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Fighting for journalism and profitable news media
AI Overviews affiliate revenue hit | Freelances object to AI using work
And Ofcom backs away from change to rule over politicians acting as presenters.
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🛒The latest frontier of the Google’s AI Overviews complaints on Press Gazette: affiliate revenue.
It makes sense: if the average user can get (what they see as) an easy answer to a buying question on the first Google result page, why would they feel the need to click through to a possibly ad-heavy, slow, long page from a publisher?
But of course less people buying products from these types of articles is having a direct impact on revenue. And the Google version might be outdated or just plain wrong.
The good news is that there are things to learn in the article from Wirecutter at The New York Times (main takeaway: serve less ads if you can), some tips on what to do to protect yourself from AI Overviews, and the fact that we’re considered quite behind on this in the UK compared to the US. That means there’s plenty we can play with still.
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🤖Speaking of AI (when are we not at the moment?) we’ve had a look at some survey results indicating how freelance journalists feel about the use of their content in AI training and publisher licensing deals. Spoiler alert: not happy.
There are some examples elsewhere of AI revenue from licensing deals going directly to journalists, including at Le Monde in France. But I don’t believe this is the case anywhere in the UK or US.
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Ofcom did want to change the wording of the Broadcasting Code but has backed down after the likes of ITN and News Broadcasting argued this would make it extremely difficult to have anyone that could be defined as a politician presenting any kind of programme, even one that only covered utterly uncontentious things.
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