Publishers Demand 'AI Overview' Traffic Stats from Google, Alleging 'Forced' Deals (theguardian.com) 19
AI Overviews have lowered click-through traffic to Daily Mail sites by as much as 89%, the publisher told a UK government body that regulates competition. So they've joined other top news organizations (including Guardian Media Group and the magazine trade body the Periodical Publishers Association) in asking the regulators "to make Google more transparent and provide traffic statistics from AI Overview and AI Mode to publishers," reports the Guardian:
Publishers — already under financial pressure from soaring costs, falling advertising revenues, the decline of print and the wider trend of readers turning away from news — argue that they are effectively being forced by Google to either accept deals, including on how content is used in AI Overview and AI Mode, or "drop out of all search results", according to several sources... In recent years, Google Discover, which feeds users articles and videos tailored to them based on their past online activity, has replaced search as the main source of click-throughs to content. However, David Buttle, founder of the consultancy DJB Strategies, says the service, which is also tied to publishers' overall search deals, does not deliver the quality traffic that most publishers need to drive their long-term strategies. "Google Discover is of zero product importance to Google at all," he says. "It allows Google to funnel more traffic to publishers as traffic from search declines ... Publishers have no choice but to agree or lose their organic search. It also tends to reward clickbaity type content. It pulls in the opposite direction to the kind of relationship publishers want."
Meanwhile, publishers are fighting a wider battle with AI companies seeking to plunder their content to train their large language models. The creative industry is intensively lobbying the government to ensure that proposed legislation does not allow AI firms to use copyright-protected work without permission, a move that would stop the "value being scraped" out of the £125bn sector. Some publishers have struck bilateral licensing deals with AI companies — such as the FT, the German media group Axel Springer, the Guardian and the Nordic publisher Schibsted with the ChatGPT maker OpenAI — while others such as the BBC have taken action against AI companies alleging copyright theft. "It is a two-pronged attack on publishers, a sort of pincer movement," says Chris Duncan, a former News UK and Bauer Media senior executive who now runs a media consultancy, Seedelta. "Content is disappearing into AI products without serious remuneration, while AI summaries are being integrated into products so there is no need to click through, effectively taking money from both ends. It is an existential crisis."
"At the moment the AI and tech community are showing no signs of supporting publisher revenue," says the chief executive of the UK's Periodical Publishers Association...
Meanwhile, publishers are fighting a wider battle with AI companies seeking to plunder their content to train their large language models. The creative industry is intensively lobbying the government to ensure that proposed legislation does not allow AI firms to use copyright-protected work without permission, a move that would stop the "value being scraped" out of the £125bn sector. Some publishers have struck bilateral licensing deals with AI companies — such as the FT, the German media group Axel Springer, the Guardian and the Nordic publisher Schibsted with the ChatGPT maker OpenAI — while others such as the BBC have taken action against AI companies alleging copyright theft. "It is a two-pronged attack on publishers, a sort of pincer movement," says Chris Duncan, a former News UK and Bauer Media senior executive who now runs a media consultancy, Seedelta. "Content is disappearing into AI products without serious remuneration, while AI summaries are being integrated into products so there is no need to click through, effectively taking money from both ends. It is an existential crisis."
"At the moment the AI and tech community are showing no signs of supporting publisher revenue," says the chief executive of the UK's Periodical Publishers Association...
News entertainment sites are the bane of society. (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
While often more truthful than some will admit, the format tends to regularly bend reporting for profits, corporate needs.
Well, since they are entertainment websites they will make the content entertaining, right? And that implies writing it with a spin. Identifying your content as humor (legally, as parody) implies this spin, makes it social commentary, and by law grants it an exemption to infringement and defamation cases.
Re: (Score:2)
Spammers complain about working spam filters.
Wait until recent AI will be used to sort E-Mails. "Nooo, users REALLY want to read our newsletter, why do you sort it under unimportant mass mail?"
It's a denial of service (Score:4, Interesting)
AI model builders will just delay longer and longer knowing that those depending on click advertising revenue, book sales, music sales, etc. will either go out of business or settle for a much lower amount.
The question of AI model arms race for future self-defense and battlefield tactic will keep the government busy during this time while the licensing and royalty payments are figured out.
Equitable Treatment (Score:2)
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Daily Mail (Score:5, Funny)
AI Overviews have lowered click-through traffic to Daily Mail sites by as much as 89%, the publisher told a UK government body that regulates competition.
Finally a killer app for AI.
What if.... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not suggesting this would ever happen.....but.....
What if Google and other major search providers decided to not index or provide search results for any "news" sites at all, and constrained their results to "non-news" sites. Just suppose, for a moment, that happened.
Would news sites still bitch?
Would various "do gooder" 3rd parties still bitch? ...and would they demand Google (and the like) resume their previous activity?
Would traffic to news sites plummet into the abyss (aka, would most people stop going to news sites?)?
Would some new player enter the market for indexing and providing search results news sites ONLY?
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
So the news providers have the choice of having their traffic plummet from being deindexed or plummet because Google is rehashing their work so Google get the advertising dollars.
Both choices are bad and both choices are going to result in terrible outcomes.
Eventually if Google push everyone independent out of business, there won't be room for a new indexing only service since there will be nothing left to index other than sites run as a rich person's playing for buying influence.
I've watched Google destroy
Re: What if.... (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
To be fair, when I see a verbatim paragraph on multiple news sites (usually meaning that none of them wrote it), I'm not really feeling bad about their copyright on their "borrowed" content. This happens a lot. And the term "victim" is debatable.
Roll their own (Score:3)
What if the major news sites were to cut Google (and the like) off, preventing them from indexing their news sites, and introduced their own dedicated news search site? If they were successful, what then?
Suppose the new news only search engine were called "NewsCo", just to have a name to refer to, and run by a jointly owned (by publishers) company of that name.
If advertisers wanted to reach news site readers, they would have to deal with NewsCo.
NewsCo could go ahead and provide AI summaries, not worrying if people clicked through to publisher sites, since NewsCo would display ads and could proportion revenue based on what AI summaries were getting viewed, in addition to what news stories were being clicked through to.
NewsCo would effectively entirely own the ad market for news sites.
NewsCo would of course need a global anti-trust exemption to operate this way. Should they get it? Why or why not?
I'd write more, but wife is calling me for dinner. Please discuss. (:
Re: (Score:1)
Not a bad idea, but given Google's propensity for making cheap alternatives and their ready capital, NewsCo might suddenly see competition from Google, directly. I mean, what's to stop them from making their own dedicated media company and cutting out the middle?
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News sites have been able to do this for decades; a simple robots.txt file will do this. But no news sites wants this. They want Google to send traffic to them (and only them, but not their competition). And they don't want Google to add any value. And, oddly enough, that's not what consumers want. If consumers wanted to read "nothing but Daily Mail" they can do it... but they don't do it.
There are a lot of problems with the profit model for news sites. The sites are part of the problem; consumers are
What did they do before? (Score:2)
What did all these news publishing websites do to get traffic on their websites before search engines came along to direct traffic their way?
Re: (Score:3)
They didn't: that chronology is back to front. When search engines came along, they were paper only. When they launched their websites, their paper editions drove traffic.
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