Publishers should leverage AI to engage audiences and give them what “they actually expect”, Press Gazette’s Future of Media Technology Conference heard in London.
Matthew Monahan, president of content platform Arc XP, discussed AI’s impact on publisher audiences, and how The Washington Post has used it for personalisation and engagement.
Launched in 2015 at the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post, Arc XP is a publisher technology company which decribes itself as: “Not just a CMS. An AI-powered engine for media growth.” It is used by more than 2,500 websites globally.
The impact of AI is hitting “directly where traditional media business models lie”, said Monahan, adding: “What’s striking is not … the ten to 15% decline that we see coming from search referrals globally. What’s…most concerning is the drop in direct traffic from young audiences.”
He said publishers need to respond to this threat by providing more of the multimedia content which younger audiences appear to prefer.
The Washington Post’s chatbot, Ask the Post, was developed by Arc XP and has been pulling specific content from text-based stories since 2016.
Ask The Post has received “tens of millions” of queries from users, Monhan said, with data from queries pointing the paper in directions “that we don’t expect, things that we didn’t report on, angles on stories that the newsroom hadn’t considered”.
The chatbot is “producing a new type of passive experience, one that’s hyper-personalised… interactive, but still fundamentally grounded in our own reporting”, said Monahan.
Monahan added: “If we know that you’ve read ten articles on Gaza this month, we don’t need to explain to you where Gaza is or who controls it. We can … dive … into the latest news and start to give you your update. I think this is what audiences increasingly expect.”
Monahan also spoke about the importance of publishers directly monetising traffic from AI scrapers.
“There’s a security layer publishers need to have that manages bot traffic,” Monahan said. “Among our customer base, bot traffic is almost 50% higher in Europe versus other regions where we operate.
“If we can come up with the right sort of access and authentication model for bot providers to access this content, not only can we block them, but we can provide the model where we do allow them access.
“Right now …media organisations – and The Washington Post is no exception – are striking opportunistic deals with open AI or perplexity or others, and I think that’s fine, as long as they’re relatively limited.”
Ultimately, scraping “in exchange for a commercial arrangement” is an “end” goal, Monahan said.
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