The strategy has its potential drawbacks.
Content assisted or generated by AI might perform worse with audiences or be penalized by search engines and social media companies. More critically, even if the solution works perfectly, it does not solve the problem of the contracting internet; it only makes content production in the meantime more cost-effective.
The hope, no doubt, is that the increased volume of output will compensate for any decrease in efficacy, and that this short-term solution will buy the company more time to grow other lines of business and sources of audience.
If the new strategy accomplishes those goals, it could be a worthwhile gamble. But if, in doing so, it harms the brand equity of the very publishers it is trying to save, its success would be a Pyrrhic victory at best.
Talking Heds
Podcaster Paydays: The gold rush for podcasting talent continues to heat up. On Monday, Disney partnered with iHeart to bring six of its podcasts to the Disney streaming ecosystem, with a specific focus on shows related to its IP, like Hey Jonas! and Pod Meets World. Then on Tuesday, the podcast firm Acast acquired the Austin-based creator network Backyard Ventures for $20 million. The two deals reflect the primary ways in which the space is evolving: Streaming services like Disney (and Netflix, Roku, Tubi, and others) are signing deals to bring podcasts to their platforms, while podcast networks are scouring YouTube for up-and-coming creators to join their networks. If you were waiting for a sign to launch a podcast, this is it!
Out of Style: Over the weekend, The New York Times published a story about the travel concierge Olivia Ferney, a 25-year-old who facilitates the capricious whims of billionaires. Oddly enough, the reporter behind the story, Guy Trebay, published a nearly identical story a year prior, a profile of Ferney. This is inside baseball, sure, but it really baffles me. The second story in no way references the first, nor does it advance the narrative. Just the same reporter profiling the same influencer one year later. No shade to Ferney—I too would welcome repeated press from The New York Times—but something feels amiss. I imagine the story performed well the first time around, but why not then acknowledge the original piece in the follow-up? Puzzling.
Gallery Group Get (EXCLUSIVE): On Monday, Gallery Media Group named Erin Collier its first chief commercial officer, a move meant to mark its expansion beyond publishing into scaled experiential and brand partnerships. Gallery Media, the media arm of Gary Vaynerchuk’s marketing agency VaynerMedia, is not a household name, but its penchant for experimentation has made it a noteworthy firm to watch. Collier, who joins from iHeart Media, comes from an experiential background and will look to apply those talents to the Gallery Media portfolio.
AI Blocks Ads: The concept of publishers serving ads to bots still strikes me as something plucked from a science fiction novel, but the practice has lately become somewhat more commonplace. But on Tuesday, a plot twist unfolded that Isaac Asimov himself could not have imagined. According to Digiday, after Time began serving ads inside the markdown versions of its webpages, a gambit intended to influence the results of AI scrapers, Perplexity began blocking the ads, with the AI firm calling the practice “deceptive.” Ads for we for but not for thee, Perplexity? If indeed bots are so easily swayed by advertising, I fear that the coming singularity may arrive speaking fluent chumbox, i.e. “AI overlords HATE this one weird prompt.”
