From Digiday, September 18:
Bloomberg Media has yet to sign a content licensing deal with any AI company. And the business news publisher’s CEO Karen Saltser explained why on stage at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Miami, Florida, on Monday.
“The choice we made at the time and to date is still not to license for training. Certainly we’re still in conversation with all of the companies, and as commercial models are evolving, we are having new types of conversations,” Saltser said.
Indeed, the AI compensation model for publishers seems to be shifting toward usage-based payments that are more recurrent compared to the lump-sum licensing deals for AI companies to train on publisher’s data. “It’s a fairer, hopefully recurring-based model. I’m not sure it’s the end-all, be-all for publishers,” Saltser said.
Fair. But is it enough to get Bloomberg to the negotiating table?
“It’s fair enough for us to have conversations. We are thinking about AI and how we run out business in slightly different ways than licensing being a big part of it at the moment,” said Saltser.
Bloomberg has the benefit of its subscription and advertising businesses continuing to grow, lessening the near-term pressure for revenue from the AI companies. The publisher’s paid subscriber base has grown by 16% this year to “just under 670,000 subscribers,” Saltser said. Meanwhile, its advertising revenue has increased by 6%.
And on that note, Bloomberg is using AI to give its business a boost. Case in point: Roughly a month ago, it relaunched its on-site search engine to be powered by AI and has recorded a 15% increase in people using its on-site search engine as well as a 15% increase in click-through rate. Those stats don’t directly contribute into revenue, but they do reinforce Bloomberg’s utility to its audience at a time when people are getting a lot of use out of ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews for accessing information they would otherwise visit publishers’ sites for....
....MUCH MORE, including the rest of the articles in Digiday's Publishing Summit series.
