Imagine if your best friend told you that he was going to chuck in his job because he’d acquired some magic beans that he was going to plant and – well you know the rest.
But that has been the story of newspapers and the internet. Publishers allowed their content to be accessed and exploited by platforms like Google, but took magic beans – in the form of monetisable clicks – instead of cash in return. This was a problem because the volume was determined by Google, and their value was also ultimately set by Google’s ad marketplace. So both the volume and value were outside publishers’ control, despite their investment in the tricky art of SEO.
So… the beans didn’t grow, their businesses went south, and no-one lived happily ever after.
Pre-internet news publishers likewise chased popularity. They sold newspapers. The more they sold, the more money they made because they set their cover price, they did their own distribution deals and they sold the ads. So “be more popular” was a pretty good mission statement.
Being more popular was easy online, especially in the early days – and companies like Google helped accelerate it, so the mission stuck.
But popularity is only valuable if you can reliably convert it to money, and the magic bean economy is bad at delivering actual cash. In the last 25 years or so, the press’s share of advertising spend has fallen about 90% (guess where it went!). Subscriptions address a tiny and saturated share of the total audience.
News just doesn’t make enough money.
As publishers have become weaker, their dependence on platforms has deepened, and their products have stagnated or dissolved into beans-gathering clickbait. Competition for limited revenue has set publishers against each other, zero-sum economics fragmenting the sector. As the revenue pool has dwindled, and with no way of collaborating to make it grow, publishers have been left fighting for shares of an ever-shrinking opportunity.
Now, everything is changing because of AI. AI platforms have been behaving like search engines did before them. They’ve just taken the content, without asking, and incorporated it into their own services.
This time, they’re not even offering beans in return: the AI directly answers queries from users, using content taken from publishers, and sends neither traffic nor money to anyone whose content helped. Instead of paying even in beans, AI companies are offering jack.
The question is, now that we can see what is happening, and knowing how it turned out last time, will news publishers tolerate it?
Nobody sensible, or who understands the history or law of copyright, would dream of putting up with this.
For now, though, creators are on their own. In the UK the government started 2025 with a consultation on changing the law which suggested that they were determined to do whatever they can to help the AI industry.
11,000 responses later, they seem to be rethinking. But not much is actually happening. The courts are equally pedestrian, with months passing while various – mostly American – lawsuits wend slowly through the system. In the meantime, AI companies release new models and features at breakneck speed.
This creates helpful, if depressing, clarity for publishers and creators: they can’t rely on the law, or the government, to protect their rights and businesses. Waiting for common sense or the rule of law to prevail would be folly; AI is moving far too fast, the lawmakers too slowly and – so far, anyway – in the wrong direction. Anyone who wants to survive the AI bonfire of content will have to take matters into their own hands.
This starts with unity. It has already emerged, powerfully, in lobbying against government proposals to twist copyright to suit AI. It now it needs to extend to action, by answering and acting on these questions.
1) How do we distinguish humans from non-humans accessing our stuff so we prevent AI systems from stealing our work? Projects like Cloudflare’s bot-blocking tools will help, and the next step will be to match them to a functioning marketplace for bot rights which publishers can control for themselves.
[Read more: Third-party scrapers are stealing publisher content to order for AI companies]
2) How do we build our own systems to take over the job of helping users discover our content and products, now that Google has abandoned that role? Can we start to function as our own network, and can our shared network start to function as a platform in its own right?
3) How do we ensure that we get paid in real money from now on, at prices we set ourselves, putting an end to the magic beans racket which has brought us to our knees and forces us apart?
4) How do we take counter the rapid pollution of the internet by AI, drawing people to trusted and accountable content?
All these are questions which are essential for the industry to address if it wants to survive.
This will take more than just talking about it. The industry will need to collaborate at a strategic and operational level to define a future model which can scale and which doesn’t depend so heavily on platforms for distribution, discovery or monetisation.
But we need to do much more to redefine the next phase of the internet as one in which creative industries can thrive again. Products will have to evolve to better meet the needs of the new paradigm and will need to focus relentlessly on the needs of users.
And it has to happen fast: AI is destroying the foundations and business models of the industry at an incredible pace. We need industry-owned, customer-focused solutions, platform independent solutions in the market in weeks or months, not years, building out in a state of constant evolution.
News publishing can’t go into the next phase so fragmented. We need a bigger share of the online spoils and we won’t get it by fighting over someone else’s scraps..
If journalism wants to survive and thrive in the AI era we need to knock down the artificial walls which the platforms have created to hold us apart, we need to collaborate to take back what AI and legislators seem determined to take from us, and we need to build our own networks in which we, and the humans we exist to serve, can thrive.
What’s my interest in all this? I’ve been at the forefront of mounting defence after defence against the platforms and working to build a digital environment in which media can thrive. Starting with ACAP, back in 2006, via numerous projects inside and outside News Corp, and in the last few years through my company Axate which aims to create a network of publishers and users all able to access any pay for whatever they want whenever they want it.
This time around the whole industry is under attack, there is no option to retain the status quo and I want to help everyone to fight back. It’s not just a fight for survival, it’s the opportunity to create something much better for ourselves and our – population-scale – audiences. If you agree, get in touch. Let’s do this together.
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