Economist president Luke Bradley-Jones spoke to Jessica Davies of Digiday about how the publication plans to grow its revenue in a future dominated by artificial intelligence.
Davies writes, “Unlike many publishers securing AI licensing deals, The Economist is going against the grain – keeping its journalism off-limits and actively blocking AI bots from scraping its content, via its CDN vendor Cloudflare. ‘We’re building our business for an environment where we don’t expect to get any traffic back from those AI platforms. Fundamentally, their business models and their strategies are aligned to being end-user destinations in their own right and not providing those click-throughs,’ said Bradley-Jones.
“And yet, in time, he does believe there will be ways to leverage those channels. The publisher is currently discussing how top stories could appear on those platforms as a form of brand visibility. The goal isn’t to drive traffic or revenue from them, but to use those channels as publicity, while carefully controlling what crawlers can and can’t access.
“Another strand of the plan is to use AI to build products compelling enough not only to pull readers to the Economist, but to then give them a more multi-model experience than they currently have. That includes experiments which test how readers want to consume content today, whether it’s five-minute summaries, 50-minute deep dives, text, video, or audio, he said.”
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