Publishers Facing Existential Threat From AI, Cloudflare CEO Says (axios.com) 43
Publishers face an existential threat in the AI era and need to take action to make sure they are fairly compensated for their content, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told Axios at an event in Cannes on Thursday. From a report: Search traffic referrals have plummeted as people increasingly rely on AI summaries to answer their queries, forcing many publishers to reevaluate their business models. Ten years ago, Google crawled two pages for every visitor it sent a publisher, per Prince.
He said that six months ago:
For Google that ratio was 6:1
For OpenAI, it was 250:1
For Anthropic, it was 6,000:1
Now:
For Google, it's 18:1
For OpenAI, it's 1,500:1
For Anthropic, it's 60,000:1
Between the lines: "People aren't following the footnotes," Prince said.
He said that six months ago:
For Google that ratio was 6:1
For OpenAI, it was 250:1
For Anthropic, it was 6,000:1
Now:
For Google, it's 18:1
For OpenAI, it's 1,500:1
For Anthropic, it's 60,000:1
Between the lines: "People aren't following the footnotes," Prince said.
How I use the Internet (Score:3)
"What was War and Peace about?" "Explain linear algebra" "What is the history of the Persian people?" "What is the relationship between Dasien and Das Mann?" "What did J.L. Goddard do?" "How do I build a skyscraper?"
If the reply is more than 1 sentence, what's the point? I just want THE answer!
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A: No.
(this answer works for every one of these queries, btw. Why waste your time asking DIFFERENT questions when the answer is always the same? Type less, enjoy more!)
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Brevity is the soul of wit, as ChatGPT once said.
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Explaining linear algebra in one sentence? That's a long sentence.
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Status quo has changed (Score:3)
That business model was advertising, of course. As much as I hate the "AI" hype, I do hope that it will help kill some of the poor quality, shocker-type publishers. They deserve to disappear for good.
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Absolutely. There is so much regurgitated muck out there that serves as nothing more than a placeholder to show ads. THAT business model is long past overdue for extermination.
Sites with real content will be fine. Sites that exist to facilitate the business the company does, will be fine. Sites that are first and foremost about advertising...they're the ones that will go away, and good riddance. Slashdot itself will be fine, because it's about the articles and the conversation. AI can't replace that.
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... and the conversation. AI can't replace that.
But I'll bet some small shell scripts can. :-)
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Sites with real content are increasingly disappearing altogether or behind paywalls (most news sites and magazines), in walled gardens (facebook, insta, X, threads, bluesky , fedi, etc) or videos (yt , twitter).
The web as we knew it 10+ years ago (or maybe even 5) i.e. articles, blogs, forums (and cousins like stack overflow, maybe twitter when it was accessible to search engines) is going the way of the dodo.
Here's a paywalled medium article about it that i only read 3 paragraphs of because i don't have a
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I don't see a problem with walled gardens. If the content is compelling enough, people will sign up for an account. Same for paywalls.
Yes, it's sad, the good old days of the wild west internet are gone. These days, civilization has sprung up and you have to actually make money to run your site, and people worry about privacy and overzealous indexers, including AI. Those free-roaming days when SMTP required no authentication whatsoever, are gone.
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So if I google for the answer to a question, I could either a) use the AI summary which takes 10 seconds of reading - or b) spend 2 or 3 minutes per query opening the paywall, signing up for an account, verifying my e-mail address, potentially entering in payment details... just for a chance the article will answer your question and not just be 5 pages of waffle with 2 good sentences in it as they so often are.
And people wonder why these sites are dying? For me I am staggered they even show up on
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If your question has been answered 100 times around the internet, enabling AI to provide your answer, then your paywalled site isn't providing you much value in its ability to also answer that question. Questions that aren't already answered elsewhere--*those* are the ones you'd be motivated to use a paywalled site to get help.
Sites that do nothing more than provide answers to questions already answered 100 times elsewhere, aren't providing something valuable that should be preserved.
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As long as paywalls sell monthly subscriptions, they get mostly boomers. Who wants to consume only news from the two sites one can afford to pay for? People want to pick random articles, and if you don't offer them to unlock them for a few cents, they will look for free alternatives, not for a $20 monthly plan.
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no... they won't. In fact those will hurt the most, as their content is slurped up by indexing bots and their content is being served by LLMs, with zero visitors coming to their site
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You and I have a different idea of "real" content.
People use AI to answer questions. So if your site answers questions, you should hide it behind a login at the very least, so AI can't scoop it up. If you don't, sorry, that's on you.
People don't use AI to read the news. If the AI summary of the news is sufficient, then you aren't really reading the news. Those who really want the news, will still go to the new site, if it's not paywalled.
People don't use AI for in-depth research, but for quick answers. So t
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yes that's how the internet works. Put all your content behind login walls. That will drive traffic up from incoming sources...
nope.
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Right! So until now, these companies have thought they could have it both ways. Share everything with the web crawlers, but block real users with a paywall. Tease users with the relevant search result, and then yank it away until they jump through hoops. The advent of AI has effectively broken this business model, and good riddance.
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What it's going to kill is things like useful guides on programming or home maintenance or history or math or anything of value.
Unfortunately every aspect of our civilization has become antisocial so I don't think there is any way to stop it.
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If the guide is so useful, why shouldn't I click? A guide is more than an answer and I know that. If I only need the answer the search helps me not having to scroll over 2/3 of the guide to find the right sentence. If I want more, I'll read the guide from top to bottom. Guides are not competing with search. Some FAQ sites will struggle. But they already do because their users are arrogant toward new users, if you know what I mean.
Re:Status quo has changed (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps be careful what you wish for.
The web's current advertising business model has a couple parts. A search engine shows an ad next to organic results and directs traffic to content creators who show ads (most of which happen to also be offered by the search engine company... what monopoly?).
The basic business model is that advertisers pay content producers and the platform takes a cut.
The search + display business model, together with the web making much easier ability to switch between content producers (primarily magazines and newspapers) blew apart the old print media model which was subscriptions + ads. Because of this, many publications struggled to get enough subscription revenue to keep the doors open and/or greatly consolidated. People don't want to pay for what they feel they can get for free. That's made advertising revenue paramount for most content producers, and leads to the nasty ad farms that I also detest.
The thing is that LLM search engines require content that is reasonably fresh, and the content producers have to make money somehow or they'll stop making content. Right now, LLM search engines are showing no ads whatsoever, and their responses are based on uhhh "uncompensated" content. They're also all operating at enormous losses right now, with "awesomeness" or "AGI" as the answer for how they will make money.
To replace the existing business model, the LLM search engines need to find a way to direct payments to content producers so that these people keep making content. And that's before the content producers win back payments for their "uncompensated" content. Maybe OpenAI and Claude think their fancy "reasoning agents" can synthesize the content and cut out the content producers. There may be some modest opportunities to do that, but I have a hard time believing they can cut out content producers altogether - nothing I've seen suggests that LLMs can translate meatspace into digital content in any way that makes sense, much less is interesting or compelling to a human audience.
That means that LLM search engines either need to get the advertisers to pay them directly and send the money downstream to content producers (e.g. through some form of licensing). Maybe they embed the display ads into the LLM results (a la paid search). Alternately - more realistically - they need vastly larger subscription revenues to license content and still make money. That in turn requires a large proportion of the people who used to be the free users in a freemium model to become paid subscribers.
Let's make the absolutely heroic assumption that OpenAI manages to capture paid subscribers at the same rate as Netflix (~75%). Netflix's revenues are ~$40B, while Google's are $350B - an order of magnitude difference. To get anywhere near the revenues that Google makes, the average OpenAI/Claude subscriber would need to pay some 10x what a Netflix subscriber does. I find it awfully hard to see who all those people paying $100+ a month are. 85% of Prime Video subscribers are ad-supported, and Prime Video is just an extension of Amazon's modestly profitable sales business and highly profitable cloud infrastructure business.
And that's without DeepSeek, LLaMa and everything else on HuggingFace competing with what OpenAI and Claude are producing.
It also means you should expect LLM search engines start inserting ads or even monetizing placement into responses pretty soon. But as long as the LLM response is the end of the query, it's hard to see how anyone wants to pay to be placed, or how paid content doesn't erode the idea the LLM "summarized what the internet says".
I find it hard to see an economic path forward for what OpenAI seems to want to do, much less plausible revenues to justify the hype and valuation.
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The current AI search pages (and any form that would be useful to users) only show summaries of the pages and provide source links. You can still get users to your page, if your page provides good information beyond what's in the summary. You won't get users from every summary, sometimes they only want to know the basics, but if someone wants to know more, you get a link.
That also works for shops. The first question may be what's the best hardware to run an AI model at home. The second question is who has t
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Google is still mostly an ad-provision driven business, and it is fuelling that business on a relatively low volume of content scraping to actual eyeballs visiting the site and viewing the ads it providing. The cost of providing the data to Google's craweler is, one would hope, largely recovered in the ad revenue generated and other financial benefits from those actually
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Where are you getting that from? LLMs are making it cheaper than ever before to create poor quality clickbait sites.
The sites that are going to go are the ones that are expensive to maintain, from real news sites to personal blogs. Yes, personal blogs: if an expert writes a description of a problem they solved today in the middle of the forest, and there are only trees around to read it, is there any point?
We are so fucked. SO FUCKED. And here we are with half of Slashdot cheering LLM on as some kind of fuc
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This is bullshit. This is like proclaiming that all the houses are going to fall down because we invented a nail-gun.
LLMs allow me to hammer out a design framework and project flow in minutes. I'm still doing my own creating, my own art, and my own writing, I just don't have to fuck around doing a lot of the boring shit I don't enjoy doing. I can bounce ideas off of it without worrying about somebody stealing my ideas, and it sometimes pushes me in directions I hadn't considered before. Doing outlines and
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There's already a clear divide between AI slop and real content online, but I don't think it's going to lead to a content crash like the videogame crash of the 80s.
It's going to be worse. The problem is that those who cannot without the LLM's help are eventually going to say the LLM's output is "good enough" and that will drop the value of everything above it. I.e. It won't matter if you can do it yourself without the LLM or not. People will only pay for what the LLM produces and not a red cent more, and the LLM can produce it at the push of a button so it's a fungible good. Replaced completely in seconds, which means you aren't living on your work anymore the second
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Maybe it could also kill the user tracking industry.
Imagine you need to optimize your page to be relevant to an AI summary for the content it provides (and be ranked as high quality content).
Then you don't need to find out what your users had for lunch to make money from advertising, but convince and AI that your content is good. In the best case, convince it by having good content. I guess the AI is less worried about the sites trying to find out which numbers it crunched for lunch. That's a win for the us
why start now? (Score:3, Informative)
"Publishers face an existential threat in the AI era and need to take action to make sure they are fairly compensated for their content..."
Since when? Their business model is clearly to have Google bring them customers, then send them a page that includes 3rd party advertising. Nowhere in that plan is fair compensation for the content, or even any compensation at all. It sounds like the threat is Google no longer bringing them viewers, they should have been planning for that all along.
The threat of AI is making their content of no value at all. Join the club.
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Also they aren't relying on Google for customers. Google has a practical Monopoly on discovering content on the internet. They are utterly dependent on Google for customers. That is a very dif
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The threat of AI is making their content of no value at all. Join the club.
OK, then who will make the content that feeds the LLM?
Most the content that has been even lightly copy-edited, much less reviewed for clarity or coherence, comes from content creators who are making enough money to cover hosting, have a few editorial employees, and maybe pay a little to contributors. Those may be news sites (don't think CNN, think of Ratchet and Wrench or Tom's Hardware) or they may be Substacks, or YouTubers or even influencers, but somehow they're making enough money to make it worth thei
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Customers being served ads was the compensation. You're talking about two sides of the same coin.
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> It sounds like the threat is Google no longer bringing them viewers, they should have been planning for that all along.
Worse, Google is *taking* all of their viewers.
If Google search results go shit and you get less traffic than normal, that's one thing. If your traffic actively goes to someone else, that's an entirely different thing.
I agree there's a lot of low-quality crap, plastered with ads around. That can all die off and really nothing of value is lost. However, the good stuff (by whatever meas
SEO'd search will no longer send me to ad farms? (Score:2)
The joke is on the AI companies: I run my open weights LLMs locally.
Let's fix the headline (Score:2)
s/Publishers/Humanity/
FTFY
Not really (Score:2)
This is a temporary crisis only for the publishers that actually add value. Because AI cannot do that. For the rest, nothing of value will be lost.
Enshitify my mind! (Score:2)
I don't need facts. I don't need sources. I will take what the algorithm gives me and suck it.
Do they not remember? (Score:1)
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Because "They" is hundreds of companies that dream of becoming the next Anthropic. And not sharing their data among each other, of course.