This story was originally published in On Background with Mark Stenberg, a free, weekly newsletter that explores the key themes shaping the media industry. You can sign up for it here.
The media industry has no shortage of existential crises on its plate. From the disruption posed by artificial intelligence to the precipitously low levels of consumer trust, publishers often find themselves on the defensive, reacting to adversarial conditions that threaten their very ability to survive.
I cover those elements frequently and with the appropriate measure of sobriety, but Thursday in the U.S. is Thanksgiving, and it pays to remember that the media industry is not entirely bereft of its tailwinds. Plus, as Cormac McCarthy once wrote, you never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.
So, in that spirit, here are five trends in the media industry that I am grateful for, which offer at least some morsel of optimism for the future.
1. The dawn of the pay-per-crawl
As I have amply covered, one of the chief threats to the media industry is the unpaid use of its content to power AI answer engines. Outside of a handful of bespoke deals, the vast majority of content creators have watched powerlessly as AI firms hoover up their data, repackage it, and use it to answer users’ questions.
In recent months though, several new initiatives have emerged that offer a framework for a marketplace that could allow this model to persist while still managing to compensate the publishers that enable it.
Just last week, I wrote about an experiment involving Criteo and the media network Raptive that used a pay-per-crawl infrastructure to generate $174 in a case study involving an independent food publisher. These are often referred to as “the Spotify model,” as it effectively does for text content what streaming did for music.
