The Internet Has Finally Eaten the Media
Publishers had the content. Platforms had the audience. What could go wrong?
The Internet Has Finally Eaten the Media
Remember when putting content online meant infinite audiences, boundless reach, and metrics reported with the gravity of a moon landing? I do! From PowerPoint arrows to Facebook algorithms, here’s the gloriously chaotic story of how the internet ate media for breakfast.
I have spent a fair portion of my career in rooms where people discussed “digital strategy”, “digital transformation” and, eventually, “customer engagement”. These were normally very expensive rooms, filled with very serious people and at least one slide showing a series of arrows pointing towards the word ENGAGEMENT.
The proposition was always irresistible. If you put your content online, people will see it. Give it to Google, people will find it. Give it to Facebook, people will share it. Optimise for the algorithms and audiences will arrive in numbers previously available only to the BBC, royal weddings and videos of cats.
It worked.
Publishers received traffic. Brands acquired followers. Journalists discovered search optimisation. Marketing departments learnt to report “reach” with the seriousness previously reserved for revenue. Entire careers were built around managing audiences that technically belonged to Mark Zuckerberg.
I watched much of this unfold from the brand, marketing and communications side of the fence. We were hardly innocent bystanders. We embraced the same promise of reach, engagement and apparently limitless digital audiences because it seemed to make sense. The platforms had the audiences; organisations had the content. They would provide the distribution; we would provide the reason anyone turned up.
Unfortunately, there was a flaw in this elegant bargain: the platforms took the content, the distribution, the audience relationship and, in due course, most of the advertising money, while publishers were left with the journalism itself. A touching arrangement, really, since someone still had to provide the raw material for everyone else’s business model.
This is how a proper fool’s bargain works. Nobody asks for your house on the first day. They begin with the spare key, explain that it will improve discoverability and return three months later to measure the curtains.
When Traffic Was Still a Currency
Google’s original bargain with publishers was simple enough. It indexed journalism, displayed a fragment of it and sent interested readers to the source. Publishers objected occasionally, but the traffic was valuable. The arrangement broadly worked.
Then social media arrived with something even more seductive: enormous audiences and no discernible entry fee.
Building on Borrowed Land
Publishers built Facebook pages, accumulated Twitter followers, and hired teams to feed the platforms throughout the day. Editors began thinking about what Facebook wanted. They adapted their Headlines. They spent time developing Video strategies. Newsrooms produced increasingly elaborate meals for diners who remained seated in somebody else’s restaurant.
We called this audience development, but looking back, a remarkably sophisticated way of being taken for a ride might have been more accurate.
When Facebook subsequently changed its priorities and reduced the organic distribution of publisher content, the industry reacted like a man who has spent five years renovating his rented flat and is astonished when the landlord raises the rent.
The audience had never really belonged to the publishers. They had just been allowed to stand near it for a while.
AI has now refined the arrangement. Previously, a search engine extracted a small part of an article and sent the occasional reader back. It can now ingest the article, digest it, answer the reader’s question and remove the tiresome administrative burden of visiting the person who paid to produce it. This is described as innovation, largely because “industrial-scale content digestion” performs badly in consumer research.
Suing the Machine That Feeds You
The publishers’ response has achieved an almost operatic level of confusion. They are blocking AI crawlers, suing AI companies, licensing content to AI companies and exploring partnerships with AI companies, sometimes while remaining dependent on the same companies for search traffic, cloud infrastructure, and advertising revenue. This is less a negotiating strategy than a hostage situation with a breakout room.
Perhaps this is the point at which publishers finally decide that journalism is not merely something they make to generate traffic. Perhaps the work itself has value. Perhaps anybody wishing to use it to build a search result, train a model or produce an automated answer should have to pay for it.
This is not an especially radical proposition. Tesco does not hand out free groceries because a satisfied customer might mention them to a friend. My plumber has never offered to repair the boiler in return for discoverability. Only the media managed to convince itself that giving away its product was a sophisticated distribution strategy.
The internet did not exactly steal journalism. That would be a much more comforting story. The industry uploaded it, optimised it, reformatted it and delivered it in machine-readable form. It then supplied performance reports showing the recipient which bits were most valuable.
Somewhere in a Californian data centre, an AI is now condensing the whole episode into five bullet points. The first will almost certainly be: “Publishers face challenges adapting to a changing digital landscape.”
Which is one way of putting it.