As many of you know, traffic from Google has been particularly volatile across the publishing industry over the past month.
Historically, Google has played the role of a “helpful librarian” that organized, prioritized, and ranked content for its users. The agreement between Google and publishers was that if we were useful to their readers, they would rank us highly and send us traffic. This is how we got paid for our work.
But the way people find and access information is changing rapidly. ChatGPT is beginning to close in on Google's long-standing dominance, gaining 180 million users in a remarkably short space of time. As Google seeks to disrupt itself by experimenting with its own search generation experience (SGE), disruption at a macro level will also accelerate. But when our content is summarized and served up like this, we don't generate revenue to support our journalism.
There are many reasons why I'm proud of our agreement with OpenAI, including that it sets a precedent that SGE experiences should be compensated for the use of our work, and we're actively working to build mutually beneficial partnerships with Google and others in this space.
We also knew for a long time that we couldn't rely on external referrals as a major driver of traffic — we had to build long-term, deep relationships with our readers, keeping them coming back to our site so that it became a daily habit and destination.
Our strategy, which we announced last fall, was developed with this in mind: our return to Business Insider, our focus on habitual engagement, and our focus on business, technology, and innovation will not only best serve our readers, but also mitigate the impact of distribution changes outside of our control and build the most enduring Business Insider.
The great news is that we are already seeing positive results.
