About this demo
What the hub is, the business idea behind it, how to read the pages, and what is real and what is simulated.
The idea in plain words
More and more news is read by software on a person's behalf: an assistant that prepares a briefing, a research tool, a company's own AI. Today that software takes news from the open web and pays nothing for it. This hub shows the alternative: The Canadian Press sells access to its journalism on terms. Each buyer holds a licence, each answer names its sources, each request is counted, and the count becomes the invoice.
The wire business stays as it is. The hub is a new channel beside it, with limits that stop a hub product from replacing a wire subscription.
How to read the demo in five steps
How news data is charged for today
The market already charges for news data in six ways. The last column shows how each one appears in this hub.
| Way of charging | How it works | Who sells this way today | In this hub |
|---|---|---|---|
| Subscription | A recurring fee for a feed or an archive | News agencies, research databases | Monthly fee on a plan |
| Seats | A fee per user, per year | Monitoring and PR tools | Used by the PR plan |
| Per-use metering | A small fee per request or per excerpt | AI marketplaces | The core of the hub: each request is counted |
| Anchor licence | An annual fee from an AI company | News agencies with AI platforms | Possible on the same ledger |
| Marketplace share | A share of revenue per citation | AI search programmes | Revenue by content owner, on the operations page |
| Dataset product | A dataset with a contract and a price | Data and analytics vendors | Policy Trace, Election Trace, Coverage Index |
What is real and what is simulated
The platform is real and running. The content and the commercial details stand in for The Canadian Press's own.
| Part of the demo | Status | What that means |
|---|---|---|
| The platform: search, answers with sources, licences, counting, screening, the API and AI tool access | Real | Running on Google Cloud in Canada and reachable at this address |
| The scale: more than five million items indexed | Real | Loaded and searchable; the count on the storefront comes from the index |
| The content | Simulated | Public sample content (Wikinews and Wikipedia). Nothing here is Canadian Press journalism |
| The rights classes on each item | Simulated | Assigned by rule to show how owned, freelance and partner content are treated differently |
| The dates on reference articles | Simulated | Spread across 2010 to 2025 so the age limits have something to act on |
| The customers and their plans | Simulated | Five sample organisations; no real customer is represented |
| The prices | Illustrative | Chosen from public reference points; The Canadian Press's own rate cards would replace them |
Words used on these pages
| Word | Meaning here |
|---|---|
| Product | A scope, a licence and a price, sold to a kind of buyer |
| Scope | How old an item must be before a plan may show it: real time, older than 7 days, or older than 90 days |
| Rights class | Who owns an item: The Canadian Press, a freelancer, or a partner such as AP |
| Attribution | The source line that stays with the content wherever it is used |
| Call | One request to the hub: a question, a browse, or reading an article |
| Ledger | The record of every call, with the stories it cited; invoices and revenue shares are built from it |
| API | The way a company's own software asks the hub, with a key in place of a person at a screen |
| MCP | Model Context Protocol, the standard way an AI assistant connects to a service such as this one |
| Sovereign | Stored and processed in Canada, with keys held by The Canadian Press or the buyer, and access that is restricted and logged |