A few weeks ago, I reported on the new frameworks we’re starting to see in publisher-AI relationships. Publishers are currently not seeing much revenue from AI answer engines’ use of their content, and industry insiders told me about three main compensation models they’re starting to see develop. The third of which, shared with me by Joe Marchese of Human Ventures, seemed by far the least plausible.
Basically, Marchese told me that publishers could work with AI firms to create branded answer engines—imagine ChatGPT powering a New York Magazine chatbot. Rather than scrape the entirety of the web to populate their answers, these answer engines would restrict their searches only to content from their specific host publisher.
This seemed wild to me because why would anyone willingly restrict the scope of their search to a website, when an internet-wide search would necessarily include that website, plus a trillion others?
