Who Owns Your Readers: You or AI?
Download MP3Pete Ericson (00:07)
Mm-hmm.
A journalism school says that your reader is the prize, but AI is winning the relationship between you and your reader. So what do you do about it? Now we're going to talk a little bit about the Tow-Knight Center for Journalism that produced an interesting report called The Three Layer Cake. Essentially, they say a couple of things that I found interesting. One is that blocking AI hurts the public.
So you should let your content into AI and form relationships with the AI chatbots and agents. And the second is that the most valuable asset that you have is your direct connection with your reader. Now, I agree with that a thousand percent. But those two concepts are really opposed with each other. If you let AI in, how do you capture the relationship with the reader? That's what we're going to talk about today.
Now, there are a couple interesting stats here in this report. If you think about it, this should make you wake up and probably act on what you're doing with your current ⁓ publication. 10% of people globally are using AI for news, and the for the younger set, that number's about 17%, and then it's climbing very, very quickly. More and more people are absolutely pouring into AI and using AI for news.
news discovery. Now, the way Google ⁓ overviews, AI overviews works is they look at different news sources or content sources and pull in the single overview which keeps that reader in Google and never sends them to you. And so, you know, first thing you can do is you if you're publishing anything that a reader can get elsewhere, you gotta stop doing that. That's just not going to work.
In the future. You need to really focus on original reporting with your opinion, your judgment, your voice, podcasts, events, things that AI can't really replicate. Okay, so this three-layer cake, the three layers are pretty simple. The first layer is your content, everything you produce. The second layer are the AI bots. ⁓ and these are the agents now that are going out and pulling pulling content.
They're essentially replacing the social media and search world that that you may also be worried about. And then the third layer ⁓ is the direct is the reader. So connecting to that reader ⁓ and dealing with AI at the same time is absolutely possible today ⁓ and for the future. So let's dig in a little bit.
Okay, what are your options today? So you can get paid by AI by setting up licensing deals with them. And I'd say absolutely you can do that. the tools have gotten pretty easy to connect to AI ⁓ bots and agents in order to set up that relationship. For small to mid-sized publisher, the revenue is going to be pennies, but you can do it. I wouldn't jump to do it now. Certainly down the road.
The other thing you can do is kind of take the opposite approach and just start blocking all AI bots in order to protect your content. I'd say that if you were an established brand and ha already have a big audience with traffic, that's probably ⁓ the direction I would lean in. But if you're ⁓ typical of most ⁓ mid-sized publishers, you're counting on social sharing, you're counting on Google search still. ⁓ yes, AI is coming in and distributing your content.
so you need to be a little bit nuanced with your blocking. So what I would do is I would probably start by blocking all the AI bots at this point, except for Google's, because Google search and Google AI overviews are it's the same bot. It's tied together. So if you still want to get some of that search traffic, don't block that one.
Hardwalling your content. Like I mentioned earlier, you're it's a good idea to hardwall some of your content at this point. We're gonna show you how. ⁓ and okay.
All right, so here's how to really do it. You already have the tools to do this. And it's just a really gonna be for most news publishers, niche publishers, this is gonna be a mix of hardwalling your premium content, stuff that's that you know is valuable, and then metering and having a registration wall up for your other content. So let me let me paint an example. If you're if you're a news site, ⁓
it's niche or local or regional news, you have original reporting and you're going to want to put a hard wall in front of your best stuff. Now, what's a hard wall? Well, it could be a paywall, but it could also be a registration wall. Now you may have content that you consider less valuable. Maybe it's ⁓ maybe it's just more data, ⁓ less opinion.
less ⁓ less value, great. Throw a registration wall on that so you can at least capture an email address. So in this slide, if you're looking at this, this is Mexico News Daily's registration wall. And you can set these up to literally lock your content down and require an email address in exchange for getting access to this article and a few more. Or you can continue this sort of the metering game where you give away one or two free articles, then the registration wall
you get the email list. Now, what we found, if you read our AR survival guide, ⁓ the study we did, ⁓ if you allow one free article and then put up this type of a registration wall to to get the email address, you're gonna grow your email list about two to seven X faster than ⁓ the opt-ins and pop-ups that you may be ⁓ maybe ⁓ setting up now.
And so the key is though is to let the re the free content only the key is to only let the reader read one piece of content and then pop that registration wall since Google is essentially ⁓ showing if you look at your analytics, you'll see that the average reader spends one point seven, ⁓ the average reader reads one point seven articles per session.
Okay. Let's ⁓ let's start this section over.
All right, let's dig into what you should actually do today. Today you have a window of opportunity that's closing. You still have search, you still have social sharing, yes, you have AI overviews, but you have an opportunity to really build your direct reader connection, which is through an email address. So you have to do everything in your power to get a reader's email address when they visit your website. In a year or two, website visits might be a trickle.
But right now you're still getting website visits and you have to grab that email address. So how do you do this? You do this through a registration wall. This is probably the most effective thing ⁓ that's out in the industry today. Set up ⁓ so that you allow the reader one free article. That's it. On the second article, you get something like this that Mexico News Daily is showing, where you have to you you require an email address to give away then.
One, two, or three, let's say, free articles per month afterwards. That's the trade. ⁓ email address for content. And the beauty of this is you can set this up in a really flexible manner. You can put this all across all your content and just build your email list like crazy. ⁓ you can put it across, let's say, your less valuable content and hard lock.
And require a paid subscription for your featured premium content. So if you're a news publisher, I would probably just put this across all my content and say, okay, you get one free article, ⁓ you have to put your email address in, and then you get a few more. And you can use the registration wall to hardlock everything from the bots. Now, yes, you do knock out search, you do knock out social, but the traffic that you have will convert.
fabulously in terms of building your email list. And then yes, your newsletter becomes a really important product. And you want to make sure that your your newsletter is treating those free registered readers well, the paid subscribers well, that your sending cadence is often enough. And ⁓ you will have yourself your own what we call a flywheel. We call it the publisher flywheel where you're you're creating a newsletter engine that with your growing email list, you're actually growing your traffic back to your website.
And Mexico News is a great example of this. They went from ⁓ half a million readers per month to now almost two million readers per month in ⁓ almost two years. So, and that's because of the registration wall. Now, if you're like a magazine publisher or a niche publisher, you probably have ⁓ issue content that's ⁓ featured content that's quite valuable, and you might have say a news blog running alongside that.
And so in this case, what you could do is you can literally lock down your feature content for only paid subscribers and put a registration wall in front of your news content so that your news content is still attracting social and search traffic, ⁓ plus it's building your email list. And and then you you're what you're doing is you're you're kind of playing the balance of, yeah, we don't want to let AI in ⁓ to our best content.
We're okay if AI comes in and grabs some of our news content. That's fine. But at the same time, you still have that search, social sharing, and email list building exposure. So ⁓ and and by the way, you could you can also set it up so the registration wall does sit on your premium content, but it it offers zero articles for free. You have to ⁓ drop off an email address and let's say you get one of your premium articles.
Now, ⁓ I talked to ⁓ Colin Devereaux, who's the head of AI at NerdPress the other day. We we ran a podcast, and ⁓ what he said, and because he's the head of AI there, he essentially said, Look, in a few years, ⁓ the AI agents are gonna be your readers. People won't be going to websites. And he might be right. we don't really know what the future is.
what we do know now is that you have this window of opportunity to ⁓ start building that email list like bonkers and ⁓ take control of of your own traffic that way. And yes, you will be selling ⁓ subscriptions and access to readers agents. So ⁓ readers, and this is already happening to a a small extent, but readers agents are going out and pulling content and
We are actively building a solution for that. But right now, agent traffic is low, it's growing. Right now the window is getting that email address. If you want to talk about this, ⁓ absolutely reach out. It's something that we're working on ⁓ from a lot of different angles in this crazy new world. See ya.
