I spent a few fascinating days at the INMA Media Subscriptions Summit in New York recently, chatting with attendees about generative AI. Maybe it’s just because their backgrounds are in consumer revenue, but here’s something that popped up a few times: the question of money.

The keynote speaker at the summit was Professor Rajkumar Venkatesan, who specialises in marketing with technology at the University of Virginia. He mentioned AI-powered search in his presentation, which almost every publisher I have spoken to over the past few months has mentioned as a topic of great concern. 

The reason is simple: As Google rolls out search generative experience (SGE), it will no longer send much traffic to publishers’ sites, giving consumers a bullet-point summary of what they are searching for instead.

This means that publishers may need to rethink their business models — whether they are predicated on ad impressions, affiliate revenue, or subscriptions. This has the potential to take out one-third of news publishers’ business, according to my brilliant colleague Greg Piechota, who organised the summit as is the INMA Readers First Initiative lead.

In our conversation after his presentation, Venkatesan had a lot to say about SGE:

1. Google will need to monetise AI-powered search

“There’s no way they can keep providing it for free. It costs money to run search queries with GenAI at scale,” Venkatesan said. It costs Google 10 times more to generate a list of summarised results than it does to return a typical, old-fashioned page of results with links, according to Piechota. (He also points out that Google brought in US$31 billion in revenue in 2023 from its ad network on publishers’ Web sites.)

This means Google could charge the consumer for SGE results, since it is providing them with a time-saving service by summarising results for them. Will customers be willing to pay for that? Or perhaps they are simply used to treating the Internet as “free and god-given,” as the chief product officer at a large European publisher told me.

The publisher points to a different trade-off: “Do you want good results or do you want cheap results?”

Alternatively, Google could charge publishers to be referred to and linked to in SGE results. Charging publishers could undermine trust in results — or, if Google links only to reputable publishers who can afford to pay, maybe it will not. 

So, instead of generating revenue for publishers, search could become another expense.

2. Remove the middleman

Stop relying on Google and other platforms to send audiences your way. GenAI makes it easier to generate content and build that direct relationship with the reader, whether it is a low-tech solution like newsletters or something relatively new like a chatbot that answers user queries. Publishers need to remember that focusing on their brand is worthwhile.

Venkatesan cited the travel industry as an example. Consumers realised they could get better deals and perks by going directly to a hotel Web site than by going through an intermediary travel-booking Web site. 

It is now up to news publishers to show consumers the value of their content by repeatedly surfacing what consumers actually find valuable. This means investing in data to really understand what consumers are looking for and find worth paying for.

3. Join forces and negotiate

News publishers should block GenAI platforms from simply taking their content and using it as training material for their models, Venkatesan said. (Only about half of the world’s publications do this at present). They should band together and force tech companies to pay for it, he said, as Reddit and Axel Springer did, and as News Corp is doing.

OpenAI itself has said that it is impossible to train models without copyrighted material. The news industry should cash in on that. 

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