People Inc. has long been celebrated for its creative, cutting-edge thinking in the publishing field. Soon after, during its IAC parent company’s third-quarter earnings call, they revealed a massive new AI licensing agreement with Microsoft. It’s the company’s second major partnership in the AI space after its record-setting investment in OpenAI last year.
Neil Vogel, the President and CEO of People Inc., shared their choice to partner with Microsoft. What makes this collaboration special is the ambition of their vision to use Cloudflare’s cool new technology. He explained that this was an intentional move to force AI companies to negotiate, thus changing the normalization of compensation for use of content. Vogel noted that by adopting Cloudflare’s solutions, they’ve been able to speed up their progress on deals. Now, they’re a lot further along than in the past.
In recent data disclosed to investors, People Inc. pointed to a troubling trend with one of its traffic sources. Just two years ago, Google Search was responsible for 54% of the company’s new traffic. Over the last three months, that percentage has plummeted to a mere 24%. Yet, this decline makes the need all the more urgent for publishers, such as People Inc., to find new revenue sources and partnerships.
Vogel unpacked this shift a little more during the earnings call, citing it as a prime example of how effective blocking AI crawlers can be. He noted that this approach has “brought everyone under the tent. This is a major step forward from the previous state of affairs, where AI companies had all the leverage to exploit content creators.
“Essentially a pay-per-use market where AI players directly can compensate publishers for use of their content on, sort of like an ‘a la carte’ basis.” – Neil Vogel
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Vogel further emphasized the significance of these developments for the publishing industry, stating, “It’s a very strong endorsement of us to be in the room with them and a very strong endorsement of the publishing marketplace and the value of content to make AI that is of high value.”