👉 Background: Back in 2021, big tech companies like Facebook and Google (reluctantly) agreed to a news media bargaining code. This allowed large Australian publishers to get compensated for their articles which were being re-purposed:

• Nine is estimated to receive between $40-$60 million per year from big tech
• Seven is estimated to get around $30 million per year from big tech

👉 What happened: But when these deals were negotiated, AI wasn’t really so prominent. But now, the former head of the ACCC, who was the architect for this media bargaining code, believes AI models like Google’s Bard or ChatGPT should also pay Aussie publishers.

👉 What else: Google and Microsoft have scraped news stories globally to help build these AI models, but the publishers haven't been compensated for indirectly contributing towards the ‘quality’ of these models.

What's the key learning?

💡Traditional media publishers are finding new ways to generate new revenue streams and re-invigorate their businesses.

💡The Washington Post ran a project to analyse the data sets of AI bots and found that the data set was dominated by websites from industries including journalism, entertainment and content creation.

💡That means these industries are 'helping' train these AI data sets without the publishers' permission. So it will be interesting to see whether Nine, Seven West and other large publishers can squeeze any cash out of the leaders in AI.

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