The CEO of the largest digital and print publisher in the United States accused Google of being a bad actor who climbed up its website to support search giants’ AI products.
People, Inc. CEO Neil Vogel (Formerly Dotdash Meredith), a publisher that runs over 40 brands including people, food and wine, travel and leisure, better homes and gardens, Real simplicity, Southern Life, Allrecipes, etc., said Google is not fair because it uses the same bot to crawl websites to provide it with Google search engines to support its AI ai capabilities.
“Google has a crawler, which means they use the same crawler to search and they still send us traffic, like they did for AI products, stealing our content here,” Vogel in Wealth Brainstorming Technology Conference This week.
He noted that three years ago, Google Search accounted for about 65% of the company’s traffic and has since accounted for “high in his 20s”. (Vogel shared a more surprising statistic with Adexchanger last month, saying from a few years ago, Google accounts for 90% of traffic People Inc. Traffic from open networks. )
“I’m not complaining. We’ve grown. We’ve increased our revenue.” “We’re doing a great job. What’s wrong: You can’t accept our content to compete with us.”
Vogel believes publishers need more leverage in the AI era, which is why he thinks it is necessary to stop AI crawlers (scan websites to train automated programs for AI systems) because this can force them into content transactions. For example, his company reached a deal with Openai, which Vogel described as a “good actor.”
People, Inc. Always utilizing network infrastructure companies Cloudflare’s latest solution to block AI crawlers This is not paying, prompting AI players to connect with publishers through potential content transactions. Although Vogel will not directly name the companies involved, he said they are “large LLM providers.” No deal has been signed, but Vogel said the company is “further” than before adopting off-road blocking solutions.
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However, Vogel notes that Google’s crawlers can’t stop it, as doing so can also prevent publishers’ websites from being indexed in Google searches, cutting off the “20% – ender” that Google still offers.
“They know that, and they didn’t separate the Crawlers. So they’re intentionally bad actors here.”
Janice Min, editor-in-chief and CEO of newsletter provider Anker MediaAgree, calling large tech companies such as Google and Meta long-time “content kleptomaniancs”.
“I’m working with any AI company now, it’s not good for us,” she said, adding that her company has blocked AI crawling.
Meanwhile, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince’s company, which has produced AI-Blocking solutions (he is also in the group), said he believes the way AI companies behave will still change in the future. He suspects that the changes may be prompted by new regulations.
Cloudflare executives also questioned whether the correct answer is the correct answer to using legal solutions with AI companies with things like copyright law (copyright law).
“I think it’s a stupid thing to go this path because in copyright law, usually, the more derivative things it’s protected in fair use… These AI companies are actually creating derivatives,” Prince said. “So if you look at the best case law that has come up so far, it’s actually saying that humans and others use – reason Humans solved it a few days ago With all the book publishers, publishing for $1.5 billion – they were able to retain the positive copyright rulings they received. ”
Prince also announced that “to some extent, everything in the world today is Google’s fault” as the search giant teaches publishers to value traffic compared to original content creation, which triggers publishers such as BuzzFeed to write clicks. Still, he admits that from a competitive standpoint, Google is in a tough position now.
“Inside, they’re having a huge struggle with their work, and my prediction is that by this time next year, Google will pay content creators to crawl and take it and put it into the AI model,” he said.
