The Digiday+ members receive this Media Briefing every Thursday morning at 10 am. ET. More from the series:
The Media Briefing this week examines the rise of the AI Browser War and what it means for publishers, who are already feeling pressure due to the decline in referral traffic caused by AI search tools.
There are days when it feels as if publishers are trapped in a disintermediation wheel.
It’s not the ad tech nor social platforms that are causing this problem today; it’s AI platforms. It appears that their true ambition is just beginning to surface.
The revolving doors of gut punches keep spinning for publishers with Google Now rolling out AI summary to Discover — an action that could cut publishers out of the referral traffic circle even further. The media has been awash with nervous anticipation as Perplexity released its AI-powered Comet web browser and OpenAI is expected to release a browser in the near future.
Perplexity’s press release claims that Comet, an AI-powered web browser, transforms traditional browsing into a seamless conversational experience. Comet can handle all tasks for users, including research, comparison of products, emails, and booking meetings. It claims to be able to do this by collapsing complicated workflows into one intelligent interface.
In Digiday’s tests with Comet the browser opens to a homepage that has Perplexity’s search bar, a similar user interface as a Google search box in Chrome. Users can also request tasks – such as “close tabs” or “summarize my email” – and the built-in AI powered “assistant” can be opened in a sidebar as users explore the web.
Although some publishers are excited by the potential of AI driven browsers and the way the agentic features could define the future user’s experience, there is a healthy amount of skepticism regarding how disruptive this change may be as browsers gain greater control over content accessibility.
It’s obvious that they need to be large in order to completely upset the apple cart. There are also skeptics. Mattia Fosci is a legal and tech expert, co-founder and CEO at privacy-enhancing tech firm Anonymised, and a co-founder of Perplexity Max. He believes that the $200 monthly fee for Comet will be prohibitive for mainstream adoption. He said that for now, Comet is a toy for early adopters, tech savvy people and wealthy people. He does, however, believe that it may cause further disruption to publishers.
Mark Howard, TIME’s chief operating officer, was still waiting to test Comet when he spoke with Digiday on Monday. But he had made the Is was built by startup company Browser Co. of New York and it was his default browser for a few days before that to get an idea of how they work.
His conclusions were two-fold: AI-powered browsers will accelerate a decline in link-based search traffic, putting more pressure on publishers’ reach and revenue. But they can also help users work faster by getting to the information they require.
All media companies are thinking about their pageview-dependent business, whether it’s ad supported, subscription or commerce. Howard said that everyone is running these analyses at the moment. “You have to assume that people will change their behavior to this experience. But that behavior will only be accelerated if you have it built directly into your web browser. Currently, you still need to go to a desktop or mobile app for Perplexity or OpenAI or Gemini. It will only accelerate this when it is baked right into the page experience.
AI summarizing content is not all that’s involved. Agents are also needed to help users take action. Fosci said that this is where the biggest disruption occurs. Price comparison sites and travel search engines may see a decline in traffic. Some sites rely on advertising revenue, while others rely on commissions. Both models depend on users staying on the site. He said that if AI agents handled these tasks directly, traffic (and revenue) could disappear.
Fosci said that if you have a query or are curious about something, you won’t need to visit four or five websites because the AI will do it for you. It will give you the answer immediately. “Generationally we’re already losing our habit of spending time consuming information.”
Nicholas Diakopoulos is a professor of computational journalism at Northwestern University. He said that the timing of the AI-browsers launching just as the media industry increases efforts to clampdown and block unwanted AI bots traffic may not be a coincidence. He speculated, if the internet became more anti-bots, AI companies might develop tools that mimicked human behavior to bypass security and continue collecting data. This would give them an advantage in data acquisition.
Howard believes that publishers can stop free scraping and still earn revenue from AI agents who pay to access content to answer user queries.
How quickly can that scale? We don’t. Howard said it was difficult to predict. “But it’s clear that with the introduction [like AI browsers and AI agents]… more and more will be out there each day… retrieving information in real-time, and that’s an opportunity for media industry.”
What we heard
: “The market and industry will adapt along with that. There is a need to have trusted journalism. We used to be based on scale and everyone was chasing scale. Now we are returning to the fact that people want trusted journalism and authoritative opinions… I think our readers will return to us… This is also why we are building on different platforms.”
Forbes CEO Sherry Philips on Google Discover adding AI summary.
Numbers to Know
This week, Congress will vote to reduce funding for public broadcasting by $1 billion.
Three: The number of titles that World of Good Brands sold (which is closing down), of which two were to Ziff Davis.
What we’ve covered:
IAB Tech Lab pitch to help publishers gain more control over LLM scraping.
- IAB Tech Lab has been working to assemble an IAB Tech Lab task force of publishers to begin its plan to create a framework that will allow publishers to gain greater control and be paid for LLM crawling.
- The task force has about a dozen publishers who have agreed to participate in the first workshop, which will be held on Wednesday, July 23, in New York City, to discuss the next steps for its LLM Content Ingest API Framework. Here is the IAB pitch to publishers
and what it means
Recent workforce diversity reports from publishers show DEI efforts are sluggish.
- Despite decades of promises to diversify their ranks major publishers make barely perceptible, if any, progress. According to the annual workforce diversity data for this year, The New York Times and Hearst have seen a marginal improvement in staff diversity or stagnation by 2024. Here are more details about the DEI program and other changes .
Several publishers use clean room technology for smarter data-targeting
- News UK and The Independent, as well as magazine publishers Immediate Media and Future, are teaming up to test data matching powered by clean room.
- The aim is to match Ocado shopper data to the publishers’ audience behavioral data and contextual data to unlock more granular targeting for advertisers, without compromising user control. You can read more about this deal here.
The creators are the stars of esports
- By 2025, esports will increasingly put individual content creators in the spotlight to keep fans and brands engaged.
- The increasing presence of creators in events like the Esports World Cup shows that the esports sector is recognizing the importance of creators as key drivers for both audience and advertiser interests — and is increasingly putting these individuals front and center.
Read about the strategy here
.
Conde Nast, Hearst sign Amazon AI licensing agreements
- Conde Nast, Hearst and Amazon have signed multi-year contracts to license their content in order to use it for its AI shopping assistant Rufus.
- Rufus, Amazon’s LLM powered shopping assistant, is trained on Amazon’s catalog of products and information from the web to answer questions about shopping needs, product comparisons, and recommendations. It was launched last year.
Click here to read more about the deals.
What we’re Reading
Google Discover adds AI summary
Google is rolling out AI-generated summary in its main news feed Discover. This will further threaten publishers’ referral traffic. TechCrunch reported. The New York Times reported that Skydance CEO David Ellison had held preliminary discussions about acquiring The Free Press. The Free Press is an online publication founded by Bari Weiss. Hearst Newspapers buys The Dallas Morning News (19659058) The publication reported that Hearst Newspapers had purchased DallasNews Corporation, which is the parent company of The Dallas Morning News, Medium Giant and The Dallas News.
The Washington Post restructures its newsroom with a “Futures desk”
According to Talking Biz News, The Washington Post will create a “Futures team” to cover “forces that are shaping life in 21st century”.
Reuters launches AI voiced video content in Spanish
Reuters packages video content translated and narrated by AI technology in Spanish and Portuguese for people who subscribe to its news wire service.
