For many publishers, linking up with AI developers (vs. pursuing costly litigation) is a matter of necessity — especially as genAI shakes up not only content production but also the search landscape.
The Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson said in the magazine’s press release, “We believe that people searching with AI models will be one of the fundamental ways that people navigate the web in the future.”
Both The Atlantic’s and Vox’s deals last week with OpenAI will make their content discoverable to OpenAI users — with attribution links.
As part of the agreements, the companies will also get access to OpenAI’s tech to build new journalism products.
Some thoughts:
- While I think this is probably a necessary move by these publishers right now to capture some short-term dollars, they’ve accelerated their decline with these deals.
- As Google, OpenAI, etc. compress these articles via their LLMs, they benefit greatly from the substantial value of this content. And what do media companies get beyond this cash bump? They get some crumbs in the form of attribution and links.
Outside of a handful of successful players, the media business model has been declining for quite some time. That trend looks like it will continue.
