Open Web
Be Careful What You Ask For: Google Licensing News Won’t Feel Like Justice
Publishers are still on the long ramp down in referrals from organic search, although I still maintain that “Google Zero” is more marketing than prophecy. One hoped-for outcome commonly discussed is that AI crawlers, including Google, will enter into content licensing agreements with publishers. My worry is that publishers will like a world where Google…
You Say You’re Quitting Google? I Don’t Believe You
At a conference earlier this month, an executive at a major publisher who was participating in a panel proclaimed, in high dudgeon, that they were going to block Google. Why? Because Google reneged on its “deal” to send traffic directly to publishers. When are they blocking Google? Well, not today. But soon! This line of…
A Short History of Paying for News: Why We’re Building Allegro Audience
The commerce layer has always been core to publishers and must be treated as a first-class part of the technology ecosystem. News organizations have been charging for regular access to the news for hundreds of years.
Analyzing 5,818 Publishers’ robots.txt Files: Most Non-profit News Organizations Allow AI Bots, OpenAI Most Commonly Blocked
Robots.txt is a common code format that allows website owners to instruct and direct crawlers, scrapers, spiders, and other automated systems that identify themselves as a unique user agent. Once used to green or red light search engines from accessing a site’s content, publishers are now relying on robots.txt for something completely new: Managing web…
