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No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

(bradt.ca)
137 points bradt | 1 comments | 31 Aug 25 15:37 UTC | HN request time: 0.323s | source
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djoldman ◴[31 Aug 25 16:07 UTC] No.45084227[source]▶
> ChatGPT, Google, and its competitors are rapidly diverting traffic from publishers. Publishers are fighting to survive through lawsuits, partnerships, paywalls, and micropayments. It’s pretty bleak, but unfortunately I think the situation is far worse than it seems.

> The article focuses mainly on the publishing industry, news and magazine sites that rely primarily on visits to their sites and selling ads.

I'm not sure where this comes from. The way forward for publishers of content like newspapers is subscription fees and has been for a long time.

The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist revenues are subscription fee dominant, for example.

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1. jsnell ◴[31 Aug 25 16:24 UTC] No.45084387[source]▶
It's a business with odd scaling.

You can find examples of national papers of record having successful subscription models for text content. If you're only subscribing to one paper, it'll be one of those. And you can find 1-5 person outfits with strong personal brands (often built in other media) and a loyal following, who specially want a given person's take on things and want to read everything they write. Basically financials that resemble the "1000 true fans" model.

But between those extremes it is a lot harder to make subscriptions work.