REACTION
This won’t work.
Nice try though.
Tony Haile
Editor’s Note: We sent Eric’s piece to Tony Haile, an ON_Discourse member and serial media entrepreneur who founded and sold Chartbeat and Scroll, and he did not hold back. Enjoy the discourse.
Haile’s second law of media is that the success of any project is inversely correlated with the amount of time it requires publishers to work together.
Blocking AI might have been a cool plan five years ago, but now the horse has largely bolted. Your archives, not the re-warmed Reuters piece you put up yesterday, have been the main value thus far.
As for feeding in new news, there are maybe three publishers that matter. All of them are arrogant as fuck, and the AI companies can overpay them while the rest of the industry fades until they can replace even those players.
No one gives a shit about your website. If the dominant user interface becomes asking an AI agent for something, then people will never even get to see your super cool website.
Influential creators get more reach and money from TikTok than pubs can provide, and it’s symbiotic. The way to lose influence and thus value is to go exclusive with the Albuquerque Journal.
In sum, great, high-quality journalism and new facts are a cute nice-to-have for AI platforms, while the ruthless people are sitting on the other side of the table.
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