Publishers Facing Existential Threat From AI, Cloudflare CEO Says (axios.com) 23
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!
Re: (Score:2)
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.
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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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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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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.
Re:Status quo has changed (Score:4, Informative)
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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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
why start now? (Score:4, Interesting)
"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.
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)