Within the course of the past week, several major publications all seemed to become aware of the fact that the growth of AI likely means the death of traditional internet publishers. Or at the very least, a massive change in their business models. That this awakening seemed to happen all at once is curious, absent any sort of groundbreaking new study, and yet The Atlantic, The Economist, The Week and The New York Times all ran nearly identical stories this week about the potential demise of everyone from Google and Meta to newspapers, digital publishers and Wikipedia—essentially anyone who relies on search traffic for their audience. Why It Matters That this is bound to happen is not much in dispute. It is much easier to ask an AI chatbot what the top hotels in Miami Beach are than to navigate Tripadvisor, Expedia and a range of other travel sites. That you can then ask the bot follow-up questions (between the Hilton and the Marriott which has the best food) and expect to receive reasonably accurate answers makes it even more compelling. Which, of course, means that billions of users will soon be abandoning search engines and using the various AI sites to search for everything from the meaning of the word “jumelage” (how’s that for self-referential) to the best place to buy a new coffeemaker to what to watch on TV next. That this will radically change the television landscape is also not much in dispute, though the impact there will mostly be to search and discovery and to the promotion of TV shows. If anything, it is likely to boost TV, or at least the non-news part of TV, as advertisers realize that traffic to streaming, cable and broadcast is not much impacted by the demise of the search engine and can actually complement whatever lower funnel ads they are running on chat. Advertisers though, will need to rethink their game, especially around digital advertising. Because as much as they deny it, everyone assumes that ad-supported AI is coming and is why ChatGPT in particular seems to append an unasked for follow up to every single request. So that simple “What is the weather forecast for Miami this weekend?” is invariably followed by “Going on a vacation? Would you like me to give you the weather report for the following week so you know what to pack? Which could then easily include a link to The Gap or Away luggage or United Airlines. But only if Sam Altman, you know, wanted it to. Ad-supported chatbots also raise the issue of another level of what we’ve been calling “15 Million Merits” after the Black Mirror episode—a world where some people pay to avoid ads on their chat apps and thus get a very different set of responses than those in the ad-supported realm. First-class versus steerage, and yet another marker in the ever widening gap between the haves and have-nots in the developed world, one that can at times make it feel like we are living back in the days of Dickens and Austen, with gentlefolk and peasants and all that implies. What You Need To Do About It If you are a TV network or streaming service this may, as noted, be a positive development, though you will need to learn how to adequately explain how a TV commercial complements a GPT ad and develop strategies to capitalize on that. If you are a publisher, you can try to do the legal challenge thing—making Open AI, Anthropic, Google, Perplexity et al pay you for using all your content. I strongly suspect though that the genie is already out of the bottle on that front and you’ll just wind up playing a no-win game of legal whack-a-mole that will drain your coffers even further Your best bet is to figure out how to work with the various chatbots, to grok the AI version of SEO so that the chatbots pick your site first and send people there. I further suspect that chatbot optimization will not be as easy or as straightforward as search engine optimization, but that at some point someone (or multiple someones) will figure it out, millions of people will set themselves up as “CBO consultants” and the game will start all over again. So your goal is to still be left standing when it does. Bonne chance. READ THE FULL WEEK IN REVIEW — or listen to it — ON TVREV |
