People Inc chief innovation officer Jon Roberts developed a new model of cosmic ray transport across the Solar System in his previous job as a theoretical physicist.
But his current intellectual challenge could be even greater: figuring out a way to make sure journalists get paid in a world where the content they create has been taken, scrambled and reassembled by generative AI companies.
While Roberts, who holds a Phd in theoretical physics, is on the front line of using AI in publishing – one bridge he won’t cross is getting robots to create content.
Asked whether AI is, or could be, used in content creation at the largest consumer publisher in the US, he said: “No.
“As a digital publisher we embrace AI for all its benefits, but AI will never change the fact that humans make our brands what they are. Channelling human insight, expertise, inspiration and creativity for the benefit of all is what makes our brands special. We will always be distinctly human.”
The publisher of brands including People, Food & Wine, Travel + Leisure, Better Homes & Gardens and Investopedia changed its name from Dotdash Meredith earlier this year.
It was formed out of the merger of online publisher Dotdash (part of Barry Diller’s IAC) which bought magazine giant Meredith for $2.8bn in December 2021.
Roberts has been with People Inc/Dotdash and forerunner company About.com for more than ten years after joining the company as a data scientist. He was the keynote speaker at Press Gazette’s Media Strategy Network USA conference held at the People Inc building in New York on 13 November.
Roberts was previously focused on the rollout of People Inc’s online advertising tool D/Cipher, which targets advertising based on content and is said by the company to be far more effective than tracking cookies.
Now, top of his in-tray is figuring out a way for publishers to get paid by the generative AI companies who are building online answer engines based on stolen content.
People Inc is on the front line of this battle as a result of Google’s defensive tactics that have involved rolling out AI summaries on search and AI mode, both of which largely remove the need for users to click through to publisher sources.
Roberts said: “In Q3 Google Search as a traffic source for our core brands went from 54% of our traffic two years ago – it was even higher if you go back to the time of the Meredith merger – to 24% of our traffic this past quarter. Yet, People Inc grew digital revenue for the eighth consecutive quarter as we continue to adapt to this new era in media.
“We were early to recognise the coming Google and AI challenges, and we prepared for it. That’s why every other meaningful source of traffic has increased over the past two years.”
“We should not expect Google to be doing anything other than what they’re aligned to. We just have to navigate it.”
Asked how People Inc has managed to grow non-search traffic (which includes referrals from Google Discover) he said: “It’s email, it’s direct visits. It’s all the footprints on the social platforms getting bigger, even off-platform stuff like Apple News, where it just continues to be a source of strength for us.”
Despite the challenges posed by Google’s adoption of AI in search, Roberts maintains that publishers still have the edge versus the AI answer engines.
“There are tools and places for types of user needs that are already better than AI. If you’re trying to get celebrity news, you should use the People app. If you’re trying to figure out what to cook, you should be using the MyRecipes recipe locker, and you should be going to Serious Eats, or Simply Recipes, or Allrecipes, or any one of these places.
“AI is trying to answer every question for everyone. And there’s a lowest common denominator problem. If you’re trying to do everything, you’re not actually going to do any one thing well. As publishers, we know our audience and their needs better. It’s on us to build a better product, to service our users.”
People Inc signed a deal with OpenAI in October 2022 which included an undisclosed licensing fee for the use of content, agreements over the way People Inc brands are cited on ChatGPT and the ability to use OpenAI technology in-house.
Roberts said: “You can either stand outside yelling at clouds saying, please turn back to October 2022, or you can be with these companies figuring it out.”
When People Inc announced its third quarter earnings at the start of November it revealed it was one of “a select group of premier publishers to build Microsoft’s Publisher Content Marketplace (PCM), a two-sided content marketplace envisioned to compensate publishers for use of their content by AI players and products”.
Microsoft is the largest minority investor in ChatGPT owner OpenAI and is also a major AI player in its own right. Microsoft Copilot will be the first content buyer in the new PCM.
The launch of Microsoft’s PCM follows the launch in July of new technology from web hosting provider Cloudflare which blocks unauthorised scraping of website content by AI companies and has been adopted by People Inc and a host of other premium publishers.
Roberts said: “The thing that’s very interesting with the Microsoft deal is they’re the first hyperscaler to say that you deserve to be paid for the quality of your IP. It’s a very, very clear position to have taken, and it leaves the window open for the other platforms.”
On the Cloudflare deal, he said it underlined the sheer scale of unauthorised website scraping by AI companies that flew in the face of assurances given by the tech industry.
“For all the AI companies saying we don’t need your content, on the first day, we blocked millions of unlicensed attempts to crawl our content. You can listen to what they say or you can look at what they do.”
Read all the other reports from Press Gazette Media Strategy Network USA event here.
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