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The media business has no scarcity of existential crises on its plate. From the disruption posed by synthetic intelligence to the precipitously low ranges of shopper belief, publishers typically discover themselves on the defensive, reacting to adversarial circumstances that threaten their very means to outlive.
I cowl these parts incessantly and with the suitable measure of sobriety, however Thursday within the U.S. is Thanksgiving, and it pays to do not forget that the media business isn’t completely bereft of its tailwinds. Plus, as Cormac McCarthy as soon as wrote, you by no means know what worse luck your unhealthy luck has saved you from.
So, in that spirit, listed below are 5 developments within the media business that I’m grateful for, which provide at the very least some morsel of optimism for the longer term.
1. The daybreak of the pay-per-crawl
As I’ve amply coated, one of many chief threats to the media business is the unpaid use of its content material to energy AI reply engines. Outdoors of a handful of bespoke offers, the overwhelming majority of content material creators have watched powerlessly as AI companies hoover up their knowledge, repackage it, and use it to reply customers’ questions.
In current months although, a number of new initiatives have emerged that provide a framework for a market that would enable this mannequin to persist whereas nonetheless managing to compensate the publishers that allow it.
Simply final week, I wrote about an experiment involving Criteo and the media community Raptive that used a pay-per-crawl infrastructure to generate $174 in a case examine involving an impartial meals writer. These are sometimes called “the Spotify mannequin,” because it successfully does for textual content content material what streaming did for music.
