RECEIPT #BEN-TH
JAN 01, 2025
PREDICTION BY
Ben Thompson“I do think that there is a market to be made in producing content for AI; it seems likely to me, however, that this market will not save existing publishers. Existing publishers will participate in this market, but won’t be central to it. People using AI instead of Google — or Google using AI to provide answers above links — make the long-term outlook for advertising-based publishers worse, but that’s an acceleration of a demise that has been in motion for a long time.”
FOLLOW-UP
An AI-targeted content market has started to form with licensing deals, but these have not broadly “saved” advertising-based publishing, which continues to struggle. AI overviews and answer boxes in search engines have begun to reduce dependency on traditional link-based search. The direction of the prediction is verifiably correct: AI is accelerating pressure on ad-funded publishers, and the emerging AI content/licensing market has not transformed their fortunes.
ORIGINAL SOURCE
Stratechery article "Content and Community"