The Media Copilot Newsletter

The AI industry has spent three years working on the assumption that the public would come around on its own. Build something useful enough, the thinking went, and the objections would fade. The last few weeks tested that idea harder than any stretch I can remember. The models got dramatically better, and the backlash got way louder at exactly the same time.

Cloudflare says bots now outnumber humans on the web. Most publishers treat that as a threat to block. This week's guest built a company on the opposite bet: that the bots are an audience, and audiences can be sold to advertisers. Choy Travers, co-founder of Oasy, joins me to explain how you sell an ad to a machine, what the advertiser is actually buying, and why Perplexity would rather you didn't.

The ongoing debate around whether or not AI poses existential threat to humanity has managed to blot out pretty much every other AI story this week, but when it comes to the media, it may be a welcome diversion from the larger issues to concentrate on forces that are more controllable. So let’s talk blocking bots.

Bot traffic passed human traffic on the web this year, and most publishers are still trying to keep the bots out. TIME went the other way. On July 28 the publication started serving ads to them, and this week Mark Howard, TIME's chief operating officer, is back on the show to explain what a month of agent ads has taught him: what advertisers are buying, why he thinks the AI models remember what they scrape, and what happened after Perplexity called the whole thing deceptive.

Hope everyone had a great Labor Day weekend. Coming back, it’s hard to miss how suspicious people have gotten about AI, and that mood will probably sharpen as the midterms get closer. The clearest example yet landed a couple of weeks ago, when Stanley Druckenmiller admitted he used AI to write a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

People Inc. has the money and the expertise to keep AI crawlers out, and it still cannot stop them all. Today’s column argues that publishers picked the wrong fight, and that the one deciding their future is happening somewhere else entirely. AI for Media is The Media Copilot's live six-week certification for journalists, PR pros, and communications teams who want working AI systems instead of a chatbot habit. Fully revamped for the fall cohort.

On this week’s Media Copilot podcast, I talk with Onix co-founders David Bennahum and Nicholas Nadeau, unpacking their pitch: that any expert with a body of work can turn that work into an AI model they own, creating an authorized version of themselves instead of whatever comes out of ChatGPT by defeault. For creators, that means you can turn your expertise into something others can subscribe to rather than something scraped out from under you.

For two years the accepted wisdom has been that AI answers are a dead end for the web. People ask, the chatbot tells them, nobody clicks, and the traffic publishers built their businesses on quietly evaporates. That story turns out to be half right. On May 7, ChatGPT started sending 157% more referral traffic than it had the day before, and it has stayed at that level ever since. The clicks are real. They’re just landing somewhere other than news.

AI companies want more content, but on what terms? This week on The Media Copilot, Pete talks with Newstex president Michael Ellis about what a fair AI licensing deal actually looks like, and why smaller publishers may have the most to gain. We also want to highlight AI for Media, our upcoming live course for journalists, PR pros, and comms teams who want real, practical AI skills, not just clever prompts.

Every publisher's fastest-growing readership doesn't buy subscriptions, doesn't click ads and doesn't read a word. Time has decided to sell to it anyway. That's today's column, below. First, though, two pieces of news from our side of the desk: We're hiring. If you've been visiting The Media Copilot lately, you've probably noticed there's more of it. More daily news, more analysis, more coverage of the stories that actually move this industry.