Strategy
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…
The Capital Trap for News Product Startups
I have learned to be skeptical towards the role of private capital in systemically important tool providers for journalism organizations. Capital’s requirements for growth and margin expansion can be uniquely bad for journalism tools, and even more so for the systems we rely on to manage audience data. To be clear, I don’t have a…
A Five-Step Approach to Deploying AI in Labor-Intensive Businesses
A recent academic paper about the economic significance of the “up or out” employment system used by famous consulting firms got me thinking about the economic liberty of employees in the age of artificial intelligence. Consulting is labor-intensive and thus very attractive to both consulting firms and AI tool-builders, but the early returns have mixed…
Why Doesn’t Bloomberg Put Money Stuff Behind the Paywall?
One of the best and most popular email newsletters I read is Matt Levine’s Money Stuff. It’s a must-read for folks in lots of finance and finance-adjacent circles, and stylistically one of a kind. Bloomberg, Levine’s employer, is a business, and a pretty good one at that. So why don’t they put his terrific content…
Buried Alive! Publishers are Distracted by Guerilla Marketing
Nothing is classically spookier than claiming something is dead when it isn’t actually. See Edgar Allan Poe’s The Premature Burial for a sense of just how clearly haunting — and seasonally appropriate! — this concept is. To a marketer, declaring things dead serves two purposes. First, it ends the conversation. Why are we still talking about something…
