'We’re the providers of information…but Google now wants to be the distributor'

A new 84-page report from Peter D. Brown and Klaudia Jaźwińska, researchers at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, sketches out the state of play between big tech platforms and news publishers. It’s a follow-up to a major 2019 Tow Center report that charted the beginnings of the “post-social” era for news publishers.

AI takes center stage in this latest drop, with Brown and Jaźwińska touching on newsroom AI adoption, licensing deals with AI developers, and the at times tense relationships between platforms and news publishers. Many of the report’s most fascinating insights, though, explore how news and platform executives are thinking about the future of AI search.

For the report, “Journalism Zero: How platforms and publishers are navigating AI,” Brown and Jaźwińska conducted 34 interviews with news executives, editors, former platform executives, and representatives from AI companies. All spoke anonymously, leading to some biting and revealing quotes like this one from a “platform executive”:

Now, with the promise of generative AI-powered search tools that can deliver “fresh, reliable, up-to-the-minute content” — and also generate revenue — those calculations appear to be changing. There is a growing momentum for “zero click” search experiences, in which answers are delivered without ever navigating off platform (think Google’s AI Overviews, Perplexity’s “answer engine,” or SearchGPT, which folded into ChatGPT last fall). These products let audiences consume news outlets’ original reporting without ever having to click on a blue link or land on a publisher’s article page.

These products also undercut the recent rhetoric in Silicon Valley — that news just isn’t a significant part of their business. “It undermines tech companies’ ability to claim that they don’t need (or want) news output on their platforms,” Brown and Jaźwińska write. “Therefore, the negotiating position is no longer that they don’t need or want news output, but that they don’t need to ask or pay for news content.”

Brown and Jaźwińska record some early reflections and responses from news publishers to the rise of generative search products. (Keep in mind, again, that these interviews were conducted last October, before the release of SearchGPT and the expansion of AI Overviews.) One “executive at a digitally native outlet”:

“If our Google referrals were to decline significantly tomorrow, it would cost us something like five or six percent of our overall revenue. It would be infuriating, and let me tell you, I don’t want to have to find another five percent from somewhere else. But it’s an existential threat for a lot of other places, and it’s not an existential threat to us.”

Others forecasted a massive blow to their overall traffic. Quotes from two different editors:

“In about 2018, somewhere in the region of 60 to 70 percent of traffic to our sites was internal traffic. Now that’s shifted to about 20 percent, and about 55 percent of traffic for [local title] is coming from Google. So Google is absolutely huge to us as a business.”

“I’m worried about what it’ll do to our traffic because, quite seriously, we can get about 50 percent of our traffic from search.”

Brown and Jaźwińska compare news publishers today that have built their businesses around traditional search and those in the recent past that relied on Facebook referral traffic. They quote a Mic investor: “[I]f you live by the sword you die by the sword,” the investor said in the aftermath of Mic shuttering in 2018. “Facebook drove our ascent, when they started to prioritize outside links and later video, and also our decline, when they changed their feed algorithms, and canceled our show.”

One news executive said that their organization is heeding early warning signs this time around, and reconsidering their reliance on Google traffic.

“By shifting all of our direct traffic to them through news aggregators [Google News, Chrome Suggestions] and Discover, Google were very, very clever. It’s the whole thing with the frog, and turning up the water by one degree, and then the frog doesn’t realize it’s being boiled. They were very, very good at implementing that news aggregator technology and taking out the direct traffic. And people see it as a good thing: Google traffic was going up. I think they’ve misstepped on generative. They’ve gone too far too quickly. And I think it’s awoken a lot of people to actually how bad this is going to be in the long run. We’re the providers of information and we want to be the distributors. But Google now wants to be the distributor.”

Brown and Jaźwińska posit that there are some counterforces in the publisher toolkit, including owned-and-operated platforms and cultivating more direct relationships with audiences. Newsletters and podcasts, for one, have filled the vacuum left behind by drops in traffic mediated by social media.

“You have got to accelerate everything that you are doing that is about your direct relationship with the consumer,” one executive editor at a major international outlet said. “Signed-in users and weekly active audience” are increasingly becoming the “North Star metric” for their audience strategy. “That is where you can re-engage and directly communicate with them, or else you’re at the mercy of a third party.”

You can read the full report on Columbia Journalism Review, including a fuller look at the issues circling the rise of generative search, as well as other chapters on newsroom adoption and licensing deals.