Users signals make bank for Aftonbladet, age-checking good intentions gone wrong, and how to paywall

Costly blue check chaos, one dashboard to rule them all, and how to govern your bots - all in this week's Content Aware.

Published: 15:02, 11 December 2025

Corbidge comments...gold pens and priceless ink
What's this? Both Meta and Google doing publisher deals in the same week? Something might be afoot in the world of AI, where the big guns see that paying for content is a fraction of the price of losing the war for AI primacy. Our content quant Rob gets his calculator out and looks at how the future of AI needs media at its heart.
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How to turn clicks into cash
Sweden's Aftonbladet has found a clever way to go from anonymous browsers to paying subscribers. With a little help of a machine learning model which they integrated into their front-page system, the publisher can now predict which articles are most likely to convert, and all that without having users logging in. As for the result, a 75 per cent bump in sales from front-page stories. With a little help of reliable signals and a good in-house infrastructure, Aftonbladet has proven that even limited data can drive big engagement and a happier readers.
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Age checks gone awry
While born from sincere intentions, the execution of the UK's Online Safety Act has already stirred up controversy and many cybersecurity, privacy, and free expression issues. Age checks are clunky, the wrong posts are being censored and many smaller sites are shutting down in fear of compliance rules. The Open Rights Group, as well as many other critics, are urging British MPs to reconsider and come up with a smarter and rights-respecting approach which would not only protect children online, but everyone else.
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Pumping up the prompt volume
Ever wondered if AI trackers are as smart as they claim, or if they're just really good at scraping messy data from Chrome extensions and then mixing the searches up with emails, trip plans, and a little bit of connecting the dots? Steve Toth has the answer for you, as well as the results, which may or may not be wildly inflated numbers compared to Google or Ahrefs.
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Making peace with the Mouse
Disney is to make a $1 billion equity investment in OpenAI and has also inked a content licensing deal that will see OpenAI's Sora genAI video app able to "generate short, user-prompted social videos that can be viewed and shared by fans, drawing from a set of more than 200 animated, masked and creature characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars". After being at legal daggers drawn, the two businesses have clearly now seen commercial sense in co-operation.
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Paywalls vs big tech
With big tech hoarding traffic, repurposing content and leaving nothing more than scraps for creators, some measures are due. Paywalls are one of the options, however if you're looking to get one done, you should do it the right way. Harry Clarkson-Bennett has got your back.
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Google's monopoly gets a timeout
A federal judge has given Google a bit of a reality check. After ruling that the tech giant illegally held a search monopoly, Judge Amit Mehta is now hitting Google with a one-year limit on default search and AI contracts. Basically that means that Google will have to renegotiate every year, in order to give competitors an actual fighting chance to get their foot in the search door. But that's not it, there will be some sharing of search data with rivals as well. The trouble doesn't stop there, as on the other side of The Atlantic, The European Commission is snooping around as well, looking for any shenanigans which could point to a breach of antitrust rules.
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X gets burned by EU rules
Elon Musk's X just got hit by a $140 million fine, being crowned the first platform to feel the EU's Digital Services Act bite. The charges? Selling blue checks like candy, hiding public data, and hiding its ad info so well not even Sherlock could find it. This has in turn exposed users to all kinds of internet tomfoolery, from scams to bots. X has 60 to 90 days to clean up its act and make sure it follows the rules, but as you can expect Musk is already calling foul and labelling this as EU overreach. Brussels insists it's not censorship, it's just rules. You decide.
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Is this the board that keeps Meta honest?
Born out of scandals, hate speech, and privacy blow-ups, Meta's Oversight Board, operating since 2020, was the company's solution to repair its reputation. It's a unique body in tech, but does it really have power? "Five years on, the Board has made important strides for Meta’s global users, bringing transparency, reasoning and a human rights perspective to decisions that were long made behind closed doors, and with little or no public-facing rationale" its latest report claims.
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Search console gets social-savvy
Rare W for Google, as they've decided to make life a bit easier for site owners. Now the Search Console Insights report is watching both the website and social channels, stitching together web and social data and eliminating juggling between dashboards as well as the guessing game of which post did what. While early testers say it's neat and convenient, we'll have to wait and see what its like in the long run.
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Taming AI agents
OpenAI, Anthropic, and Block just launched the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) under the watchful eye of the Linux Foundation, with the goal to make their beloved AI agents play nice together. Each of the companies pitched in: OpenAI with their AGENTS.md, Anthropic its Model Content Protocol, and Block tossed in Goose. The ideal scenario would be a well-behaved and interoperable sandbox filled with sunshine and gigabytes, without any red flags such as AI browsers spilling secrets or going rogue (Hint: that's exactly what happened). Microsoft, AWS, and Cloudflare are also joining the party.
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UK life online
The UK regulatory body Ofcom has come out with the annual Online Nations Report, revealing how adults and kids are spending their time online. Obviously, with AI in the mix things are changing, adults are becoming more sceptical while kids are mostly happy. Read the full report here [PDF].
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