“What’s your competitive advantage as a publishing business? It’s not the ability to churn out more articles than anybody else,” says Ian Betteridge, as he reckons publishers have two years’ grace to sort out their business models.
What happens when search engines generate answers for everything without people needing to click on a link? When anyone can set up a website and populate it with thousands of AI-generated articles, what sets publishers apart? With SEO and social media traffic under threat, where do we go to build audiences?
These are questions that publishers are having to grapple with as the perfect storm of challenges come together. Although there is much uncertainty, the dreams of building a sustainable business on the promise of scale, funded by digital advertising, is at an end.
I spoke to Media Consultant Ian Betteridge about the outlook for publishing as the impacts of AI begin to snowball. Betteridge – of Betteridge’s law of headlines – has been editor of tech magazine MacUser, launched Alphr.com while at Dennis Publishing, and most recently has been at Bauer Media Group leading an internal business transformation project focused on delivering new tech platforms, structures and processes to Bauer’s content teams.
Betteridge has some sobering advice for publishers, but it’s not all doom and gloom.
Cheap clicks are no longer a viable model
It’s hard to comprehend how much upheaval we could see in the coming months as savvy users really get to grips with AI tools. ‘SEO heists’ and large-scale content farming are problems even Google, with their vast resources, are struggling to keep under control.
But bad actors and opportunists aren’t the only ones pumping out low-quality content to game algorithms and benefit from traffic. Some well-established publishers have been doing this for years, employing journalists to regurgitate press releases, do quick write-ups on celeb Instagram posts, and write vast quantities of lower-quality content just to get extra clicks. I could point fingers here, but we can all name multiple examples, however precious we get about the industry.
“Content strategies where you’re just pumping out tonnes and tonnes of content are not going to be the ones that prosper over the next five years,” Betteridge points out. “With any of these tools…anybody can do this in their bedroom. So if all you’re doing is using ChatGPT to churn out 100 different really SEO-optimised articles, any kid can do that.
“You are a company with 1,000 employees. What’s your competitive advantage over the one person who can do that every week? If the answer is, you haven’t got any, then you need to rethink your content strategy. Because that’s not a viable business.”
Betteridge thinks that, with the speed the tech is being picked up, publishers have around two years’ grace to move away from such strategies. Even without easy replication and content production, search engines like Google have been moving towards ‘zero-click’ searches. In 2022, over half of searches resulted in no link being clicked, and that figure is only likely to have grown.
“More of the bread-and-butter SEO articles that focus on giving an answer to a really quite specific question, that’s all going to be answered on the page…it’s not going to be directing big-scale traffic to your site,” Betteridge explained. Articles about what football is on TV tonight, the opening times of a local restaurant or what a celebrity ate for breakfast “are really not going to be sustainable because you’re not going to get the scale traffic that you once did.”
There will be exceptions for specialist publishers, for example Radio Times, who are completely focused on TV-related content and who are ranked highly enough to continue to take advantage of scale. But, Betteridge warns, general titles will find it much harder over the coming months.
Double-squeezing
There is, of course, huge potential with AI tools to benefit publishers. But in the short term, there is a nasty combination of pressures which media leaders need to be thinking seriously about. “You’ve got this double squeezing,” Betteridge explains. “One, all of that content can be generated by anybody really cheaply, and got up online fast. They can milk whatever traffic’s there. Two, a lot of that stuff is going to be answered directly by Google.
“You’ve got to really think, okay, what’s our content strategy going to be not next year, but the year after, when this has really started to impact. What’s our protection against that happening to us?”
Even affiliate, a relatively new revenue stream for some publishers, will likely see declines. Again, publishers are not without blame here; some big names have been exploiting search algorithms to rank for product reviews that writers have never even had their hands on. Gisele Navarro and Danny Ashton have a superb piece on HouseFresh about big publishers ranking at the top of Google for subpar product reviews which is well worth a read.
“A lot of affiliate content could be struggling to gain big enough audiences now,” Betteridge notes, saying that publishers should have an advantage here as they should be having human interaction with whatever they’re reviewing; something AI can’t replicate. “But how many times have you come across an affiliate piece, and it’s pretty clear that they haven’t had hands-on on the products?”
That’s before we even mention the looming giant of Amazon, who made nearly $47 billion in ad revenue last year; more than the entire US publishing industry.
Old-school
None of this paints a pretty picture. So what should publishers be doing about these threats? Betteridge thinks that we need to go back and think about how we reached audiences before platforms existed.“Some of it is always going to be paid acquisition, because that’s always going to be effective. Some of that is going to be word-of-mouth,” he said. “The big advantage you’ve got as a human being is you’ve got experience, so you can go out and talk to people. AI can’t do that.”
B2B publications are naturally more resilient to changes like this. People and publications have reputations that AI cannot replicate. “[B2B publications] have always been quite niche about the people that matter,” Betteridge notes. “You’ve just got to double down on that, double down on events, double down on word-of-mouth, double down on anything which gets you in front of qualified people.”
But consumer publishing has strengths too, as Betteridge points out. “In consumer, you’ve got access to TV stars, musicians, celebrities, AI hasn’t got that,” he said. “So it’s going back to those really quite traditional ways of finding exclusives, finding leads, finding really great content, and less of the focus on just ‘churn it out’ journalism.”
None of this is easy. But perhaps that’s the way publishing will be from now on. No more ‘easy’ money, no more cheap traffic bulking programmatic revenues,
Optimistic in the long term, but short-term pain
Crucially, there is no time for publishers to sit and wait to see what everyone else does. AI is impacting revenue right now, with billions under threat in the coming years.
But in the long term, Betteridge is optimistic. “I think that in the long term, what becomes valuable is experience, and specifically human experiences,” he explains. “If you’re thinking car reviews, being able to translate as a human being what it’s like to sit in a car is something that a large language model will never be able to do. And that’s quite old-school journalism in a sense, because it is about tapping into the emotions and the needs of your audience in a way that only a human can do with another human.”
“So I’m optimistic. But I think there’s going to be a whole world of pain to get to that point, and it is going to be quite short. I think we’re talking about five years where it’s going to be really painful for the publishing industry as we find our way through all of this.”
We have another article going live soon with leadership advice from Ian Betteridge on introducing AI to your organisation. Subscribe to our daily newsletter so you don’t miss any more from Media Voices.
