I had a call recently with a long-standing publishing client. One of their sites was changing direction, and as part of that we were reviewing the revenue model.
We ended up having quite a blunt discussion about what publishing looks like when AI search is extracting your content, synthesising it, and handing the answer directly to the user. No clicks and no revenue.
And that’s a bit of a problem. Online publishing as a business has, pretty much since the inception of the commercial Internet, worked on a model of ‘get click > sell ads’.
The model that ran for thirty years is running out of road.
The only real lever was volume. More content generally meant more rankings, more rankings meant more clicks, more clicks meant more revenue. I don’t pretend I didn’t play a part in this, it was the sole reason many sites hired me.
The quality bar for content this change over the years, but it was always generally set by whatever Google chose to reward, which for a long time meant broad, well-structured, sufficiently useful content across a wide array of topics.
The problem is that AI systems now read that content, synthesise it, and give the user an answer before they ever need to visit your site. The click never happens. And if the click never happens, the model doesn’t work.
Two tiers are emerging, and the middle is gone.
What this means for publishers is a split. General information — the broad how-tos, the explainers, the top-level stuff — will increasingly just come from AI. People will use it and move on. If someone wants to go deeper, into genuine expertise, into something the AI can’t fully reconstruct, then they’ll seek out a niche site with real authority.
But the vast middle ground where users find competent, useful, broadly informative content at scale has nowhere to go.
The licensing deals won’t save most publishers.
What we have seen over the past couple of years is some large publishers creating licensing deals directly with AI companies. That could work for the biggest players but the fundamental problem with that model is valuation. With advertising, the maths was straightforward: CPM, click volume, conversion rate, sale value. You could calculate your way to a number to the point the whole thing was automated.
With AI licensing, how do you put a value on it? You don’t know how much of your content they’re using, when they’re using it, or in what context. There’s no established pricing, no standard protocol, no way to verify the usage.
And the elephant in the room is that most of the content has already been consumed anyway. The AI companies have already ingested the open web. Why would they pay for something they already have?
One option is you block AI crawlers, but then you’re out of the conversation entirely and that makes people nervous.
Sam Altman said we need a new deal… but words are cheap.
At the New York Times DealBook Summit in December, OpenAI’s Sam Altman was asked how writers should feel about their work being used for AI training. He said he thinks a new standard protocol is needed for how creators get rewarded based on an opt-in model with micropayments.
Google’s Sundar Pichai has said he thinks a market solution will emerge, that there’ll be a marketplace, that creators will figure it out.
Maybe. But right now, nothing is happening. And AI companies are currently burning money at scale — the incentive to voluntarily introduce a cost that nobody is legally forcing them to pay isn’t obvious.
So, publishers aren’t making enough noise and the regulatory environment hasn’t caught up, meaning nothing happens.
The head is eating the tail.
My natural fear is that Publishers won’t be able to afford to keep paying people to produce content at the volume the old model required. So some move to AI-generated content to cut costs in order to keep the old model profitable,
That content then feeds back into the AI systems. The AI gets better at producing the kind of content that publishers are now using AI to produce. The information becomes less unique, less valuable, and less worth paying for. You end up with a slow, grinding collapse. The web fills with content that exists to train the systems that made the content unnecessary.
Free content is becoming AI content. Everything else will need to be paid for.
I think what will happen is free content will only be eitehr available in AI or by people who don’t create it for the money.
Most content that sits outside of AU — that offers something AI genuinely can’t synthesise — will need a direct revenue relationship with the reader. Subscriptions, memberships, email, community.
The danger of that outcome is real. The internet’s genuine achievement — making information accessible to everyone, raising the floor of what an ordinary person could learn for free — depended on advertising subsidising that access. If content moves behind paywalls to survive, you get a two-tier knowledge economy - people who can pay for genuine expertise and insight, and everyone else who gets whatever the AI confidently tells them.
That’s a worse world than the one we’ve had. The open web genuinely educated people and it wasn’t controlled by a handful of individuals. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens because I think we will reach an inflection point very soon.