Should publishers block AI bots? Is litigation effective? Who wins when it comes to content licensing agreements? All these questions — and many, many more — bounced around the room at OpenAttribution’s AI event in London this week.
The event brought together some of the leading thinkers and doers in the space, but what happens next, how publishers best navigate this unknown, and the road to monetisation, remain unclear.
An inflexion point
At the same time, while publishers, as one panellist said, have historically failed to “set the rules of the road” in the digital era, the industry sits at an inflexion point, where there’s now an opportunity for them to do so — and there are signs that they’re beginning to.
Indeed, the SPUR Coalition — an organisation seeking to shape the rules, standards and infrastructure for publishers and AI platforms — includes the likes of BBC, the Guardian Media Group, Sky News, Telegraph Media Group and the Financial Times as founding members, along with a growing number of other publishers and affiliate organisations, signalling that this once fragmented space is overcoming industry rivalry towards a unified goal.
At the event, Alex Springer, Director of OpenAttribution and Technical Lead at the SPUR Coalition, articulated this goal: “We think that it's possible for our information systems to be based on a few key principles that, again, for a long time we all thought were just generally given. We should be able to trust the sources, we should know where they came from, and we should be able to hold them accountable.”
The SPUR Coalition’s telemetry standard, now open for public comment, is a central facet of this.
But beyond implementing standards, throughout the day, diverse voices presented different approaches for how publishers and the broader ecosystem contend with this new reality.
Sustainable solutions
One panellist spoke about the need to find what she called “sustainable solutions,” focusing on business models for content creators, data rights holders, and AI startups. Here, she spoke of using a framework built on compensation, authenticity and attribution, rights management and standardisation.
The panellist also talked of the potential of a universal opt-out standard and the challenges of stripping out data that’s already been used to train AI models, as well as blockchain-based models that can be used to create archives of content.
One forecast from this panellist: the way content is communicated will change.
“I firmly believe that we will still have content outside of AI, but it will be more through apps and, in a sense, a different type of communication strategy, which may, in part, even rely on in-person events like this.”
And can the industry learn anything from the Spotify model?
“You need to develop alternative revenue streams that aren't reliant on this mode of distribution,” she said.
When the conversation shifted to owning content, blocking, redirecting, licensing, and emerging AI content marketplaces came into view, alongside virtual direct consumer relations to remain independent.
One panellist said that publishers should be considering all approaches, with the type of content and type of usage dictating which is employed at a moment in time.
On whether publishers have transitioned from considering AI models a threat to an opportunity, another panellist said that in the US, projections for the growth of the token economy are optimistic, but an important question is how well content marketplaces can scale.
In terms of what a functioning content marketplace looks like, identity, information provenance, and payment mechanisms were underlined.
“What is not here today is the payment mechanism, the functioning payment mechanism to get that money into the hands of the publishers or the content creators at scale on that side,” added one panellist.
Meanwhile, from the audience, the risk of the marketplace becoming the dominant benefiting entity in this new era was raised.
And when it comes to blocking AI bots — a hotly debated topic across the industry — one panellist said an important factor is whether publishers have visibility and understanding into what’s happening on their sites.
While others at the event emphasised the importance of blocking, the degree of their effectiveness was questioned — is this even a technical possibility? Some at the event weren’t so sure.
An architectural change-up
Another insight from the day was that a “fundamental change” in architecture is required for all media businesses.
“A lot of these AI companies are not paying right now, because they don't have to.”
Indeed, they noted that while marketplaces are evolving, and direct deals are being serviced, there needs to be a “degree of abstraction” between the content that's being served, the decision made about what to serve, and the signal that sits above it to work out what the traffic is in the first place.
At the same time, while we’ve recently seen movement from the UK’s CMA on opt-out, as well as court rulings across Europe, panellists pointed to challenges of legislation that isn’t “reactive enough,” while one speaker argued that litigation is not a “legitimate business strategy.”
And what about affiliate? Where is the industry positioned in this new era?
In a space that has shifted from attention to influence and against a backdrop of rapidly evolving user journeys, upper-funnel content and the metrics that need measuring are changing too.
In this new landscape, panellists also said that unique, authoritative content that drives decision-making and purchase decisions is becoming increasingly important — and on a day where the affiliate conversation was far from the spotlight, the industry's potential to step up is coming into view.
Stay tuned for interviews with OpenAttribution’s Alex Springer, David Buttle, the Founder of the SPUR Coalition, Microsoft’s Dr Paul Farrow and Bertelsmann VP, Achim Schlosser.
