Tootfinder

Analysis: 16 of the UK's top 50 biggest news websites now use a "consent or pay" model to let users opt out of cookies; almost 100% choose to accept cookies (Charlotte Tobitt/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/marketing/consent-or-pay-…

More UK news publishers are adopting 'consent or pay' advertising model
Sixteen of the 50 biggest news websites in the UK are now using a “consent or pay” model to allow users to pay to reject personalised ads.

Textbook publishers are largely rejecting OK Supe Ryan Walters' MAGA curriculum in Oklahoma
https://www.friendlyatheist.com/p/textbook-publishers-are-largely-rejecting

B2B travel trade magazine TTG closes its print edition after 72 years to focus on digital and events, which it says account for 45% and 40% of its revenue (Charlotte Tobitt/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/

Travel magazine TTG closes print title to focus on digital and events growth
B2B travel trade magazine title TTG is closing in print after 72 years but CEO sets out "clear growth path".

Four outlets have taken down AI-generated articles by a "journalist"; Wired says her article didn't go through a proper fact-check or get sufficient editing (Charlotte Tobitt/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/

Wired says 'AI-written' story did not have 'proper fact-check process'
Wired explains how it got duped by an AI freelancer while other editors who had been pitched by Margaux Blanchard share their stories.

Do you compose or publish music in the UK? 'Call for composers and publishers to deposit digital scores' with the British Library and other legal deposit libraries? https://www.bl.uk/stories/blogs/posts/call-for-composers-and-pub…

Call for composers and publishers to deposit digital scores
Help us to collect digital scores from composers and independent publishers.

Filing: the Internet Archive and major music labels settle a copyright infringement lawsuit against IA over its project to preserve early music recordings (Ashley Belanger/Ars Technica)
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/202…

Internet Archive’s big battle with music publishers ends in settlement
The true cost of keeping the Internet Archive alive will likely remain unknown.

Sources: publishers are considering moving from flat-fee AI content licensing deals with companies to usage-based deals; Perplexity is developing such a model (Catherine Perloff/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/news-p…

News Publishers Shift AI Licensing Focus to Usage-Based Deals
Signs that OpenAI and other artificial intelligence firms are generating ever-increasing revenues are getting attention—from news publishers who want to get their piece of the action. Publishers that have struck deals to license their content to AI firms for training large language models are ...

🐦‍⬛ 'Resident Evil' makers marvel at 'miracle' longevity
#games

'Resident Evil' makers marvel at 'miracle' longevity
When zombie-blasting survival game "Resident Evil" launched on the very first PlayStation console in 1996, Japanese publishers Capcom never thought the series would reach tens of millions of people or endure for three decades.

Checked in at Betaworks Studios. Prepping for Protocols for Publishers this evening — with Ted

Wired and Business Insider remove articles by journalist Margaux Blanchard that appear to be AI-generated and feature people who do not seem to exist (Charlotte Tobitt/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/

Wired and Business Insider remove 'AI-written' freelance articles
Wired and Business Insider have removed freelance articles over concerns they were written by AI under a fake name.

Google updates its Search app's Discover page to let users follow specific publishers and creators; it plans to add YouTube Shorts and X and Instagram posts (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/17/google-revamps-discover-pag…

Google revamps Discover page to show content from creators | TechCrunch
Google will now let you follow publishers and creators directly through its Search app's Discover page.

fediverse: Fediverse network (2018)
An early snapshot of the federation network among web publishers using the ActivityPub protocol. Nodes are instances, and a directed edge exists if an instance follows another instance.
This network has 4860 nodes and 484164 edges.
Tags: Social, Online, Information
https://ne…

Taboola and Paramount Skydance launch a CTV product called Performance Multiplier, aiming to extend the reach of Paramount's small and medium-sized ad partners (Sara Fischer/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/10/22/taboola-launches-ctv-product-with-paramount…

Taboola launches CTV product with Paramount
The tool leverages Taboola's Realize AI tech, which allows publishers to sell performance ads across the open web.

«younger generations are seeking information on social video platforms rather than the open web. This gradual shift is not unique to #Wikipedia. Many other publishers and content platforms are reporting similar shifts as users spend more time on search engines, AI chatbots, and social media to find information.»
All of those "alternatives" are facilitated through algorithmic recommendation engines designed to maximize profits, what could possible go wrong there…
https://www.404media.co/wikipedia-says-ai-is-causing-a-dangerous-decline-in-human-visitors/

ProRata.ai, which lets publishers embed custom AI search on their sites with a 50/50 revenue share, raised a $40M Series B, bringing its total raised to $70M (Kerry Flynn/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/09/05/prorata-ai-search-tool-publishers

Exclusive: ProRata.ai raises $40M and launches new search tool for publishers
The new product provides publishers custom AI search on their sites.

Google officially launches AI summaries in the Discover news feed within its smartphone search app in the US; there is no date set yet for the UK (Rob Waugh/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/news/google-ai-summaries-start-to-roll-out-in-discov…

Google AI summaries start to roll out in Discover in US
AI summaries roll out in Google Discover, posing new threat to publishers who rely on the app for traffic.

A rightwing conference recently saw theocratic Christian nationalists,
far-right publishers and members of men-only secret societies
speaking alongside the Missouri senator Eric Schmitt,
the assistant attorney general for civil rights at Donald Trump’s Department of Justice and other senior Republican figures.
The speaker list at the "National Conservatism" conference in Washington DC raises questions over what distinctions exist between the nationalist hard …

Apparently an older boy generated the ads with AI and ran away.
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/nexon-respond-to-claims-theyre-using-ai-generated-tiktok-streamers-to-advertise-the-first-descendant…

Nexon respond to claims they're using AI-generated Tiktok streamers to advertise The First Descendant
The First Descendant publishers Nexon have addressed AI-looking streamer adverts for the game on TikTok, saying they and the platform are investigating.

In a marketing experiment I'm looking around at different social networks. (The fediverse is great but organic advertising benefits more with more eyeballs.)
In my experiment I dusted off my ancient birdsite account to create a branded account, and FUCK, I didn't completely understand just the level of vitriol and hatred that frequently gets promoted over there!
With my branded account I'm following tech folks and game publishers, and even in those chats extremist ri…

In a marketing experiment I'm looking around at different social networks. (The fediverse is great but organic advertising benefits more with more eyeballs.)
In my experiment I dusted off my ancient birdsite account to create a branded account, and FUCK, I didn't completely understand just the level of vitriol and hatred that frequently gets promoted over there!
With my branded account I'm following tech folks and game publishers, and even in those chats extremist right-wing cha…

City Matters, a free monthly newspaper serving the City of London since 2016, enters voluntary liquidation, citing rising print costs and declining ad revenue (Alice Brooker/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/reg…

Fleet Street's local newspaper goes out of business
City Matters launched in 2016, aiming to "fill a local news gap" for City of London which, at the time, had "no dedicated title".

@… I’m not sure this would fix it? I think https://docs.npmjs.com/trusted-publishers is the new thing that might help prevent bad publishes from other workf…

📚 Publishing/writing colleagues! Who publishes craft chapbooks?
As in, shorter books about story design, etc. I'm looking for publishers that would not over-price them for academic libraries, and preferably are activist-friendly. ✊
It may just be that all the usual publishers are happy to do so shorter books. Thank you! ✍

Digital Content Next survey: 19 US online publishers, including major newsrooms, saw a median 10% YoY decline in Google referral traffic in the May-June period (Charlotte Tobitt/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/media-audie

UK and US publishers say Google AI is harming website traffic
US publishers reported an average fall in referral traffic from Google search of 10% in May and June compared to a year earlier.

Sources: Microsoft is in talks with US publishers about launching a two-sided marketplace that would compensate publishers for their content used by AI products (Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/09/23/microsoft-ai-marketplace-publishers

Scoop: Microsoft looks to build AI marketplace for publishers
Copilot would be the first buyer in the Publisher Content Marketplace.

RLRF: Competitive Search Agent Design via Reinforcement Learning from Ranker Feedback
Tommy Mordo, Sagie Dekel, Omer Madmon, Moshe Tennenholtz, Oren Kurland
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04096

RLRF: Competitive Search Agent Design via Reinforcement Learning from Ranker Feedback
Competitive search is a setting where document publishers modify them to improve their ranking in response to a query. Recently, publishers have increasingly leveraged LLMs to generate and modify competitive content. We introduce Reinforcement Learning from Ranker Feedback (RLRF), a framework that trains LLMs using preference datasets derived from ranking competitions. The goal of a publisher (LLM-based) agent is to optimize content for improved ranking while accounting for the strategies of co…

Your word of the day:
"Caesarism"
Yup, it calls for a revival of the government approach of Julius, Augustus, Nero, and Caligula.
And it is becoming the policy of our country's R-party and our countries orange colored wannabe emperor.
It is an espoused plank of the "National Conservative" movement who are meeting in DC, with many MAGA gov't officials not only in attendance, but as speakers.

The Italian federation of newspaper publishers submits a complaint to Italy's communication watchdog calling for an investigation into Google's AI Overviews (Angela Giuffrida/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/202

"Multilingual Scholarly Publishing and Artificial Intelligence Translation Tools: Weighing Social Justice and Climate Justice"
https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.7100

Newsletter platform Ghost now lets publishers syndicate their posts across social web platforms like Mastodon, Bluesky and Threads
https://www.theverge.com/news/718286/ghost

One of the biggest newsletter platforms now syndicates to Bluesky and Mastodon
Newsletter platform Ghost now lets publishers syndicate their posts across social web platforms like Bluesky, Threads, and Mastodon as part of its 6.0 release.

Appcharge, which runs a DTC platform for game publishers, raised a $58M Series B led by IVP, taking its total funding to $89M, and powers stores for 100 games (Globes)
https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-mobile-games-sales-platform-appcharge-rai…

Mobile games sales platform Appcharge raises $58m
The Israeli company has developed a direct-to-consumer (DTC) platform for mobile game publishers to maximize profits through owning player relationships.

Ofcom rules that the BBC's failure to disclose that a Gaza documentary was narrated by the son of a minister in the Hamas-run government was a "serious breach" (Alice Brooker/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/…

Ofcom orders BBC to air on TV finding that Gaza film broke broadcasting rules
Ofcom has accused the BBC of “a serious breach” of the broadcasting Code with its Gaza documentary for its Hamas links.

Exposing Citation Vulnerabilities in Generative Engines
Riku Mochizuki, Shusuke Komatsu, Souta Noguchi, Kazuto Ataka
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06823 https://

Exposing Citation Vulnerabilities in Generative Engines
We analyze answers generated by generative engines (GEs) from the perspectives of citation publishers and the content-injection barrier, defined as the difficulty for attackers to manipulate answers to user prompts by placing malicious content on the web. GEs integrate two functions: web search and answer generation that cites web pages using large language models. Because anyone can publish information on the web, GEs are vulnerable to poisoning attacks. Existing studies of citation evaluation…

Optimal Boost Design for Auto-bidding Mechanism with Publisher Quality Constraints
Huanyu Yan, Yu Huo, Min Lu, Weitong Ou, Xingyan Shi, Ruihe Shi, Xiaoying Tang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08772

Optimal Boost Design for Auto-bidding Mechanism with Publisher Quality Constraints
Online bidding is crucial in mobile ecosystems, enabling real-time ad allocation across billions of devices to optimize performance and user experience. Improving ad allocation efficiency is a long-standing research problem, as it directly enhances the economic outcomes for all participants in advertising platforms. This paper investigates the design of optimal boost factors in online bidding while incorporating quality value (the impact of displayed ads on publishers' long-term benefits). To a…

Filing: the Internet Archive and major music labels settle a copyright lawsuit against Internet Archive over its project to preserve early music recordings (Ashley Belanger/Ars Technica)
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20…

Internet Archive’s big battle with music publishers ends in settlement
The true cost of keeping the Internet Archive alive will likely remain unknown.

Standing up to Trump's assault on #research requires solidarity. ARL, ACRL, SSP, STM, and AUPresses issued a joint statement & request for feedback on next steps. Share your ideas!

fediverse: Fediverse network (2018)
An early snapshot of the federation network among web publishers using the ActivityPub protocol. Nodes are instances, and a directed edge exists if an instance follows another instance.
This network has 4860 nodes and 484164 edges.
Tags: Social, Online, Information
https://ne…

DMG Media, Guardian Media Group, and other UK publishers call for the CMA to include Gemini in its investigation into Google's search and search ads dominance (Alice Brooker/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/publ…

Publishers call for CMA to include Gemini in Google investigation
Publishers have responded to the UK's competition watchdog (CMA)'s investigation on Google's market dominance.

A profile of Far Out, a UK-based digital culture magazine that grew from a student blog in 2010 to ~30 full-time staff, with 20M monthly page views on average (Alice Brooker/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/how-far-out-grew-…

How Far Out grew from student blog to 30 full-time staff
Far Out founder Lee Thomas says the online culture site averages 20 million page views a month and maintains traffic through Google Discover.

Google updates its Search app's Discover page to let users follow specific publishers and creators; it plans to add YouTube Shorts and X and Instagram posts (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/17/google-revamps-discover-pag…

Google revamps Discover page to show content from creators | TechCrunch
Google will now let you follow publishers and creators directly through its Search app's Discover page.

ProRata.ai, which lets publishers embed custom AI search on their sites with a 50/50 revenue share, raised a $40M Series B, bringing its total raised to $75M (Kerry Flynn/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/09/05/prorata-ai-search-tool-publishers

Exclusive: ProRata.ai raises $40M and launches new search tool for publishers
The new product provides publishers custom AI search on their sites.

The Spectator, which launched a US print edition in 2019, plans to double its print output in the US to 24 issues annually as part of a relaunch this fall (Sara Fischer/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/08/19/the-spectator-us-edition-print

The Spectator to double print for U.S. edition
It's part of an industrywide print revival in the U.S. as publishers look for more ways to upsell jaded digital advertisers in the AI era.

Investigating Industry--Academia Collaboration in Artificial Intelligence: PDF-Based Bibliometric Analysis from Leading Conferences
Kazuhiro Yamauchi, Marie Katsurai
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01593

Investigating Industry--Academia Collaboration in Artificial Intelligence: PDF-Based Bibliometric Analysis from Leading Conferences
This study presents a bibliometric analysis of industry--academia collaboration in artificial intelligence (AI) research, focusing on papers from two major international conferences, AAAI and IJCAI, from 2010 to 2023. Most previous studies have relied on publishers and other databases to analyze bibliographic information. However, these databases have problems, such as missing articles and omitted metadata. Therefore, we adopted a novel approach to extract bibliographic information directly fro…

In the US v. Google ad tech trial, Google says it's willing to provide publishers with the data for how its ad server decides what online display ads to show (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-30/…

Seven US and French news publishers sign up with Perplexity's Comet Plus, a $5/month add-on for the AI-powered Comet browser, with revenue splits for publishers (Charlotte Tobitt/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/news/perple

Perplexity launches AI subscription revenue-share scheme for publishers
AI platform Perplexity has signed up seven US-based and French publishers as launch partners for its Comet Plus subscription.

AudioBoost: Increasing Audiobook Retrievability in Spotify Search with Synthetic Query Generation
Enrico Palumbo, Gustavo Penha, Alva Liu, Marcus Eltscheminov, Jefferson Carvalho dos Santos, Alice Wang, Hugues Bouchard, Humberto Jes\'us Corona Pampin, Michelle Tran Luu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06452

AudioBoost: Increasing Audiobook Retrievability in Spotify Search with Synthetic Query Generation
Spotify has recently introduced audiobooks as part of its catalog, complementing its music and podcast offering. Search is often the first entry point for users to access new items, and an important goal for Spotify is to support users in the exploration of the audiobook catalog. More specifically, we would like to enable users without a specific item in mind to broadly search by topic, genre, story tropes, decade, and discover audiobooks, authors and publishers they may like. To do this, we ne…

Reddit launches free tools for publishers within Reddit Pro to track article performance and get suggestions on which communities to share their stories in (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/10/reddit-launches-tools-for-pu…

Reddit launches tools for publisher to track and share stories | TechCrunch
Reddit is introducing new Publisher tools under Reddit Pro.

fediverse: Fediverse network (2018)
An early snapshot of the federation network among web publishers using the ActivityPub protocol. Nodes are instances, and a directed edge exists if an instance follows another instance.
This network has 4860 nodes and 484164 edges.
Tags: Social, Online, Information
https://ne…

Hey all! This is short notice so please boost! Calling all local Canadian Journalists!
Sign ups are open until Friday at 5PM PDT!
"Independent publishing can be lonely, but it doesn’t have to be. LION Publishers wants to help news entrepreneurs across Canada connect and build new relationships.
Each group will be led by a LION community ambassador and will meet monthly from August to October to discuss the highs and lows of local publishing"
#canpoli #cdnpoli #journalism #local #BC #news

TollBit: publishers with OpenAI licensing deals have a ChatGPT clickthrough rate almost 7x higher than those without agreements; OpenAI has 40 US and UK deals (David Buttle/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/comment-ana

Publishers with AI licensing deals have seven times the clickthrough rate
Publishers with OpenAI licensing deals benefit from a ChatGPT clickthrough rate almost seven times higher than those without agreements.

LinkedIn is expanding its BrandLink video ads program with new publishers and creators, and says payouts to them have more than tripled year over year (Jaspreet Singh/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-tel

Free London business paper City AM says it returned to print profitability, with gross profit margin of 50% last quarter and EBIT up 52% from January to August (Charlotte Tobitt/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/city-am-trumpets-re…

City AM trumpets resurgence of print profitability
London business newspaper City AM has seen massive growth in its print profitability following a "transformative" year under its new owner.

fediverse: Fediverse network (2018)
An early snapshot of the federation network among web publishers using the ActivityPub protocol. Nodes are instances, and a directed edge exists if an instance follows another instance.
This network has 4860 nodes and 484164 edges.
Tags: Social, Online, Information
https://ne…

An interview with Newsquest CEO Henry Faure Walker on the regional publisher's focus on local news; paid digital subs have risen 35% YoY to 135K (Alice Brooker/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/

Focus on local, not 'trending', news fuels record Newsquest digital growth
Newsquest CEO Henry Faure Walker discusses how the publishers has reached record digital subscriptions and page views.

Perplexity launches Comet Plus, a $5/month tier offering curated content, and says it has allocated $42.5M for publishers, who will receive 80% of the revenue (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-25/perp…

Sources: Microsoft is in talks with US publishers about launching a two-sided marketplace that would compensate publishers for their content used by AI products (Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/09/23/microsoft-ai-marketplace-publishers

Scoop: Microsoft looks to build AI marketplace for publishers
Copilot would be the first buyer in the Publisher Content Marketplace.

Some French news publishers have signed agreements with unions to redistribute revenue from AI licensing deals to journalists; Le Monde redistributes 25% (Andrew Deck/Nieman Lab)
https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/09/in-france…

Some French publishers are giving AI revenue directly to journalists. Could that ever happen in the U.S.?
Le Monde agreed to give journalists 25% of revenue from licensing deals with OpenAI and Perplexity. Now, other French publishers are following suit.

How Australian men's lifestyle publisher Man of Many is countering a decline in Google referral traffic, through a registration wall, podcasts, and newsletters (Alice Brooker/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/

How lifestyle brand Man of Many has changed to counter falling Google traffic
Man of Many, an Australian digital lifestyle brand, has adopted a new 2.0 strategy involving a sign-in system and seen "record growth".

Newsletter service Ghost says publishers have earned $100M on it, its annual revenue is $8.5M , it now supports ActivityPub, and is upping new member pricing (Neel Dhanesha/Nieman Lab)
https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/08/ghost-makes-it-easier-to-publish-t…

The NYT is making deals with other US news outlets: Philly Inquirer premium subscribers get access to the Cooking app and the Star Tribune bundled in Games (Laura Hazard Owen/Nieman Lab)
https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/07/publishe

Publishers like The Philadelphia Inquirer are bundling New York Times content into their subscriptions
The New York Times has been experimenting with these deals with other U.S. publishers over the last year.

Resilience Media, which aims to be the defense tech industry's "publication of record", adds several ex-TechCrunch staff, including Ingrid Lunden and Matt Burns (Charlotte Tobitt/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/…

Former Techcrunch staff join rapidly expanding defence technology title
Veteran Techcrunch staffers are leading Resilience Media for the defence tech industry which has expanded due to seed fundraising.

Study by SEO platform Authoritas: when Google AI Overviews is present, publishers witness a drop of 47.5% in clickthrough rate on desktop, and 37.7% on mobile (Alice Brooker/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/media-audie

AI Overviews cutting publisher clickthrough rates by 50%, new report finds
When AI Overviews is present, publishers witness a clickthrough rate drop of 47.5% on desktop and 37.7% on mobile according to new report.

The FT says it increased subscription conversion rates by ~280% by using AI to personalize its paywall messaging, resulting in a 7% increase in lifetime value (Charlotte Tobitt/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/

FT says AI-personalised paywall messaging has quadrupled conversion rate
How publishers including Reach and The Independent are - and aren't - using personalisation.

A look at how the Canadian Journalism Collective has distributed Google's annual CA$100M payment under the Online News Act; 400 outlets have received funds (Gretel Kahn/Reuters Institute)
https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.a

Perplexity is making its AI browser Comet, previously $200 per month as part of Perplexity Max, free for all, with rate limits (Charles Rollet/Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/perplexity-makes-200-ai-browser-free-to-battle-ai-sl…

Find out how Perplexity wants to fight AI 'slop' with its latest browser
Perplexity's Comet browser is now free as the AI startup fights low-quality content and partners with publishers like CNN and The Washington Post.

Le Monde joins more than 20 publishers in offering NYT subscriptions to some subscribers at no extra cost, exposing NYT to new audiences (Mark Stenberg/Adweek)
https://www.adweek.com/media/new-york-times-le-monde-bundle-ai-translation-onbackground/

Can The New York Times Be the ‘Essential’ Newspaper for the Entire World?
A new subscription bundle with Le Monde, coupled with the promise of AI translation, underscore its untapped international audience

Greenleaf Book Group and Amplify Publishing Group have been acquired by Civica Media, a new publishing company formed by private equity firm BlackBern Partners (Jim Milliot/Publishers Weekly)
http://www.publishersweekly.…

Private Equity Firm Acquires Two Leading Hybrid Publishers
Greenleaf Book Group and Amplify Publishing Group, two of the country’s oldest and best-known hybrid publishing companies, have been acquired by Civica Media, a new publisher formed by private equity firm BlackBern Partners.

Q&A with Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince on why he thinks AI chatbots imperil the web and journalism's future, his company's pay-per-crawl initiative, and more (Fred Vogelstein/Crazy Stupid Tech)
https://crazystupidtech.com/2025/08/30…

Cloudflare's Matthew Prince has a plan to get Google and the AI oliigarchs to pay for your content even though many are used to getting it for free. He might have enough leverage to make them.
AI chatbots are blowing up the 30-year economic relationship publishers have had with search engines. Many think this will kill the web if not addressed. Google needs to change first. It's resisting. Cloudflare's Matthew Prince is going to try and make them.

WaPo internally releases a beta version of Ripple, its AI product "to curate quality opinion journalism" from across the US and offer context from WaPo stories (Ben Mullin/@benmullin)
https://x.com/benmullin/status/1978870382233858334

Ben Mullin (@BenMullin) on X
new: The Washington Post is rolling out a beta version of Ripple, its A.I.-enabled opinion product. "The intention is to provide a range of recent perspectives from other publishers across America."

DMG Media launches two social publishers to produce original content for the Daily Mail's TikTok and Instagram; its social channels have 150M followers in total (Charlotte Tobitt/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/social_medi

Mail invests heavily in creating content for Tiktok and Instagram
Daily Mail publisher DMG Media has launched two social publisher arms, “doubling down” on reaching young people and what they can offer advertisers.

Sources: Google is set to face a modest EU antitrust fine over adtech practices, in an investigation triggered by a complaint by the European Publishers Council (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/g

An interview with Independent Studio's Head of Content Al Brown, who expects podcasts and video to eventually become The Independent's biggest revenue source (Alice Brooker/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/

Independent's video and podcast Studio aims to become biggest revenue driver
Independent's new Studio launch will aim to become the main source of revenue, and expand its team next year.

Irish News, the UK's top selling regional daily, restructures to focus on video, newsletters, and events, and reports H1 print circulation down 8% YoY to 20,857 (Alice Brooker/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/

Irish News adds jobs in digital-focused restructure
Top selling regional daily focusing on video, newsletters and events.

The Daily Mail consolidates its digital platforms under the name Daily Mail and renames its digital subscription package, which has 325K subscribers, DailyMail (Charlotte Tobitt/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/

Daily Mail sets 1m digital subscriber target amid major rebrand
The Daily Mail has set a target of reaching one million digital subscribers by October 2028 as it undergoes a global rebrand.

Sky News expands its data and forensics team as part of the Sky News 2030 project to build a newsroom focused on premium video journalism (Charlotte Tobitt/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/sky-news-data-forensics-journalism/

Sky News expands data and forensics journalism team
Sky News is hiring journalists to expand its data and forensics team as part of a plan to make premium journalism that people might pay for.

Google's AI Overviews, which a recent Pew study shows reduce clickthrough rates, are further eroding traffic to original publishers by linking to aggregators (Emanuel Maiberg/404 Media)
https://www.404media.co/googles-ai-is-destroying-search-the-inter…

Google’s AI Is Destroying Search, the Internet, and Your Brain
Google’s AI Overview, which is easy to fool into stating nonsense as fact, is stopping people from finding and supporting small businesses and credible sources.

LADbible launches Betches, the US women's media brand it acquired in 2023, in the UK aiming to fill a "gap in the market" for Gen Z and millennial women (Charlotte Tobitt/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/publish…

Ladbible launches Betches in UK to talk ‘with, not to’ millennial and Gen Z women
US women's media brand Betches has launched in the UK aiming to fill a gap in the market for Gen Z and millennial audiences and clients.

People CEO Neil Vogel calls Google a "bad actor" for refusing to pay publishers for AI content and says Google Search drives 25%-30% of visits to People sites (Jeff John Roberts/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2025/09/11/media-in…

Google’s AI is the ‘worst’ for stealing content, says People CEO
But Google-owned YouTube could provide a model for media and AI to coexist and thrive, says internet industry pioneer Bill Gross.

In the US v. Google ad tech trial, Google says it's willing to provide publishers with the data for how its ad server decides what online display ads to show (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-30/…

Reddit launches free tools for publishers within Reddit Pro to track article performance and get suggestions on which communities to share their stories in (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/10/reddit-launches-tools-for-pu…

Reddit launches tools for publisher to track and share stories | TechCrunch
Reddit is introducing new Publisher tools under Reddit Pro.

A survey of 2K Substack publishers finds 45.4% use AI, mainly for research; among them, 51.1% are over age 45, 55% are men, and 85% of tech publications use it (Arielle Swedback/On Substack)
https://on.substack.com/p/the-substack-ai-report

The Substack AI Report
We asked 2,000 Substack publishers how they’re using and thinking about AI. Here’s what we found.

LinkedIn is expanding its BrandLink video ads program with new publishers and creators, and says payouts to them have more than tripled year over year (Jaspreet Singh/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-tel

Perplexity launches Comet Plus, a $5/month tier offering curated content, and says it has allocated $42.5M for publishers, who will receive 80% of the revenue (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-25/perp…

Newsletter service Ghost says publishers have earned $100M on it, its annual revenue is $8.5M , it now supports ActivityPub, and is upping new member pricing (Neel Dhanesha/Nieman Lab)
https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/08/ghost-makes-it-easier-to-publish-t…

Publishers that have been wary of Reddit are launching new accounts and reviving old ones, as the platform offers new features such as tools to track engagement (Klaudia Jaźwińska/Columbia Journalism Review)
https://www.cjr.org/analysis/reddit-winnin

Reddit is winning the AI game.
Since the site struck licensing deals with Google and OpenAI, its traffic—and its importance to legacy media outlets—has surged.

Gay Times CEO Tag Warner says his outlet is facing "good old-fashioned discrimination" from advertisers amid DEI criticism; other LGBTQ publishers agree (Michael Savage/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/aug/31/lgbtq-media-advertisin…

A coalition of European writers, publishers, and others warns that Europe's AI Act is not properly protecting copyrights and is selling out the creative sector (Scott Roxborough/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business

European Creators Slam AI Act Implementation, Warn Copyright Protections Are Failing
Europe’s writers, actors, musicians and producers accuse the EU of selling out creative industries in favor of GenAI giants and demand urgent reforms to safeguard IP rights.

Q&A with Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince on why he thinks AI chatbots imperil the web and journalism's future, his company's pay-per-crawl initiative, and more (Fred Vogelstein/Crazy Stupid Tech)
https://crazystupidtech.com/2025/08/30…

Cloudflare's Matthew Prince has a plan to get Google and the AI oliigarchs to pay for your content even though many are used to getting it for free. He might have enough leverage to make them.
AI chatbots are blowing up the 30-year economic relationship publishers have had with search engines. Many think this will kill the web if not addressed. Google needs to change first. It's resisting. Cloudflare's Matthew Prince is going to try and make them.

Sources: Google is set to face a modest EU antitrust fine over adtech practices, in an investigation triggered by a complaint by the European Publishers Council (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/g

Interviews with several publishers in the US and the UK indicate they are preparing for "Google Zero", the decline in traffic due to AI Mode and AI Overviews (Daniel Thomas/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/f7a0eb8e-ff5b-42ae-b882-4815dbb38653

Google's AI Overviews, which a recent Pew study shows reduce clickthrough rates, are further eroding traffic to original publishers by linking to aggregators (Emanuel Maiberg/404 Media)
https://www.404media.co/googles-ai-is-destroying-search-the-inter…

Google’s AI Is Destroying Search, the Internet, and Your Brain
Google’s AI Overview, which is easy to fool into stating nonsense as fact, is stopping people from finding and supporting small businesses and credible sources.