Publishers push for negotiations with generative AI firms, tout new uses in latest earnings calls

The chief concern for Thomson and IAC’s management, nonetheless, is tech firms utilizing their content material with out permission or compensation to coach their massive language fashions (LLMs), and mentioned they’re in negotiations with these firms to hunt fee. But in an analogous trend to earnings calls in This fall 2022 and Q1 2023 when executives mentioned the rise of generative AI, there stays an absence of particular examples of how this expertise is contributing to publishers’ income and earnings. 

“For media companies, it’s a little bit opaque right now in terms of exactly how they apply [generative AI and] how they’re creating content and ad solutions with it. I’m a little vague on that myself,” mentioned Doug Arthur, managing director at media analysis and advisory agency Huber Research Partners.

Execs at Gannett and The Arena Group didn’t talk about AI initiatives in Q2 earnings calls with shareholders, regardless of addressing this matter in earlier quarters.

Publishers are negotiating with AI tech firms

News Corp’s Thomson outlined particular challenges to publishers and their mental property introduced on by generative AI platforms, together with content material being scraped and used to coach LLMs and “synthesized and presented as distinct when it is actually an extracting of our editorial essence.” 

He addressed News Corp’s function in a consortium of publishers negotiating with tech firms over using their content material to energy AI engines, led by IAC chairman Barry Diller. Last week, media firms and organizations together with Gannett, the Associated Press and the News Media Alliance signed an open letter pushing for regulation to guard their content material from LLMs. The New York Times has since dropped out of this coalition, Semafor reported.

“Negotiations are well underway with the relevant companies,” Thomson mentioned. “News Corp hopes to set precedents that benefit creators, publishers and journalists around the globe.”

Thomson declined to develop on these negotiations through the earnings name. “I can’t be more specific at this moment. But we see a positive financial result through consensual negotiation, not through litigation,” he mentioned. 

Notably, News Corp Australia is producing 3,000 native articles per week utilizing generative AI, The Guardian reported.

Execs at IAC fielded quite a few questions from analysts across the matter of generative AI, together with just a few on how AI chatbots are impacting Dotdash Meredith’s site visitors.

“Relative to generative AI… we have not seen any loss of traffic so far in our properties and are having active discussions about how we can be a partner [with AI companies],” mentioned IAC CFO and COO Christopher Halpin in an August 9 earnings name.

In IAC’s earnings name, CEO Joey Levin was clear that he believes tech firms are negotiating in good religion with publishers round utilizing their content material.

How publishers are utilizing generative AI expertise

Mirroring conversations from earlier earnings calls, some publishing executives expanded on the content material and promoting alternatives utilizing generative AI instruments.

IAC is utilizing generative AI for “back of house” capabilities at Dotdash Meredith, similar to figuring out what tales to supply round particular matters and bettering content material personalization to retain and recirculate audiences, Levin mentioned.

The firm can also be utilizing generative AI to customise adverts by testing totally different advert copy for improved concentrating on, Levin mentioned. However, he didn’t give particular examples of how this has led to extra income or extra enterprise for the corporate.

BuzzFeed spent a big portion of its Q2 earnings name outlining its generative AI tasks, together with customized and interactive quizzes and chatbots. 

The firm doubled its quantity of AI-assisted content material from Q1 to Q2, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti mentioned in an August 8 earnings name. He famous that “it will take time for these initiatives to translate into scaled monetization.”

Compared to Q1, views of BuzzFeed’s AI content material and time spent have each “increased threefold,” Peretti mentioned. The prime 20 AI articles BuzzFeed revealed in Q2 generated greater than twice the time spent in comparison with the highest 20 AI articles in Q1, he added. A latest submit that used AI to generate photos of Barbie dream homes throughout the nation drew over 1 million views.

BuzzFeed has partnered with Sprite, Serta and Walmart to create sponsored quizzes and purchasing chatbot integrations, mentioned BuzzFeed president Marcela Martin.

Peretti additionally gave an instance of how AI has helped BuzzFeed’s gross sales staff win a shopper deal. Its gross sales staff used a instrument BuzzFeed developed that enables them to take requests for proposals from advertisers and match them to BuzzFeed’s merchandise and have been capable of shut a deal in 24 hours when “ordinarily that… [would be] maybe a couple weeks of work,” Peretti mentioned. Martin added that the corporate plans to make use of AI to shorten the five- to six-month-long gross sales cycle on the firm.

“It’s still pretty early. And I feel like we’ve figured out how to bake some good cakes. But we still have to build out the bakery that can scale this and make more content experiences like this widely distributed across our network,” Peretti mentioned.

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