Future’s Jon Steinberg shares his philosophy on AI content licensing deals

Between generative AI technology companies spending millions of dollars to license their content and Google flip-flopping on third-party cookie deprecation plans, publishers have had a lot to sort through.

When asked which has been the bigger concern to him, Future plc’s CEO Jon Steinberg said, “The cookie thing keeps me up at night more than the AI thing. The AI thing used to keep me up more at night, but [now] … I have more optimism … The cookie thing — every cookie conversation begins and ends with, ‘Well, there’s so much uncertainty.’” 

On the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Steinberg discusses both these topics, as well as why Future hasn’t inked a content licensing deal with an AI tech company … yet.

Below are highlights from the conversation, which have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Unbothered by the uncertainties of Google’s cookie deprecation decision

I think less has changed than more. So maybe there’s 30% of the Chrome users that will have cookies, and that might be a helpful signal. So I think either way, we’re either the same or slightly better off, but I don’t think It’s a huge difference from prior to the announcement. 

We’re making strides in terms of moving people to more branded content and more first-party deals, and so we just need to continue on that mission. Ultimately, for us, the yield is four times higher on first-party than it is [in the] open auction and so we have an economic incentive. And then also, I believe it’s better for the advertiser and the agency. I think you know when we are able to get them mobile phone intenders, or people who are in the market for an air fryer … you get such an advantage from doing that first-party buy … It could be a messy period, but I think on the other side, people are not going to want to just buy the portion of our audience that has cookies.

His philosophy on the publisher-AI tech company relationship 

I have a philosophy on what should happen and it’s a very simple philosophy that has two prongs to it. The first is we want traffic from these platforms. And I think it was a very positive sign … [that] OpenAI announced SearchGPT, which, from I’ve only seen the images they put up on the website, is going to prominently feature publisher content and links … They can’t just scrape our content. They have to send back traffic. That has always been the reciprocity that has existed with Google and so that is what needs to continue in this new world. 

And then the second [prong] is, we need to get paid. We need to get paid for our content [but] the first [prong] is much more important.

Price is Right, but for content licensing deals

Ultimately, if we’re talking about millions of dollars for our back catalog, and millions of dollars on an ongoing basis – you know, we did £391 million of revenue in the half year that we just reported in May – like that’s not going to [come close to the value of the business]. I mean, I want any money we can get, legally and ethically … but the traffic is the much more important piece of the puzzle.