From one perspective, publishers are up a creek.
Generative AI search is reducing the discoverability of their content, traffic is declining and no one – including Cloudflare – has figured out the best way to compensate publishers for their resulting loss in revenue.
But that doesn’t mean sites are screwed. And kudos to Cloudflare for actually doing something, says Amanda Martin, CRO of Mediavine, on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
In early July, Cloudflare announced that it would block all AI bots and crawlers by default on the sites it serves and introduce a “pay per crawl” model to remunerate pubs every time an AI company wants to access their content.
“I applaud them for taking a stand,” Martin says. But, she adds, it’s not clear just yet whether Cloudflare’s approach will be commercially viable in the long term.
And so it’s up to publishers to weigh the potential benefits and risks of allowing scrapers.
Mediavine, which provides ad management and other services that help creators monetize their content, doesn’t tell the sites in its network what to do. But it does encourage publishers to carefully consider how they use AI and to prioritize responsible AI practices.
“We’ll advise them on a situational, case-by-case basis,” Martin says. “But we’re revisiting those answers daily, weekly, sometimes hourly, in the sense of how quickly things are changing.”
Also in this episode: The misconceptions that publishers have about advertisers (and vice versa), why the industry isn’t talking about made-for-advertising sites as much anymore and how Martin uses AI in her personal and professional life.
