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

> 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.

Who will pay for a subscription fee for journalism if people get trained to receive their information from an opaque tl;dr machine rather than primary sources?

Americans already, and increasingly, report getting a good chunk of their news from social media:

https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/social-med...

Folks who want more traditional journalism will pay for it.

Social media doesn’t provide news. It provides regurgitation of actual news by journalists (who need to eat) and a lot of hot takes and commentary on the actual news by journalists. Take away the journalism and you’re left with Reddit hot air.