New lawsuits and deepening partnerships highlight the delicate balance between major publishers and AI companies.
Some of the first media companies to sign deals with OpenAI say they are preparing to release new AI-enabled features aimed at benefiting readers, publishers, and advertisers. One of the latest examples is Dotdash Meredith, who created a new way to use AI to target readers with contextual ads.
The company used historical audience data and Amazon shopping data to train large-scale language models to find correlations between content consumption and underlying user behavior. Dotdash Meredith Chief Innovation Officer Jonathan Roberts said yesterday while speaking at the AI Trailblazers Marketing Conference in New York that the new division will be launching today with a major (privately held) retailer. said. Other panelists included executives from Time Inc., the New York Stock Exchange, and the New York Times Company.
Roberts, who was trained on 11 billion website visits from last year, described the new ad units as moving “from a binary Morse code system to full 4K resolution color screens.”
“It gives you an incredibly rich perspective on what someone is trying to do,” Roberts said. “Not because of who they were last week on a third-party site that you can’t see or interrogate, but for everyone who has ever viewed this content.”
Time is also “on the verge of launching” its first product developed with OpenAI, said Mark Howard, Time’s chief operating officer. He did not provide specifics, but said he would work with Fox to use blockchain technology to track content with AI models and create a marketplace for micropayments in exchange for acquiring publisher content. He also mentioned that he will be discussing development with Scalepost.
Priorities vary by media company. Joe Benarroch, head of content and media partnerships at the New York Stock Exchange, wants to work with news organizations, big technology companies, and AI providers to build a new media network. Benarroch, who previously led communications at X, mentioned xAI’s Grok platform and major martech companies like Sprinklr and Adobe as potential partners.
Despite deepening partnerships, some publishers remain concerned that tech companies could scrape their content to train AI models, siphoning off readership and ad revenue. Earlier this week, OpenAI COO Sarah Friar told the Financial Times that OpenAI is considering introducing advertising to ChatGPT. (The company has since issued a follow-up statement saying no immediate plans are moving forward.)
Concerns extend beyond the United States to Canada. Last week, a group of major Canadian media companies filed a new lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing ChatGPT’s parent company of violating copyright law. Other ongoing lawsuits include complaints filed by The New York Times and Tribune Company against OpenAI, and News Corp. against Perplexity.
Even before LLM, the Times and other publishers have been using building machine learning for years to build contextual tools for reader personalization and ad targeting. We hope that AI personalization will reduce dependence on declining distribution channels such as search and social media. That’s why The New York Times is focused on using AI to personalize content across its websites, apps, and emails.
“In a world where people have news in the palm of their hands while waiting on the street or at a traffic light, there are so many opportunities to reach people and optimize audience development,” said Chris, Chief Data Scientist.・Mr. Wiggins said. In the New York Times.
While all the pressure is on AI companies, publishers are also thinking about how AI can wrest power away from ad tech companies.
“Ad tech companies have long been saying, ‘Well, don’t worry. We’ve got this, we understand your audience better than you ever will, let’s take it from here. ,” said DotDash’s Roberts. “That wasn’t true then, and it’s definitely not true now.”
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