Why are media partnerships increasingly coming with a price tag? In this exclusive article for Predge, TechCabal Managing Editor Asukwo Oduo shares his perspective on how AI-driven search is reducing publisher traffic, weakening advertising revenue and changing the economics of media partnerships. For PR and communications professionals, understanding this shift offers a clearer picture of why newsrooms are charging for opportunities that were once easier to secure through collaboration. He writes:

Friends in PR and Communications always have this look of surprise on their faces when they reach out to media firms, ask for media event partnerships, and then get slapped with a hefty bill.

Most of the time, they don’t understand it. Like, why can’t we partner the way we used to, without any financial commitments? I’m sorry, my friends, AI changed the game.

Several reports have been published on how AI is eating media for lunch; in fact, many publications have had to cut jobs in the last few years. All of this is down to dwindling revenue.

Google is the world’s biggest Search engine, with over 90% market share. Publishers relied on it to drive decent traffic to their websites, which in turn generates ad revenue for the publications. Media outlets that don’t rely on ad revenue leverage the traffic they get to charge advertisers a premium.

In the same vein, without decent traffic to your website, advertisers wouldn’t want to do business with you, or they’d offer you peanuts.

Enter AI.

With the advent of AI and the chat becoming mainstream, individuals would rather ask ChatGPT or Claude rather than go to Google to search a query.

Not only that, but those who search on Google get answers from AI overviews. The AI crawls websites, extracts information, summarises it, and leaves users with little or no incentive to visit the websites from which it got its results.

Visits to numerous websites across the globe have continued to plummet because of this. AI gets answers from the hardwork of publishers and their reports, but undercuts/sidelines them and feeds their labour to users.

The publishers bleed in two ways. First, they don’t receive sufficient website visits to sell to advertisers, and then they lose out on the ad revenue Google itself pays (based on website traffic and user geography).

This is the explanation nobody gives folks in PR and Communications. So they don’t understand how their friends in newsrooms want money for almost everything. Sorry, friends, bills have to be paid.

Published exclusively on the Predge Blog