Media Briefing: How publishers spent summer 2024 

Between Google’s decision to no deprecate third-party cookies after all and AI technology companies waving around big fat checks in exchange for access to publishers’ content, publishers had to reevaluate some priorities and figure out their philosophies on things that are bound to have a longtail impact on their businesses.

Below is a recap of how the digital media industry spent the summer: 

Pubs ink more AI content licensing deals 

It felt like a new publisher announced a content licensing deal with an AI tech company every other week this summer, with Condé Nast being the latest at the end of August. 

Condé joined the likes of Vox Media, The Atlantic, Dotdash Meredith and News Corp, among many others, that signed content licensing deals with OpenAI, though the terms of those multi-year deals have largely been kept under wraps. All besides News Corp’s deal, which The Wall Street Journal (owned by News Corp) reported is worth $250 million over five years. The expectation, though, is that that figure is much higher than the industry standard.

A new type of publisher-AI company deal model also came into the picture this summer — one that isn’t all about giving AI companies’ access to content to train their large language models (LLMs). 

AI-based search engine Perplexity AI launched a revenue-share model for publishers that is specifically aimed at sharing prospective ad revenue with media companies, not paying them for access to content itself. While Time, The Texas Tribune and Fortune willingly signed onto this program before ad revenue even began rolling in, other publishers like Forbes and Condé Nast issued cease and desist orders. 

But if the $50 CPM that Perplexity is reportedly looking to charge for ads on its search platform doesn’t scare away advertisers, that price point could put a bit more money in publishers’ wallets than the non existent rev-shares other search engines currently offer.

Google’s cookie plans get upended

The biggest news of the summer was most likely Google’s announcement that it wasn’t deprecating third-party cookies from its Chrome browser after all. Instead it would allow users to decide whether they want to allow third-party cookies, à la Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT).

Once publishers’ initial wave of surprise and frustration subsided, media execs largely reported that not much will actually change regarding how they’ve been prepping for the cookiepocolypse. That’s because giving users the choice will likely mean the majority of users will not allow third-party cookie tracking, if ATT was any preview of that behavior. 

That said, there is still a lot left to be determined about Google’s proposed plan for dealing with cookies (one being getting regulator approval from the Competition and Markets Authority) but also what the default settings will be for tracking, how the choice will be poised to users and how often they’ll be asked to accept cookies. All of these variables will determine if publishers can monetize their sites with cookies, so having the cookieless alternatives on deck as back-ups is primarily still the go-forward strategy for pubs, meaning the last five years of cookiepocolypse preparation will likely not be in vain.

New social platforms pursue publishers

While Facebook, X, Instagram and TikTok have worked to disincentivize users from leaving their platforms (and thusly caused publishers to lose much of their referral traffic from those platforms), a secondary wave of platforms have stepped up to try and woo publishers with promises of partnership and even revenue.

LinkedIn and Reddit are two platforms that spent this summer forging relationships with media companies while others haven’t been satisfying publishers’ needs. 

LinkedIn’s Wire Program, a revenue-share that allows publishers to sell ads on their on-platform video content, had its formal debut this June, with Bloomberg, Business Insider and The Wall Street Journal as a few of the launch partners. 

Meanwhile, Reddit hasn’t formally launched a program for publishers, but has rolled out a number of tools and products for brands to more effectively post on the platform, as well as see which communities are talking about their stories. The result has been a resurgence of publishers refreshing their strategies on the platform to try and increase referral traffic and audience engagement. 

Women’s sports coverage blooms amid growing ad interest

Women’s sports grabbed audiences’ and advertisers’ attention alike during the women’s basketball NCAA tournament this spring. And by the Cannes Lions Festival in June, it seemed like every publisher on the ground — even those that don’t traditionally cover sports, like Axios and World of Good Brands — was boasting its women’s sports coverage to interested advertisers.

Publishers subsequently spent the summer talking up their women’s sports coverage to advertisers, chasing the growing pool of money being allocated to this coverage.  

Take the WNBA’s deal with ESPN, NBC, and Amazon over its rights, which yielded $2.2 billion over 11 years (or about $200 million annually). This is still significantly lower than what the NBA fetched at $76 billion over the same period, but it’s much higher than what the WNBA’s rights currently go for at $60 million per year.

What we’ve heard

“Reddit was about 5% of the social referral mix. It’s now about a third. On some days it has eclipsed Facebook in terms of traffic, referrals and engagement, and it continues to be the only growth platform for us.”

— Will Federman, The Hill’s vp of audience and content strategy

Podcast networks expect a bump in political advertising 

Podcast execs said that while politics has been a slow growing ad category, they’re optimistic that the medium has finally matured enough to bring in “meaningful” revenue during the 2024 U.S. presidential election cycle. 

“We’re expecting a big political bump in the next, call it, six to eight weeks leading up to the election,” said Scott Walker, svp of ad platform at SiriusXM Media, who declined to share growth figures or projected revenue. “It’ll be very, very different than the 2020 cycle.” 

It’s not just that more people are listening to podcasts. But in the past two years, more ad tech, measurement tools and audience targeting capabilities have rolled out, making it easier for political advertisers to target specific demographics, podcast companies say. Thus podcasters have a more level playing field for competing for political ad dollars against CTV, digital and radio. 

“Programmatic and more audience-based buying was a small percentage two years ago. It’s now 50-50 with the show-level, host-read type buy,” said Walker. 

“[Political ad revenue] is not going to make or break a year for us in podcasting, but it is starting to become meaningful for us for sure,” said Conal Byrne, CEO of iHeartMedia’s Digital Audio Group, which includes podcasting. Byrne did not provide exact figures.

Gretchen Smith, vp of media at audio advertising agency Ad Results Media, said her team has received an influx of political marketers inquiring about podcast campaigns in the lead-up to the presidential election, “but I don’t know that the pie is going to shift significantly,” she said, without providing exact figures. Instead, she said retail is usually the top spending ad category in Q4 for holiday and is likely to maintain that position by the time the election rolls around. 

Meanwhile, Ross Adams, CEO of the podcast network Acast, said “political is going to be big this year,” as an advertising category (though he declined to share any further details about how much that category is expected to grow compared to previous election years). But modernizing the medium is an integral part of attracting that revenue.

“It’s about how we make the audience available, and how we make it available in the way that [marketers] transact … [If it’s] very difficult to buy audiences on scale and report back on [it], they won’t spend. So we have to replicate how digital media does it,” Adams said.

Numbers to know

>600: The number of union members in The New York Times Tech Guild, the majority of which signed a pledge of support for a strike this week. 

185 million: The number of weekly users of Meta AI, Meta’s artificial intelligence assistant, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. 

200 million: The number of weekly active users that use ChatGPT, according to parent company OpenAI, double the amount it had in November.

$9.5 billion: The amount of money that TikTok’s parent company ByteDance is asking banks for in a corporate loan.

What we’ve covered

How publishers are experimenting with Reddit:

• Over the last 18 months, Reddit has steadily rolled out products and resources aimed at courting media companies.
• But the effectiveness of Reddit in publishers’ audience engagement efforts all hinges on an ever-evolving equation of knowing how to use the platform. 

Learn how Reddit is being put to the test by publishers here.

How state governments and businesses are addressing AI deepfakes:

• With two months left before the U.S. presidential elections, state and federal officials are looking for more ways to address the risks of disinformation from AI and other sources.
• More than a dozen states have now passed laws regulating the use of AI in political ads, with at least a dozen other bills underway in other states.

Read more about the state of AI deepfake regulation here.

After keeping them at arm’s length, sports brands are opening the door to creators:

• Golf’s established powers want to bring new audiences into the sport. This week, they took a big swing with a new tournament featuring only YouTube creators.
• The Creator Classic was a first for the PGA, but it’s not the only sports media player making moves to include more creators in their marketing strategies.

See how sports leagues are getting into the creator game here.

What we’re reading

Several big publishers are blocking Apple’s AI from scraping their content: 

Apple is making it easy for brands and publishers to disallow content scraping by the tech company, which would use the obtained data to train its AI. And according to Wired, many media companies have opted out of Apple’s content scraping, including The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Atlantic, Vox Media and Condé Nast. 

Facing backlash, Bloomberg kills the publicity campaign for its new show:

Bloomberg’s new show “Working Capital,” featuring political reporter Olivia Nuzzi, didn’t have the splashy rollout it was promised. Backlash against an article written by Nuzzi earlier this summer by a small group of left-leaning X users led to the decision to cancel the media promo, Semafor reported.

Brazil’s Supreme Court will keep the X ban in place: 

Brazilian Justice Alexandre De Moraes put a ban on X last week, going as far as fining users who access the social media platform via VPN the equivalent of about $8,900 per day if they’re caught. On Monday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Brazil’s Supreme Court voted to uphold the ban, despite criticism from free-speech advocate groups. 

Outside buys workout mapping apps from Under Armour: 

A suite of GPS-tracking workout apps, under the MapMyFitness umbrella, were bought by the outdoor enthusiast media company, Outside for an undisclosed amount, according to Axios. The acquisition is expected to increase Outside’s total paid subscriber base from 830,000 to over 1 million. 

Former Fortune CEO joins The Wall Street Journal:

After relinquishing the helm of Fortune in April, Alan Murray is set to join The Wall Street Journal where he will help in building out the publication’s events business, Adweek reported.