Thesis: We’re moving towards a publishing market where AI content monetized by ads is going to dominate.
How will publishers survive?
Short answer: many won’t.
I know that this idea upsets a lot of people for a lot of reasons, but here’s why it’s going to happen.
Value.
Cheap Sells
Publishers argue that their content is higher quality than anything AI can create. That’s not the winning argument they think it is because people don’t always choose quality. We look at a combination of quality, price, and convenience.
Human creators like to call AI-created content “slop.” Sometimes that’s justified. But those complaints don’t mean much because …
- AI is getting better all the time, and
- It’s not a question of what’s “better.”
That second bullet is the hard one to swallow, but I’m afraid it’s true.
People will choose to pay $1 for the AI slop rather than $10 for the “better” human-created stuff.
You can see this phenomenon in your own life.
A custom shirt is better than a shirt off the shelf, but how many people buy custom shirts?
Art from a skilled human may be better than anything AI can do. But if the human art costs $100, and the AI art costs 10 cents – even if it’s only 85 percent as good…. It’s game over. People will choose (and are choosing right now) to use the AI “slop.”
Consider the image I’m using for this article. I could have hired a human to create something for me, and I have no doubt it would be better. But this image took 10 seconds and cost me almost nothing. That puts a very different spin on what “better” means.
“Better” isn’t what your art director or your editor thinks it means. It’s not a question of quality.
The question is what will people settle for, and all of our experience says that most people will settle for lower quality provided it comes at a much lower price.
Add the Internet
The Internet itself — structurally, at its core — has a strong bias towards “free, supported by ads.”
Take podcast platforms as an example. That was a perfect opportunity to create subscriptions, but it didn’t go that way because that’s not how the tech people think. They assume the podcast will be free and that you’ll earn your supper with ad revenue.
Paid content is a small minority of what gets consumed on the Internet, and it always will be.
“Free, supported by ads” is a tough model for a publisher. You have to pay writers, editors, and artists, and ads aren’t the cash cow they once were.
Many content creators fight against that in many different ways (as they should), but the cards are stacked against them. Our tech overlords have always preferred the “free with ads” model (because they control the ads, and they can get more user information that way), and they’re always nudging (sometimes shoving) in that direction.
“Free, supported by ads” is a tough model when you have lots of salaries to pay, but it becomes easier when AI is doing more and more of the work of creating the content.
Consumers will settle for “good enough,” and they (and the platforms) will prefer “free supported by ads.”
That’s a recipe for AI winning the war.
Some consumers will pay a premium for human-created, higher quality work, just as some people will buy custom-made clothing. But they’ll be rare.
Also, there will be a growing market for cheap, AI-created products that are not ad-supported. AI-written books. AI-created music. And, God help us, AI-created movies – with AI actors.
What’s a publisher to do?
For now, there are two choices.
Option one: outcompete the machine.
Go all-in on AI production, radically reduce your cost of business by replacing humans with AI, and hope that the few humans you still employ can provide a creative edge over the companies that have even fewer (or no) humans.
This can work in the short term, but AI will get better and better, and you’ll be competing against a cost structure that approaches zero run by companies with more capital than you’ll ever have.
The long-term prospects are not good.
Option two: become impossible to replace.
This is the harder path. It means betting on the idea there are some things humans can produce that AI can’t, and that other humans will be willing to pay for it.
Three things fit that description. At least for now.
- A name people trust.
- A relationship with you, your staff, or with other subscribers. A community.
- Judgment that AI can’t match, such as local, boots on the ground reporting.
There will be pockets where human-made work remains commercially strong, especially where trust, status, taste, and identity are part of the purchase. But that won’t save the median publisher trying to live on digital ad economics.
Conclusion
I’m sorry for delivering the bad news, and please don’t think I like any of this. If I could pull the plug and eliminate AI, I’d do it in a second.
But we have to live in the real world, and this, unfortunately, is where things are heading.
Also, while I’m painting a sad picture, it’s not total doom and gloom. AI content supported by ads will dominate, but it won’t be the only game in town.
Clever publishers will find niches, such as special interest publications.
But AI will dominate the landscape.
