Firms like Cloudflare, Fastly, Tollbit, ProRata, Criteo, and others support this kind of model, which would effectively charge AI firms for the right to crawl a website. But these efforts are nascent and face significant roadblocks. For instance, what incentive would the AI firms have to participate? Outside of a legal mandate, I have heard few truly convincing answers to that question.
Still, at least there’s some groundwork. It also bears mentioning that this is not just for the benefit of publishers. The system as it currently exists is evidently unsustainable: AI firms rely on content creators while eliminating their ability to fund their content. The sooner we arrive at an equitable solution, the better off the internet is.
2. The vodcast extravaganza
Blame it on the 2024 election, perhaps, but 2025 was the year vodcasting—the vogue new term for a video podcast—went supernova.
Nearly overnight, audio-only podcasts have nearly disappeared. Suddenly, a podcast appearance became something you had to look good for.
This has been beneficial in a variety of ways. First, for the podcast industry, it has allowed the medium to tap into video advertising budgets, which are much larger.
It has also helped podcasting solve its lingering discovery problem, as users can now come across podcast clips on social media (which tend to favor video posts) that they might’ve otherwise never bothered to explore.
But I think most impactful is that vodcasts have given publishers and creators a low-lift means of entering more meaningfully into the world of video content. A podcast is often simply an interview, which journalists conduct on the regular. Film the exchange, put it on YouTube, and voila: You have turned a reporter into a vodcaster.
This is a relatively incremental shift, but it has important implications for this next trend.
3. The creator-ification continues apace
Nearly a decade too late, publishers have finally started taking cues from creators—at least when it comes to the ways they package and distribute their content.
Most notably, this has been made manifest in the increasing volume of video output now coming from publishers. News outlets including The New York Times and Washington Post have even incorporated whole tabs into their mobile apps designed to replicate the experience of scrolling through TikTok.
But it extends beyond any single channel. You see it in Vox launching on Patreon and The Financial Times joining Substack. You see it in the new breed of creator-publisher partnerships, such as Platformer’s Casey Newton joining The New York Times through Hard Fork or Alex Heath working with Vox via Sources. Even internally, publishers like Axios, Wired, and Bloomberg are franchising their star reporters, building out brands around their talent because audiences gravitate to individuals.
