsetting the traffic decline. News Corp is the outlier in this bucket. Its strong quarter was driven less by consumer subscriptions than by Dow Jones' business-to-business portfolio, digital real estate, and a $643 million share buyback. The buyback program, which is predicated on the belief that its stock is “materially undervalued,” according to Thomson, is a different way of betting on the same core thesis, a conviction that the company will emerge from this disruptive moment even stronger.  Taken together, the main lesson of the earnings this week is that AI licensing remains a promising but unproven revenue stream, while subscriptions and improved user monetization are producing results in the near-term. Whether that balance tilts will be one of the more important storylines to watch in th