Publishers are walking a tightrope.
They need to protect their content from unauthorized use by large-language models, but they also need to figure out how to work with new AI technologies.
It’s a tricky balance, one that News Corp is striking.
Last year, News Corp sued Perplexity for allegedly scraping news articles from its sites without permission, including The Wall Street Journal and New York Post.
But just a few months before, it signed a multiyear content licensing agreement with OpenAI for access to all of its archived content.
What gives?
“We have a licensing deal with OpenAI and we’re suing Perplexity, so I think it’s pretty clear what our general position is here,” said Josh Stinchcomb, CRO of News Corp-owned Dow Jones & Co., which publishes The Wall Street Journal.
“If our content is going to be used, we need to be properly paid for it,” Stinchcomb said. “We’re looking at each company in turn, and if there’s a deal to be done and it makes sense, then we’re happy to do it.”
Meanwhile, the landscape keeps shifting. Earlier this week, Perplexity announced that it plans to share 80% of the subscription revenue from its AI-powered Comet web browser to compensate publishers when their content is used in AI search answers.
Dow Jones declined to comment on whether this new rev-share agreement will influence its ongoing lawsuit against Perplexity – but chances are it probably won’t change much.
Stinchcomb spoke with AdExchanger earlier this summer.
AdExchanger: News Corp isn’t alone in suing an LLM. The New York Times brought a case against Microsoft and OpenAI over copyright infringement and so did the Chicago Tribune. Ziff Davis is also suing OpenAI. How do you see all this shaking out?
JOSH STINCHCOMB: It’s still early days, although things move so fast now that even weeks are material. But, honestly, everyone is just trying to figure it out.
I can’t predict where all of this will lead, but it does show that publishers aren’t being passive. We’re putting as many arrows in our quivers as possible, whether that’s being litigious or striking deals.
Speaking of arrows in the quiver, what do you think of Cloudflare’s pay-per-crawl initiative?
I like any model that acknowledges publishers should be paid for their work, and I think it’s important for publishers of all sizes to experiment with different approaches.
There are only a handful of publishers, the Journal among them, that have the equity and leverage to strike big upfront deals, like we did with OpenAI. So, for a lot of publishers, what Cloudflare is proposing might be their only option to make money, and that’s better than nothing.
Let’s switch gears and talk about the Journal’s first-party data strategy. What do you collect and how do you use it?
We’re in the fortunate position of being a paywall business. The vast majority of consumption on our site comes from people who are logged in. As a result, we know quite a lot about our visitors – where they work, for example, and what job they have – and we can also infer a lot, which is helpful for targeting.
The centerpiece of our digital advertising proposition is our ability to segment our audience and give B2B advertisers specificity. A big B2B client who spends a lot of money with us might only care about reaching 20,000 people, so it’s not just about scale. It’s about getting the right people at the right frequency.
What about brand safety? Have you had it up to here with brands avoiding the news? Leading question, I know!
It drives me insane – and it’s also ironic.
First, there’s the fact that every piece of research from Day One has refuted the original premise that an ad next to “bad” news is bad for the brand.
But more so, the whole brand safety industrial complex is basically a reaction to user-generated content, yet the big social platforms barely have to address the issue.
The news industry is the one sitting here having to debate it and bring it up all the time. But I think the news industry has been talking about this for far too long while the platforms just ignore it and talk about performance. So that’s what publishers need to do more of – talk about performance.
Right, so the same brands that are worried about whether news is brand safe are completely fine handing over wads of cash to Meta, Google, TikTok, et al. What’s up with that?
It’s because they work and because it’s easy. But the news works, too – we just need to take a page out of their book.
It’s time to shift the narrative and go on the offensive so that we can move past the era of backfoot defensiveness. It makes no sense to avoid the news. It’s such a missed opportunity for advertisers and I’m offended by the principle.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.
For more articles featuring Josh Stinchcomb, click here.
