Leverage and lip service

Welcome to events season. There are several in NYC this week, including a convenient cluster around World Trade Center from Wired, Fast Company and Axios. 

This weekend, I swung by a more low-key event around the corner at WSA: Case Sensitive, a niche magazine gathering. One of the charms of niche magazines is they attract people who do them for reasons that have little to do with economic leverage. One session began with a recitation of the “traumas” of institutional media that led the people to start from scratch. 

These are very different people than the newsletter hustlers. These magazines are well designed and the craft of print is not just respected but elevated. Mass market magazines arguably hastened their own decline by severely economizing during the financial crisis. They are now in harvesting mode, a point driven home to me in the airport when I saw a special UFO issue of Popular Mechanics. The labor it takes to produce a small circulation magazine does not make economic sense, but it serves as a signaling function of giving a shit that allows them to charge $25 or more an issue.

Gautier Robial of News and Coffee, which operates magazine kiosks in in a handful of European cities, said niche magazines have a “sincerity” that is an advantage over an over-optimized and increasingly synthetic digital media filled with conflict and cynicism. Making a niche magazine in 2025 is an act of defiant optimism.

London magazine store MagCulture owner Jeremy Leslie said culturally magazines can serve as an antidote to being extremely online: “It’s self care. It’s reminding yourself you’re human. We are all tired of the digital world. People are seeing through it now.” 

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I’ve covered Google for nearly 25 years. I’ve never seen a moment like now where publishers are openly hostile to Google. They would grumble about Google’s role as internet hegemon, but they were at least realistic about it. Google would act in its self interest – forget about the “don’t be evil” marketing – but those interests roughly aligned with an open internet. No longer.

At Wired’s AI Power Forum yesterday, Google vp of government affairs and public policy Markham Erickson gave the now-familiar spiel that Google is simply responding to shifting consumer preferences to receive answers directly rather than hunt around. He also dutifully repeated the promises that AI will cure diseases and we can’t let China win. This is starting to feel like cover for the wholesale theft of humanity's collective intellectual output. 

“We want a healthy ecosystem,” he said. “The 10 blue links served the ecosystem well. We are not going to abandon that model. What users want is changing.”

(Troy and Alex took a variation of this position in the latest episode of People vs Algorithms, seeing as the open web overall is not going away, it's more publishers putting words on webpages that are in the barrel.)  

On deals with publishers, Erickson called them “still nascent,” which means only Reddit, the Associated Press and a few others. Google is reportedly in talks with other publishers.

Later, during a publisher panel, People Inc CEO Neil Vogel joked he was on the wrong panel, pointing to the empty seat in the front row reserved for the Google exec who had hit the exits. 

“This is a leverage game,” Neil said. “Google is going to work in Google’s interests. The fundamental thing Google is doing is using their market leverage to keep us from getting leverage.”

The crux of the issue  is that Google uses one crawler for search and AI scraping. That means publishers cannot allow their sites to be crawled to show up in classic search results without consenting to having their content slurped up for AI Overviews they see as an existential threat. Since Google is a monopoly in search, this means publishers are being strongarmed. Despite the criticism, People Inc does not block Google from crawling its site.

“The idea they care about a healthy internet is not true,” Neil said.

Fellow media chiefs were equally unsparing in their Google criticism. One noted the need to have “good faith discussions,” a polite way of saying Google has a history of talking nice and acting far differently. The notion that Google is still sending as much traffic to publishers from core search – not Discover –  irritates publishers that have seen their search traffic plummet. “Simply not true,” Jim Bankoff said. Mike Reed, CEO of USA Today/Gannett, concurred: “100% false.” As for Google’s claim that AI is leading to higher “quality” of clicks, again no. One publisher noted that ironically their Google Analytics does not back this up. 

Tech companies in general were criticized by Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal, who noted they have a history of paying “lip service” to the need for oversight. They also expand the definition of fair use wide enough to drive an 18-wheeler through. Publishers can't rely on courts, as seen in the ruling in the Anthropic copyright case brought by book publishers that training on legitimately obtained copyrighted content is transformative and therefore fair use.

“We want to deal with the perfect storm that’s engulfing journalism,” Blumenthal said. “They’re doing the work. they deserve the compensation and recognition.”

Publishers have mostly avoided open war with Google because discretion is the better part of valor. That’s changing, not just rhetorically. PMC launched a lawsuit against Google, making the case that Google is abusing its monopoly and strangling Penske’s affiliate business with its inclusion of AI Overviews. Penske said its affiliate revenues are down by one third. 

The bet these big publishers are making is that the “garbage in, garbage out” rule will kick in, if blocking works. The new realism in publishing, hard earned after its many idiotic pivots over the years to the whims of tech platforms, is that the AI companies will only come to the bargaining table if their products are made worse by not having access to the content from these brands. Then, as the trillions going to pay for data centers and compute normalize, a new economic bargain can be struck that roughly mimics how Spotify cut its deals with the music industry for a post-Napster era. 

But to Neil’s point, what’s needed is leverage for that to happen in any form. The narrative on Google has shifted back to it being in the pole position in the AI race. Its market value has crested $3 trillion. It can afford to pay lip service. 

The Rebooting’s latest research project, in collaboration with Piano, surveyed 65 revenue leaders at publishers to understand their progress in fostering “total monetization strategies.” Key findings:

Forbes used to carry the tagline “the capitalist’s tool,” so it stands to reason that it has been an innovator in digital media monetization. It has been an early adopter of everything from native advertising, franchises as tentpoles, high-octane affiliate marketing, events and more.

Sherry Phillips, CEO of Forbes, joined me to discuss how the publisher is leaning on its diverse business model to weather 30%-plus declines in search traffic. Forbes produces 100-150 list franchises a year, depending on how you classify some spinoffs. It is focusing on its franchises like 30 Under 30 and its recently released World’s Billionaire’s List, and adding new categories like the Top 50 in AI and Forbes Top Creators. It already had a large events business that accounts for nearly a third of its revenue. It has brand licensing deals in 67 countries and runs a three-pronged affiliate business through Forbes Vetted, Forbes Advisor, and the third-party–operated Forbes Marketplace.

“We don’t think of ourselves as just a magazine or even just a media company,” Sherry told me. “Forbes is a brand platform, and the way we win is by monetizing that brand across every surface — lists, events, licensing, commerce, you name it.”

This is the future for most magazine brands. The print, and even the journalism itself, is one part of a larger brand platform that creates value in a variety of ways, some of which are very tangential to the original journalistic function. 

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