He cited INMA as an example of this second tranche, along with The Information, which recently launched its own chatbot called Deep Research. Earlier this year, I wrote about a similar product from Politico, available only to Politico Pro members, that scraped its vast archives of proprietary research to make compiling white papers a breeze. (Max Tani at Semafor has since reported that the Politico Pro product has had some hiccups, generating reports with fake info.)
According to Dorosz, the viability and utility of these products, as is often the case, effectively boils down to quality of the information that they are helping sort. If a publisher deals only in commodity content, which is available in other places across the web, an answer engine that recirculates that material will struggle to offer any benefit that a ChatGPT or other freely available search doesn’t.
If, however, these answer engines help (paying) readers make sense of case studies, white papers, exclusive data, and expert insights, then they add value to subscriptions and utility to users. That will keep people coming back and paying.
There is the natural question of cost and accessibility, however. Singolda, from Taboola, emphasized the point that most publishers cannot afford to build or operate their own answer engines, and they would have little luck charging visitors to use them. So, the best bet for these publishers could very well be partnering with third-party firms like Taboola that shoulder the costs of production themselves, monetize the engagement with ads, and split the revenue with the publisher. It might not be groundbreaking, but it is money.
On some level, this has been the Taboola pitch since the dawn of time. If these tools increase site engagement even 10% or 20%, and they’re free, then it’s hard to make a case against their value.
But that is the kind of logic that animated the old internet, an ecosystem where commodity content produced at scale could feasibly sustain a media business. In this new era, the post-traffic era, you could have an infinite number of recirculation tools and still no one could visit your website in the first place.
