On PvA: Ads come to ChatGPT, publishers embrace prediction markets, Claude Code breaks out of the nerdery, and how Trump has reset how global leaders communicate. Listen to PvA.
Newsweek is making the move to beehiiv
Why is an industry leader like Newsweek migrating their newsletter program to beehiiv? Let’s get it straight from the source: "We needed to be able to run newsletters as its own business within Newsweek, and a platform like beehiiv gives us more capabilities and opportunities to monetize those newsletters," said Bharat Krish, Chief Product Officer at Newsweek.
beehiiv’s ecosystem of tools is core to their ambitious growth plans, as they look to scale their flagship Bulletin newsletter while launching new subscriptions. Krish added, "I'm excited about partnering with a team that's tech-first and has an entrepreneurial mindset." Keep an eye out for Newsweek’s partnership with beehiiv launching in mid-December, and learn more about working with beehiiv here.
Unhappy vassals
Donald Trump sucked the oxygen from the air at Davos, but Canadian prime minister Mark Carney emerged as a star with his “rupture” speech declaring “the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality.” Carney did an admirable job of skipping the nostalgia to speak plainly about power dynamics..
A similar process is underway with the open web, as the pleasant fiction of interdependence with tech platforms gives way to great power rivalry that is about muscle, not fairness.
The economic model for the open web doesn’t stretch as far back as the institutions set up after World War II. Instead, the open web’s infrastructure emerged in the competition to dominate the commercial internet. Google won. Like the US, Google then set up or supported a web of standards and rules that attempted to strike a balance between the needs of Google shareholders, advertisers, users and publishers. (Google would list its priorities historically as users, advertisers, publishers. It never mentioned acting in its own interests, weirdly.)
And of course, as Carney noted, it was always something of a lie. Google controlled distribution of the open web, so it was going to extract value through its domination of the advertising ecosystem. It would send traffic to millions of websites and more often than not take a piece of the action indirectly through its advertising system.
The price for publishers was following Google’s rules, sometimes issued through trade bodies Google controlled and mostly through diktats. If Google wanted faster loading pages, publishers adopt its accelerated mobile pages product. It is to blame for those long-winded recipe pages, which while not the greatest sin of the open web, reinforced who was running the show. And of course, Google would put its thumb on the scale and prioritize its own properties; it would control the digital ad system to its own benefit as a monopolist. Google’s house; Google’s rules.
Publishers were, in Belgian prime minister Bart de Wever, “happy vassals.” Unlike most businesses that pay for reliable distribution, publishers came to see organic traffic from Google as an entitlement. They made their peace with the pleasant fiction that Google needed them as much as they needed Google.
Compared to fickle pretenders like Facebook, Google was reliable. The algorithm shifts were more predictable, the rules less hazy, and the business models of Google and publishers broadly aligned in the aggregate, if not in specific instances. Were open web publishers fully sovereign? Was Belgium?
Times change. The open web system, like the post-war order, is over. De Wever warned it’s easier to swallow vassal status than be a “miserable slave.” Google is locked in titanic battles with Open AI and other tech companies to keep its dominance in the midst of AI’s emergence. AI Overviews are decimating the traffic many publishers are seeing from Google. The model of getting traffic from search engines to monetize through programmatic advertising is in hospice.
What replaces it is just as hazy as whatever will replace the rules-based international order. It’s useful at these times, as Carney did, to look to the past. The open web began with a set of protocols that made it open. RSS – really simple syndication – was a critical piece of technology that let publishers syndicate content in a machine-readable way without giving up control, creating a cooperative model where distribution, attribution, and traffic flowed back to the source.
Now, one of RSS’s creators has created RSL – really simple licensing – an open standard that lets publishers set explicit terms for how AI systems can access and use their content, extending the logic of robots.txt from blocking to licensing. On top of that standard, it creates a collective rights organization so AI companies can license content at web scale through a single agreement, with payments distributed based on actual use.
The idea is that the open web develops its own equivalent of ASCAP or BMI: a collective rights organization that makes it possible for AI companies to license content at scale, while distributing revenue back to publishers and creators based on how their work is used.
“When Spotify uses content, they pay for it,” said Doug Leeds, former CEO of IAC Publishing and now CEO of RSL, on The Rebooting Show. “They pay one blanket fee and then the collective management organization distributes that money based on how the content was used and when it was used.”
RSL has attracted backing from major publishers and infrastructure players, including Ziff Davis, USA Today, Wikipedia, and several content delivery networks. It will soon cover half the content AI uses to train its models. And it would allow a simple way for AI companies to incentivize the creation of quality content its models need.
What it doesn’t have yet is customers on the other side. A marketplace with only sellers is not much of a marketplace. Google plays a less acerbic version of Trump’s America here. It is playing a might-make-right game, using its domination in traditional search to power its AI Overviews by using the same crawler. This is critical because it means that publishers cannot block Google from crawling its pages in for AI answers without cutting off search traffic, which few open web publishers can afford.
Google and other tech companies have struck a smattering of licensing deals. Doing individual deals is clearly insufficient and impossible since it would exclude 99% of publishers. Tech companies know this. And it plays to their defense that not only can they not understand which bits of content were used to produce which answers – and to tie it to revenue – but they cannot possibly conduct bilateral deals with every content publisher.
“They’ve literally said in court filings that they can’t license content because there are hundreds of thousands of places to do deals with,” Doug said. “What we’re saying is: now you can do one.”
The bet is that publishers will be seen as critical infrastructure, an argument that New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger recently made at Stanford. Tech companies love to reduce all the inputs they’ve used as simply “data,” but that’s an unpleasant fiction.
“If they don’t pay for the content, ultimately the content will go away – and so will the value of their product,” Doug warned.
On the latest episode of PvA:
OpenAI does the inevitable and embraces ads, raising the question of whether this is desperation.
Prediction markets go mainstream, with media companies cashing in and a sharp debate over whether this is new infrastructure for the Information Space or late-capitalism financialization of everything.
Vibe coding breaks out of the nerdery, triggering a broader reckoning for SaaS and software development.
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