Q: What do you see as the main opportunities facing publishers?
Katie: In an age of generative AI, misinformation and made-for-advertising sites, it sometimes feels like the open internet is doomed. And this is why I think the big opportunity for publishers is the journalism that is the heart of our organisations — brilliant stories written by humans, for humans, be they essential investigations that hold power to account, commanding coverage of the climate crisis, or nifty recipes and money hacks.
This doesn’t mean the Guardian is against using AI tools. But they will need to be used with great care, in line with our principles, and always with the understanding that our human editorial judgment is what will distinguish us from badly automated synthetic content.
The open web needs quality journalism, the world needs quality journalism. And this is the message we should be leaning on when we are thinking about monetisation — how do we ensure that our readers understand the value exchange? That our advertisers understand the value exchange? The opportunity really is in quality — journalism, inventory, user experience — if everything is held to a high bar then monetisation follows.
Thomas: There is great opportunity for publishers to use the new tools available to enhance the value, depth and ways users experience quality journalism. These include:
- New data services: There are numerous examples of publishers creating new, proprietary databases and stories that were only viable thanks to emerging AI tools. These include analysing unstructured documents like government filings or email chains.
- Discoverability — including the archive: New ways to index and interact with search, personalise the UX so readers have the exact experience they want.
- New derivative article formats: Translations, summarisation and digests, or even reader specific personalised content will help provide a richer experience.
Q: How do you see the revenue mix for publishers evolving over the next few years?
Katie: Reader revenue will continue to be the core driver because the sustainable recurring revenue that it delivers is such a strong base and we will all watch Sun Club with interest — more investment in verticals is likely, especially given the success of food, puzzles and sport at the NYT.
Advertising should grow, especially now publishers are better able to increase consent rates in the UK and Europe through strategies such as consent-or-pay, and consent in turn makes identifiers more prevalent and valuable.
Commerce is going through a tough time due to its over reliance on search and the number of affiliates-driven sites that now exist, so quality and USP here will be increasingly important. The one to watch though will be licensing driven by deals with AI companies, arriving just as news funding initiatives from the platforms start to fall away.
Thomas: From a B2B perspective, subscriber revenue will continue to grow fuelled by the need for walled off, trusted content and data services. By the same token, face to face events and peer networks will continue to grow, helping to foster learning and the ever-important human connection.
Regular advertising revenue may decline in order to pursue reader revenue and protect against AI encroachment, but greater 1st party data provides opportunities to create deeper, more effective campaigns for advertisers.
Q: How do you see the content / product mix for publishers evolving over the next few years?
Katie: Verticals will be really key to success, especially for news publishers who will benefit from better bundling options for subscriptions and also more “brand safe” ad inventory. It will be interesting to watch the rise of the app, which are great for returning visitors and subscription revenue but tend to be hard to monetise through advertising. Most interesting will be how publishers react to the opportunities available through genAI and what tools and functionality they make reader-facing rather than behind the scenes.
Thomas: Personalisation, not only of story recommendations, but formats will allow the reader greater choice of how to consume information. Typical examples of this include audio versions of articles, but we may start seeing more options for length of article, versions tailored for different personas, or fully translated articles.
Beyond that, data journalism and data services are likely to advance. Publisher ability to build proprietary datasets, as well as fewer barriers to advanced visualisation and analysis will help bring data to life.
Q: What are the main threats facing publishers and how should publishers be responding to them?
Katie: Decline in traffic — driven by so many things such as competition for attention (vs, for example, platforms, streaming services, genAI interactions, gaming), changes to search (algorithm updates and particularly AI Overviews), news avoidance because everything is so grim. There’s not much to get excited about on the news calendar for 2025 after a year that had Olympics, multiple elections and the men’s Euros. On top of the decline in traffic, publishers need to ensure that their pages are monetised as they intend, so they need consent, no ad blockers, no Apple web eraser.
Thomas: Search engine and LLM cannibalisation of traffic is a very real threat to publishers. The big tech and AI companies are being highly aggressive, using publisher content to create a directly substitutional experience in their chatbots and AI Overviews. Eventually, regulations may catch up to this, but it may well be too late.
The temptation for many publishers is to lower standards or push content to more platforms to try and retain engagement. Instead, they must double down on quality, unique content and be as strict as possible when it comes to which AI companies are allowed to crawl and scrape content.
Q: Where next for publishers and their use of AI?
Katie: Quality, values-led newsrooms have a real opportunity with genAI to reduce the time spent on generic tasks like transcription but also to realise investigations that simply couldn’t be done by humans alone. Focusing on these two areas will empower journalists and journalism, and newsrooms will need to continue to experiment carefully but seriously to find the most effective use cases.
Less reputable news organisations will be focusing instead on using genAI to create low-cost commoditised journalism at scale and with minimal oversight. Combined with the platforms increasing intermediation between our journalism and our readers (in AI Overviews or through Apple Intelligence and more), this will mean discoverability, loyalty and engagement will be even harder to secure. Those organisations which survive will have made a clear and urgent case for their value to readers in that landscape.
Thomas: Facilitate AI literacy for all individuals and teams within your business. Many productivity gains through AI come from the bottom-up, not from management and often not from IT teams.
Trustworthy publishers must embrace AI to reduce time-to-publish in the newsrooms. From transcriptions to meta data management, free your journalists to do the skilled, investigative work that creates value for readers.
Ensure product teams are empowered to lead with AI, but not be led by it. Remain close to user needs to establish genuine use cases for AI enabled product development.
Q: Where should publishers be channelling their resources over the next 12 months?
Katie: We all need to understand the government’s views on AI and their position in terms of using the output of the creative industries to fuel the AI industry with limited hindrance. Decisions made now could enormously impact our intellectual property rights and ability to own and monetise our own journalism.
We also need to ensure that we have the right relationships with ad tech monetisation partners and intermediaries — we’ve had two comprehensive supply chain studies, seen the decline in third party cookies and endured huge shifts in consent requirements and rates. We now need to make sure the choices we make are right for us as publishers rather than allowing third parties to take all of the money once again.
Thomas: Ensuring readers can find, convert and build a loyal relationship on publishers’ own platforms. This is primarily via three areas:
- Protect your platform: As AI content and LLM bots thrash against publisher pay/reg walls, it is imperative to be well protected. As well as technical protections, reduce the amount of content available on non-owned and operated platforms.
- Invest in journalism: Use modern tools to make your content uniquely insightful.
- Foster known, loyal readers: Ensure the user experience is optimised for converting anonymous traffic in to known readers, and you don’t stop there. Continue to build a relationship and deeper engagement
Q: Why should people enter industry awards like AOP's Digital Publishing Awards?
Katie: I’ve been involved in entering the AOP Awards since I joined the Guardian back in 2006 — it’s an incredible way to showcase excellence and innovation, and to shine a light on people and products that don’t necessarily grab all of the attention day to day.
Thomas: There are an incredible number of success stories happening across publisher types, suppliers, teams and by individuals. These awards are a fantastic way to celebrate the best of these across this uniquely fast-paced, inventive and critical industry. And if nothing else, have an epic night with your team.
Q: What should the deserving award winners do the day after?
Katie: Find out who took the award home, make sure it got home, discuss logistics for transporting award to appropriate location. And update the LinkedIn profile.
Thomas: Take the day off. Heads will be sore, so put your feet up and leave your favourite AI Agent in charge. What’s the worst that could happen?
The AOP Digital Publishing Awards celebrate the individuals, teams, and publishing excellence which are driving success for publishers of quality, online content. For all awards information please see here; information on how to enter can be found here.
Awards timetable:
- Thursday 20th March: Deadline for Entries
- Wednesday 23rd April: Finalists Announced
- Wednesday 11th June: Awards Ceremony & Dinner
For further information or any questions please contact Rachel on awards@ukaop.org
