This Media Briefing covers the latest in media trends for Digiday+ members and is distributed over email every Thursday at 10 a.m. ET. More from the series →This week’s Media Briefing will look at how the open web is splitting between human audiences and AI crawlers — and why publishers are betting on stronger brands and diversified audience strategies to survive the shift.
The open web isn’t dead — it’s just changing shape. As human traffic becomes harder to attract and AI crawlers absorb more publisher content, the web is splitting into two audiences. That’s forcing publishers to rethink the economics of the open web, and shift their focus from chasing scale to building strong brands with diversified content strategies that resonate with audiences.
That’s the only way to survive, and grow, in this new era, four publishing execs told Digiday.
“If you want to grow, you want to be more than an open web business. The open web is not dead, but it’s getting smaller,” said Jon Roberts, chief innovation officer at People Inc. “We will always be an open web business… And we will also build on other platforms. It’s not a this or that, it’s a this and that.”
At the same time, publishers are trying to determine how to deal with the surge of bots coming to their sites, while navigating the nascent commercial landscape of AI content licensing. Determining how to monetize this new bot audience is challenging, and not happening fast enough to offset losses in impression-based ad revenue for some publishers.
