Hello and welcome everyone back to another episode of the Publisher Lab
I'm Tyler Bishop joined today again by your good friend, Producer Manny
Producer Manny. Hey, I'm back. Manny is a jack of all trades. I really don't know how he does these managing multiple monitors, screens, audio, and still
finds time to weigh in on all the different topics that you talk about here on the Publisher Lab
I've really been enjoying sort of the flow that we had recently
I think that one of the things that's been really fun is seeing how the show evolved
and then the feedback from all of you. So if you listen to the show or enjoy listening to the show because we cover things that are
topical, things that have happened this week, usually the top articles and news and information
in the world of publishing, stuff that affects people that run websites and things along
those lines. If you really enjoy this stuff, it would be great just to get more feedback
We talked about this a few weeks ago when we said that web publishers need to be interacting
with audiences as much as they can. We really let your feedback guide the show
And so we hope that'll continue to be the case. You can go to publisherlab.org and give us your feedback and any questions you have
And that would be amazing because I love answering questions and then yeah, feedback, we take it
So just kind of hopping right into things, one of the first kind of areas that we like
to cover in the show is sort of the advertising industry since it's the lifeblood for digital
publishing in a lot of respects. If you look back historically, thousands of years, literally centuries and centuries of
– I mean, pretty much the history of written content. So yeah, it's been fueled by advertising more so than any other model and it's proven
to work because you have three parties that win. You have your reader who wants content for free, you have the publisher who provides
content and then you have the advertisers that subsidize all the costs that are associated
with that. And so right now going on in industry news, we have the anatomy of ad tech and this comes
from DigiDay. So there was an article this week and you can go back probably three or four years and
you could find this exact same article almost verbatim and it's called The Anatomy of Ad
Tech Outrage by DigiDay and the advertising community is basically – they're upset
over an outrage that's basically made for advertising content on the web
So you can think of this as basically websites that are spun up specifically for the only
reason being to monetize them. I was reading through the story, Producer Manny, they don't really go into specifically
what that means because this is something I actually talked to a reporter at DigiDay
a while back and they were talking about spammy sites and I was like, well, what is a spammy site
And what they described was it was a little bit arbitrary because it was subjective
So I don't know, when you hear made for advertising website, what do you think of
I'm thinking about like a website that just has a ton of ads on it
Maybe not the most exciting or relevant or even good content but just somewhere where
they can just throw a bunch of ads on there and just make money off of it
Yeah, I think – so I'm always jaded whenever people will use these sort of like broader
terms in the industry because I have a hard time putting myself in the – from the perspective
of either a general member of the public or even somebody that's not quite as jaded
by the advertising ecosystem over a couple decades. And so when I look at that, I can think of two things
I can think of somebody that is started and started running a website specifically just
because they want to make money. You can think of it almost like as an investor
And that doesn't necessarily eliminate the quality of the content from being – like
if you make great content, nobody's doing this purely for free for the most part
A lot of people start for free. But over time, when this starts to become a business, yeah, you want to make money off
of it. So what I'm assuming that they're talking about specifically more so than anything else
is kind of this new hybrid arbitrage. It's not new. Arbitrage has been around for a long time where you basically almost trick people into
clicking links on social sites and things like that and then you come to the website
and then show them more ads than it costs to get the click or whatever
That kind of went extinct a while back. But there is sort of this like kind of hybrid industry where you have sites that are essentially
picking keywords and things like that that they think that they can get ranked for using
AI to spin up the content. So you have what is pretty generic low-quality content populating on the web and then people
trying to make a quick buck out of it. To me, there's not a lot of profit in it
You know, like even if AI just generates the most generic thing ever but it ranks number
one for a certain term or something like that, there's a pretty good chance that that query
or that term didn't have any other good answers and nobody had made content for it
So I think that this is a lot of hand-wringing and a lot of finger-pointing going on across
the industry at what is not the problem. The problem is not that the internet has too much spammy content
It would be more so that the spammy content would populate to the top and that really
isn't the case. You look at all the studies that are out there, generally the overall quality of content served
in search results and pretty much across the entire web, quality in terms of content, not
necessarily like production. But yeah, I don't know, producer-manager, am I wrong on this
Do you think that content on the internet is getting worse? I feel like content on the internet has always kind of stayed equally spammy
It's just more about the creativity and the new methods that they use, right
Yeah, I agree with that. I think this kind of speaks to a larger point, which again, it's funny how this industry
operates in cycles, but this is coming from Adweek. But they had an article this week on, it's called Publisher Adoption for New Video Ad
Spec, Lag 6 Months After Introduction. So this is another thing where it's like if you go back probably six, seven years, you
had this big issue where Facebook was over-counting, I believe, the number of views on Facebook Watch
So you had a lot of advertisers and even publishers. I remember I think BuzzFeed was one of the ones that was really upset about this and
maybe had a lawsuit filed against Meta or formerly Facebook. And it was all based on the fact that they literally hired these big video teams and
people were spending a lot more money on video because Facebook had inflated the amount of
views that these videos were getting. And now I think everybody should hopefully know better than to trust a platform's metrics
on something that they have an incentive to inflate. But despite that, I think that we're sort of seeing that again where you've got publishers
and advertisers, they're struggling to adopt new forms of video ad classifications and
things along those lines. And that lack of symmetry that you're seeing, that's because essentially you have publishers
and advertisers that both want some sort of formatting or standard that they can base
costs, pricing, that sort of thing off of. And not having something like that creates almost like a vacuum where there's this big
disparity between somebody that gets it right and somebody that gets it wrong
So a lot of this has been introduced in March, some of the new specs that they've been trying
to get to take hold. But a lot of it's been hindered by unclear sort of like whose responsibility it is for
ensuring adoption. There's not really a lot of financial incentives in terms of like a community-based incentive
And then just also who is supporting this? Like who is ensuring that these types of things are evolving and actually working
And so I think what you're going to find is that there's very few parties in the space
outside of those with significant vertically integrated businesses that may or may not
be against the law that have any interest in doing anything with this
Because you have some friends about basically trying to manage all of it and take the lead
on it. And there's just everybody in the space is kind of out for themselves a little bit from
the standpoint of why would I invest so much time and energy in trying to collectively
bargain what this is? Because universally what you're going to find is that advertisers and publishers are
a little bit sort of on different sides of the fence on this sort of thing
And so you are going to probably get for a long time now this big disparity between publisher
to publisher. The video advertising that you have on your site could vary quite considerably depending
on how it's configured and what the demand even is for your types of topics or audience
So like you can think of this as me and Manny both have websites
I have one on golf. He has one on, I don't know, fly fishing
And you would think that we have largely similar audiences. Maybe his is all from Montana
Mine is all from Texas. And because of that, maybe I have a lot of video demand and he doesn't
And so maybe we make the same amount of money because I don't even have the right formats
available on my website. Okay. But I change the formats and now I make a lot more money
Now he sees me doing that. He changes the formats on his. Maybe he gets another ad partner
But his doesn't go up and it's just, you don't know, is it the demand or is it the standard
And yeah, that's one of the things that I don't imagine changing anytime soon
But it gives you an idea of sort of like what types of things matter and what you can ignore
whenever people start proselytizing that these things are going to solve those types of problems
So let's see. Moving on. What else do we have in terms of, I think that kind of leaves us for our advertising news
of the week. I will say this in relation to ad news for the week is I think that the advertising ecosystem
has been polluted for a long time. And if you read everything that, you know, like all the major ad week, Digiday, whoever
and you listen to the big brand publishers, you know, they bang their fists on the desk
every year and they complain about the same problems. And one of two things
Either A, they don't have the interest in solving any problems and they want somebody
else to do it. Or B, they don't have the power to. And I think that it's a little bit of A and a little bit of B
But I do caution our listeners who I don't think are largely, you know, working at Complex
or anything like that. I will say that you should not necessarily take the lead from big brands and assume that
you know, they're representing your interest. Because from what I've found over the years is that brand publishers are largely concerned
with a lot of things that are, you know, in some ways arbitrary and not all that important
to their actual business. And so I think for publishers, it's really good to sort of like keep your ear to the
ground and worry about your best interest and what types of things actually are going to affect your business
You know, video ad standards and things like that I don't think are a huge concern for
most independent publishers. Looking forward into social media news in the week
So, you know, when you talk about social media news, it's pretty hard not to find X or formerly
Twitter in the news. And this article comes from TechCrunch. X's privacy policy confirms that we use public data to train AI models
Now, producer Manny I, he brought this up to me right before we started the podcast
And just to give you a little context on this before we get into it
So they updated the privacy policy. It was on for all platform users
And basically what they said is that they're going to start collecting everything from
biometric data. And that's a little concerning to job history. You know, you can assume all the content that's in there and other public data
And, you know, is this, you know, potentially Elon's entry into the A.I. market
I would argue that Twitter is one of maybe five places online that have, you know
exponential amounts of unique data and content that would be extremely valuable for A.I
moving into the future. And so, yeah, I think the writing was on the wall when they cut their API access off to
developers a couple of months ago. It was pretty obvious that this was the reason why they didn't want somebody else to
build an entire enterprise. And, you know, maybe the next megalithic big pet company off of Twitter's data
So they're going to do it themselves. So, Producer Manny, you mentioned before, like, is it good for A.I
to get the information? You can rephrase the question how you did because I think it was the right one
Yeah, so I guess the question that I was raising, and I might be jumping forward a
little bit here, but we also have a story about CNN and a lot of the large
publications where they are trying to stop web crawlers and A.I. from taking their information
However, on the other side of the fence, we see Elon and X saying, yeah, we're
going to use everyone's tweets to train A.I. So I think the concern here is, like, the quality of information that the A.I
will be trained on. Is that something that we should be concerned with
And then that also kind of brings in the misinformation because Twitter is just
full of it. So which way do we go? Yeah, and the thing that I think maybe I surprised you with before we started the
show is that I would much rather have all the data be fed in from Twitter than
from, you know, like a CNN or a major media company. Take, you know, what you might think about all the major news outlets here in
the U.S. aside. The more information, the better. So the benefit of A.I
that we can think of at the moment is really that it's ability to sort of like
pull in lots of information and then calculate it quickly, much faster than humans
So you can think about it as, would you rather basically have a human filter
this information for you or would you rather have a machine that has far less
flaws and biases and things like that and know exactly how the information is
filtered back to you versus, you know, it's a human being and, you know, it's
based on their decisions and things along those lines. Now Twitter is filled with, you know, everything
And you can think of, you know, you think of it bad, good, whatever
It's in there. But you kind of want that, too, because what if all the, you know, like even
hateful, you know, disparaging content or something like that? Wouldn't you want to know, like, where is this coming from
What types of people are taking in this information and what kinds of things
are they saying? Because this is the type of thing that can actually, like, create content in of itself
So you think about, you learn that, you know, a huge portion of the population
thinks the Earth is flat and we're getting way off on a tangent here. But, you know, why is it that they think that
It's all people from, you know, certain backgrounds and they have, you know
all these XYZ things in common. And like that gives you information to be able to then communicate with people
like that in ways that you probably couldn't have ever before. And I think personalization is a big part of where maybe Twitter might go
with something like this. I don't know, Manu, are you convinced? Have I brought you over or are you still a little bit skeptical
I think I'm going to still be skeptical. I feel like especially with gathering all this data, especially with, like
biometric data. Biometric data is concerning. It's a different thing because, you know, we're talking about, like
how AI can basically take in all the data and information, like, in tweets
and then maybe parse that through. But then we start thinking about, like, and this is job history
education history, biometric data. That's a little concerning from the standpoint of, you know
changing the terms and conditions. You know, I'm still, like, dumbfounded that all these tech companies
for so long have got away with just being able to, like, text this box. And, you know, now you agree to whatever we say
And then being able to just, like, send you an email and say, oh, we updated it
Well, like, in this case, this is a huge difference, you know
Saying that I allow Twitter to, you know, like, have my content that I put
into it in the form of tweets and having Twitter being able to genetically
identify me out of a lineup are two different things. One of those things I might be willing to sign up for
The other is probably not. So pretty concerning. And one that I imagine is used in practice will probably come
under legal challenge. I also just want to add, too, that it was mentioned that because
this is X and Elon Musk that's working on this, Tesla and his other firms
are going to be very closely working together with this. So even, like, if you're sitting in your Tesla, you know
there's, like, a million cameras on the Tesla. They're going to have all that information
They're going to be able to feed the AI. Yeah. And I think that this is something that we all need to be probably
kind of aware of from the standpoint of over the last decade
we've gone through this amazing transformation where the cloud and lightweight technologies have allowed the collection of more data
than what pretty much any, you know, system or human can know
what to do with. And all this data has sort of been collected by every tech company
I mean, every tech company I've ever worked for or built, we've collected way more data than we needed with the idea of, like
we're saving it for a rainy day. You might want this someday
But the point of wanting it someday is that eventually you would find
you know, systems or something that's smart that could take that data
and then provide analysis or give direction based on it. And over the last decade, we've had unprecedented amounts
of consumer and personal data collected by a lot of companies. And now we're going to find out, you know, what is and isn't legal
to have done with that data. And, yeah, I think it is definitely something that if it slides
by people too quickly, you may not like kind of like where this ends up
But I imagine they'll spend a decent amount of time in courtrooms before then
And I'll go ahead and kind of skip over some of the – so there was a recent article in DigiDay about X's brand safety
and an upheaval there. That is something that's really common in advertising is sort of this concern
about, quote, unquote, brand safety, having ads appear next to, you know, extremist content or even just volatile content
that maybe a brand doesn't want to agree with. And I think that this is a – I've never seen this have an impact
actually, on advertising performance, both personally and then just you can look across the studies that have been done
It's pretty rare that advertising, you know, being associated with, you know, especially when it's programmatic
If I see a commercial on TV for Pepsi and it's, you know
on some R-rated movie that I wouldn't want my children to watch or something like that, I don't immediately go
kids, we're not drinking Pepsi anymore because, look, they support R-rated movies
The same goes for, like, display ads and all kinds of ads on the Internet, I think
I do think that brands maybe feel an impact or, like, an appeal from customers a lot of times whenever, you know
maybe they're supporting somebody specifically where it's like, Pepsi sponsors, I don't know, Putin, you know
I would imagine that wouldn't be too popular in such a U.S. So I do think that this is probably overblown to some extent
The one thing I will say about it, though, is that when a brand
is investing money, especially in something programmatically, and they do get pushback from their audience or their consumers
where people are like, Pepsi, how dare you support, you know, InfoWars is a big one a while back
Alex Jones, pretty much, they made it impossible for him to basically get monetized after a long time
But for a while, when Google and others still allowed display ads
on a site, people would, you know, sort of, like, go at the brands that, you know, still ran ads in there
And, you know, realistically, it's not even the ads. They just didn't have them blacklisted as a site
So what you find is that somebody that is an audience member
of InfoWars or something like that, they go and they visit Pepsi's website and they come back to InfoWars or wherever
and then they see those Pepsi ads on there. And so it has more to do with the person that's actually
seeing the ads than it does the publisher or the advertiser. And I think people largely get that, but what brands hear
are the loud voices from the activists. So there are people and organizations that are out there
that specifically go around and sort of, like, try to get different sources demonetized by, like, protesting
to the brands. And so that's really where most of this comes from, and that's why you never see anything done about it
in reality. And then finally, moving on to our favorite, AI News
So we weren't AI last this time, and I think it's probably
appropriate because it's in every single episode where we kind of go through what's the latest
And I figured we'd start with some vanilla, the things that we know, you know, social media
advertising, you know, these things that have been around for a while that haven't been completely replaced
by the robots just yet. And speaking of being replaced by robots
so chat GPT's reach is limited among US adults. So this comes from Search Engine Journal
and just whenever we thought the robots were going to take over, all the sort of, like, analytics
that you're seeing now around, like, the, you know, kind of linear adoption of chat GPT and sort of, like
its peak potential and this big explosion that everybody has been watching and also expecting to continue
it's sort of, like, it's ramping down a bit. And I don't really know exactly why this is
but I do know that, you know, like, I can look around in my own life, people that are completely disconnected
from, you know, the technology space. Like my wife, for example, I think she's used chat GPT
one time, and it was because I was like, you should use chat GPT to do this
Is this kind of what you're finding in your life as well? It's funny because we're kind of in the same situation
My wife won't really touch it unless it's, like, very important or if it's like, oh, I can write, like
Instagram descriptions with it. So I do hear about less and less people using it
I know that there was a big concern and fuss, especially within the graphics design community early on
But as time has gone on, I feel like that concern has lessened
I feel like more and more people are seeing it as a tool rather than a replacement
And a lot of the times, you know, if you need a very, very specific image or if you have something in your head
nine times out of ten, unless, like, you're hyper descriptive, you probably won't be able
to get AI to give you the image that you're looking for
And even if it kind of does it, it's still not perfect enough, you know
Yeah, no, I agree. And I think that, you know, I've found that, you know
I've become a better user of the different forms of AI. And, you know, I have a level of technical expertise
where I'm able to sort of, like, kind of piece together different frameworks and things like that and largely
you know, do a week's worth of work in a day in many cases. And I think that that's the potential that it has
But I don't know that it's necessarily approachable enough for every person
And because, you know, like, unless you work in a job that there's an obvious application
consumer behavior traditionally – and this is sort of like the big thing with search engines as well
right now where these sort of, like, forward-looking, like, disruptions that you can imagine or everybody
has a theory on, these are going to actually take a lot more time than what you might assume
And the reason is, is because even though, like, you can see how chat and GVT is going to disrupt
you know, the modern search engine right now, and maybe it – in fact, it is in some cases
especially among early adopters, by the time that some of these people that we're talking about now
Producer Manny and I, where we're talking about, like, you know, my wife, for example, or whoever
to get those people brought over to where it's like their, you know, their behavior is disrupting the search engine
by using chat and GVT instead, we're a little ways away from that
And I think it's because those populations have to be able to find, you know, practical users and use cases
sort of like what they call on ramp to a new technology
or behavior. So I do think that one of the things that we can kind of
take away from this is that all the metrics in the world are telling us that, you know, sort of like this big takeover
that AI is going to have in disrupting the web. Not necessarily that it won't occur, but that maybe
we all have a little bit more time than what was initially thought
And then our last story for the day from Axios, major websites are blocking AI crawlers from accessing
their content. So this is sort of like a lot of people taking a page
out of the Xbook, Manny. So remember me saying a little bit earlier that they cut
off their developer API access, which had been free for the longest time, which is kind of crazy, actually
And they're basically hiding their content from AI crawlers and crawler bots and things like that
And the reason is because, you know, if an AI can come
to your website and take its content, you know, just because it's really stealing
It's like licensing. It's like why the actors are mad that, you know
chat GPT can take a writer's job or whatever. It's not that AI can't write
It's that, you know, if you ask it to write the, you know, 11th season, I don't know
I'll pick a show that I actually do watch that has seasons. Maybe, now I don't know the number of the seasons
of the different shows. Let's see, Succession, right? So Succession, I think it's supposed to be over, right
Manny, did you watch the show? I didn't know. So I think Succession, you guys get it
I think it did three seasons and it should be like, it should be finished now
But let's say you wanted to write a fourth season and got the actors on board, but you didn't want
to hire any writers. Well, the source material for what would happen next
in the story arc is going to come from the three seasons that were written by people
So you're using and piggybacking off of all their labor for, you know, something that's fresh and new
And so if your website can basically get like pillaged by AI to regurgitate sort of that
content or even just like use it as a baseline for creating new content, that has pretty large
ramifications because you're basically allowing these large organizations and big tech to, you know
get free labor. You know, like training an AI model is really hard
It's why it's taken so long to get a stat GPT. It's a lot of feedback from real users
I've heard that they had people in warehouses basically just training bots on whether or not
you know, an answer was semantically correct for communicating with humans for a long period of time
So this stuff is not easy. And so now you, you know, you have crawlers that
are basically being blocked by a lot of websites. But if we're going to be honest, this is going to
save websites from open AI. It's going to save them from, you know, like
Google or whoever, because they will obey these because they'll be worried about legal concerns
The thing that we should be concerned about with this is what AI is out there that is not going to
obey that because crawlers, unless you ban visitors from your site, the crawlers can pretty much do
everything that a regular visitor could do. And there's really, there's really no great way
other than measuring sort of like the data like extracted or like the energy expended from, you
know, like a session or a user agent or something like that
So it gets pretty complex whenever you try to block it. And, you know, if a lot of people decide to block
it, it can just change sort of its parameters and its behaviors and it should get past that
So it's a game of cat and mouse that publishers can't win
And I think that the concern that we should all have is basically, you know, like if somebody
without your knowledge takes your content and then doesn't even regurgitate it necessarily
but then uses that as sort of like knowledge that it's required to create new content, well, that's
the value that humans do provide is that the machines out of the box have no information
They're zero. And so humans collect the information and, you know, like you or me or whoever, we're experts on
things and we write about it and we create that content. Well, what happens then whenever, you know, like
somebody else comes along and wants to steal your expertise, you know
I've heard before with both acting and writing what you're going to start to see is, you know
databases pop up that are largely designed so that users can, you know, these artists or the writers
or whoever, people that, you know, create content for a living or have their likeness associated
with content. You're going to see these databases start to pop up where you can truck your content into a
database where it'll cross-check it against, you know, different models and information that's
in them and you'll be able to say, like, if you want to use, you know, my content in your model or
whatever, you'll have to license it from me. I think that's a lot easier in practice when you
start talking about, like, you know, likenesses and things like that. But written content is going to be a little bit different
And, yeah, I think this is probably the first area where you'll see AI regulated content of, you
know, adoption standards where, you know, like it's very easy to sell and also some form of
protection for sites and things like that. I mean, the web kind of has this now, right
Like, you've got websites. You ever see the little copyright thing down at the bottom of the website for Decent Manning
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It definitely has. The reason for that is because they're basically
letting you know it would be illegal to copy the source code to that website or application and
then use it like as if it was your own. And that's something that largely people have
abided by the law on and the law has done a good job with sort of like judicial review and
judicial consequences for it. So I'm a little bit optimistic here that, yeah
I do think that we're going to run into some, you know, like sticky examples in the meantime
But until then, I think, you know, I think this is something that's solvable, at least solvable in
the sense that we've got solutions now that are not too dissimilar
But that's it. We've got through the news today in terms of like
you know, all the stuff that we've run down. I enjoy really kind of like digging into these
topics a little bit more and staying up with the news of the day. But if there are topics or there's just kind of
general directions that you'd like to see us go with the show, one of the things that I've
considered a couple of times is I discover all kinds of new AI tools and revelations about how to
use it almost every day. And I thought about doing an episode where I just
run through some of them and why you should check those out. But I really want your feedback
So if you have a chance, leave us a question or give us some feedback or if that's an episode that
sounds interesting to you, go to publisherlab.org. Otherwise, you can keep watching on YouTube or
listening wherever you get your podcasts to the Publisher Lab. ♪ Music Playing �