The publishing industry has spent
the past two decades struggling to adjust to the internet, as print circulation
has plummeted and tech companies have gobbled up rivers of advertising revenue.
اضافة اعلان
Now come the chatbots.New artificial intelligence tools from
Google and Microsoft give answers to search queries in full paragraphs rather
than a list of links. Many publishers worry that far fewer people will click
through to news sites as a result, shrinking traffic — and, by extension,
revenue.
The new AI search tools remain in limited
release, so publishers such as Condé Nast and Vice have not yet seen an effect
on their business. But in an effort to prevent the industry from being upended
without their input, many are pulling together task forces to weigh options,
making the topic a priority at industry conferences and, through a trade organization,
planning a push to be paid for the use of their content by chatbots.
“Search has been the mainstay of the publishing business on the internet.”
“You could essentially call this the
Wikipedia-ization of a lot of information,” said Bryan Goldberg, chief
executive of BDG, which publishes lifestyle and culture websites including
Bustle, Nylon, and Romper. “You’re bringing together Wikipedia-style answers to
an infinite number of questions, and that’s just going to nuke many corners of
the open web.”
Searching, publishing symbiosisContent publishers have an uneven but
largely reciprocal relationship with search engines. The search sites benefit
from having trusted sources of information in the results, and the publishers
benefit from the traffic to their sites that the search engines generate.
Search traffic from Google accounts for
half of overall visits, or more, to many sites, said Brian Morrissey, who
writes The Rebooting, a media business newsletter.
“Search has been the mainstay of the
publishing business on the internet,” he said.
Kyle Sutton, director of search and product
at newspaper publisher Gannett, said the relationship had, until now, been
mutually beneficial.
“While all search results are taking from our
data and, from our perspective, crawling our content, aggregating our content,
there is the return there of them driving traffic to our site,” Sutton said.
“So I think that relationship is kind of first and foremost what we want to see
maintained.”
A new way of consuming informationThe new offerings could change all of that,
said Barbara Peng, president of digital news brand Insider. Microsoft is
incorporating the chatbot into Bing, its search engine. Google’s search
chatbot, Bard, is separate from its main search engine.
“Part of the reason that traffic is up is that we don’t just do a good job of answering the question, but we provide links”
“This will be revolutionary,” Peng said,
adding, “It will take some time, and there is a good portion of hype mixed in
there, too, but I do think it will change the relationship people have with
finding and consuming information.”
News Corp’s chief executive, Robert
Thomson, who for years has led a push to get tech companies to pay for news
content, said in an interview: “If you don’t get out early and define what the
issues are and the obligations, then you will find yourself on the defensive.”
Negotiating content usageThomson said tech companies should pay to
use publishers’ content to produce results from AI chatbots. The chatbots
generate their results by synthesizing information from the internet. He added
that News Corp, which owns The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post among
other outlets, was in talks with “a couple of companies” about the use of its
content, though he declined to specify which ones.
“There is a recognition at their end that
discussions are necessary,” he said.
Roger Lynch, chief executive of Condé Nast,
which owns titles including Vogue, Vanity Fair and Glamour, agreed that content
creators should be compensated. He said one upside for publishers was that
audiences might soon find it harder to know what information to trust on the
web, so “they’ll have to go to trusted sources”.
The News Media Alliance, which represents
2,000 outlets around the world, including The New York Times, is working on
principles that it says should guide the use and development of AI systems, and
regulation around them, to protect publishers. According to a draft, the
principles say the use of publisher content for the development of AI should
require “a negotiated agreement and explicit permission”.
“This will be revolutionary. It will take some time, and there is a good portion of hype mixed in there, too, but I do think it will change the relationship people have with finding and consuming information.”
The guidelines also call on tech companies
to “provide sufficient value” for high-quality, trustworthy journalism content
and brands, and state that any new laws or regulations that make exceptions to
copyright law for AI must not weaken protections for publishers.
The click trailYusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s head of Bing, said
in an interview that directing users to click through to publishers was “a top
goal”. And although the new Bing has been around for less than two months, the
data was “already showing that we are driving, in fact, more traffic to
publishers”, he said.
“Part of the reason that traffic is up is
that we don’t just do a good job of answering the question, but we provide
links,” he said, pointing to footnotes in the answers on Bing’s chatbot that
show the information’s source.
Mehdi said Microsoft was at the beginning
of its conversations with publishers around the new search. “It is our
intention that we would like to share incremental revenue that happens in that
chat experience,” he said.
Microsoft is considering showing more
articles from a certain publisher below the footnote or selling ads against the
links in the chat answer and splitting the proceeds, Mehdi said.
A Google spokesperson said in a statement that
the company was “deeply committed to supporting a healthy and vibrant news
ecosystem” and would put a priority on sending traffic.
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