Content Aware media news: June 29, 2023

Apple content payments, defending against AI bilge, and wasted ad spend - all in this week's Content Aware.

Published: 09:14, 30 June 2023

Publishers together strong
A number of large publishers are in talks to create a coalition specifically to deal with AI's impact on our industry.
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"Apple next" in cash-for-content payments
Major publishers posit that if Google and Facebook are on the hook for payments to publishers for content used, then so are Apple.
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Asymmetric outcomes
Australia was first to legally require platforms to reach deals with publishers for content. Canada is following. This study from the Australian experience throws up some interesting examples of unintended outcomes, the most concerning being that such a funding model lets Big Tech pick winners and losers according to their aims and purposes.
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Corbidge comments on... are the Five Ws strong enough to withstand the generative deluge?
The basic tool used by reporters for aeons could well be the buttress against which mass-produced AI content must test itself, or be measured against.
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Media orgs resistant to societal change are hurting themselves
Analyst Shirish Kulkarni is the latest big name in the Media Voices podcast series on modern media problems and solutions, this week looking at the pace and shape of change in media organisation versus the societies they serve.
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23% of programmatic ad spend "wasted"
A huge amount of cash is being pushed towards what the Association of National Advertisers in the US call "suspect inventory".
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This diet drives AI crazy
A study has found that training AI systems on data generated by other AI systems - synthetic data - causes "models to degrade and ultimately collapse." This raises the prospect of a web dominated by AI generative content feeding on itself ultimately becoming useless, or worse, producing convincing gibberish.
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Human curation versus Machine Scale
A trawl through developments on the web since AI started to rear its derivative head doesn't make for pretty reading for many publishers. Yet, as this piece argues, it's almost certainly a phase we have to go through.
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Google in code coincidence shock? No, surely not
SEO Senpai Barry Adams noticed something in a fix Google made to Google Analytics 4 just before Universal Analytics is shut down this weekend.
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The NYT is indicative of the NYT only
We all know how great the NYT's digital strategy is, because we're constantly told so. But it's not necessarily a good example to base research or decisions on, according to academics, because it's actually an outlier.
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