Google’s Gen AI Search Threatens Publishers With $2B Annual Ad Revenue Loss
Publishers are increasingly looking into managing their intellectual property, either by legally defending or monetizing their content, said Steven Read, adMarketplace’s chief product officer.
A growing number of publishers, such as The Associated Press, have arranged licensing deals with OpenAI for its data in exchange for compensation. Meanwhile, The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft over AI use of copyrighted content.
“Other publishers are also exploring options to sell [their] content via deals to OpenAI or other large language models,” Read said.
Elsewhere, publishers are taking a pragmatic approach to their editorial strategy, diversifying traffic from newsletters and subscriptions and, in some cases, investing in their own generative AI chatbots to attract traffic.
Money.com gets 40% of its traffic from Google Search, according to CEO Greg Powel, a former Google employee. The publisher is reworking its website format by including snippets of content deployed in a question-and-answer format, answering people’s questions related to a product or service, ultimately, to increase traffic from SGE.
“The idea is that Google would crawl and incorporate that into SGE potentially,” said Powel.
Meanwhile, publishers with less editorial flexibility are exploring paid search and social ads to grab traffic, said McCollum.
