Data

Publishing’s Survival Depends on Data, Says Elsevier Chairman

At last week’s Sharjah Publishers Conference, Y.S. Chi warned that publishers need to build richer data infrastructures or face extinction.  “No publisher will survive five years from today if they don’t have data,” he said last week at the 15th Sharjah Publishers Conference. “I don’t care how well you edit and publish books. If you don’t have data, you will make wrong decisions.” At the top of his agenda was addressing perhaps the most urgent threat to publishing: artificial intelligence. “You can’t do AI unless you have data,” Chi explained.

Source: Publishing’s Survival Depends on Data, Says Elsevier Chairman

Big Tech Is Spending More Than Ever on AI and It’s Still Not Enough

Silicon Valley’s biggest companies are already planning to pour $400 billion into artificial intelligence efforts this year. They all say it’s nowhere near enough. “We’ve been short [on computing power] now for many quarters. I thought we were going to catch up. We are not. Demand is increasing,” said Amy Hood, Microsoft’s chief financial officer. “When you see these kinds of demand signals and we know we’re behind, we do need to spend.”

Source: Big Tech Is Spending More Than Ever on AI and It’s Still Not Enough

Hundreds of thousands of videos from news publishers were used to train AI models

YouTube channels from major news publishers and creators were in video data sets used by Microsoft, Meta, Snap, Runway, and Bytedance. For example, 11,604 videos from the official YouTube channel of The New York Times across 11 different data sets are in the database. Over 8,000 of these videos, though, came from a single training data source — Runway Gen-3.

Source: Hundreds of thousands of videos from news publishers like The New York Times and Vox were used to train AI models

Google AI Overviews ‘leading to affiliate revenue drop of 20-40% at some publishers’

Google’s AI Overviews are reducing traffic to review content and buyers’ guides by up to 50%, according to an affiliate marketing specialist. Paul Cunliffe, who works with publishers on their affiliate channels, described the arrival of AI Overviews as a “real challenge at the moment in the affiliate space”. Publishers can earn affiliate revenue by linking to products and services, taking a commission when readers make a purchase by clicking through a link.

Source: Google AI Overviews ‘leading to affiliate revenue drop of 20-40% at some publishers’

Inside the web infrastructure revolt over Google’s AI Overviews

Cloudflare, a web infrastructure company, has updated millions of websites’ robots.txt files in an effort to force Google to change how it crawls them to fuel its AI products and initiatives. There have been lawsuits, efforts to kick-start new marketplaces to ensure compensation, and more—but few companies have the kind of leverage Cloudflare does. Its products and services back something close to 20 percent of the web, and thus a significant slice of the websites that show up on search results pages or that fuel large language models.

Source: Inside the web infrastructure revolt over Google’s AI Overviews

Google AI Overviews Overlaps Organic Search By 54%

New research from BrightEdge offers insights into how Google’s AI Overviews ranks websites across different verticals, with implications for what SEOs and publishers should be focusing on. The data shows that 54% of the AI Overviews citations matched the web pages ranked in the organic search results. This means that 46% of citations do not overlap with organic search results.  Could this be an artifact of Google’s FastSearch algorithm?

Source: Google AI Overviews Overlaps Organic Search By 54%

Publishers with AI licensing deals have seven times the clickthrough rate

Publishers with OpenAI licensing deals benefit from a ChatGPT clickthrough rate almost seven times higher than those without agreements, according to the latest State of the Bots report from Tollbit. This suggests that AI gatekeepers’ discretionary deal-making, which currently largely locks out all but large, premium, English-language titles, will be a key determinant of success as AI adoption and diffusion continues to accelerate.

Source: Publishers with AI licensing deals have seven times the clickthrough rate

Universal and Sony Music partner with new platform to detect AI music copyright theft 

The two major music companies have each partnered with a research lab called SoundPatrol, which has developed a patent-pending method to analyze music. SoundPatrol, which originated at Stanford University, is developing what it calls a “forensic AI model for audio-video fingerprinting,” which it claims “represents a step change from existing detection methods.”

Source: Universal and Sony Music partner with new platform to detect AI music copyright theft using ‘groundbreaking neural fingerprinting’ technology

Google makes real-world data more accessible to AI — and training pipelines will love it 

Google is turning its vast public data trove into a goldmine for AI with the debut of the Data Commons Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server — enabling developers, data scientists, and AI agents to access real-world statistics using natural language and better train AI systems. Data Commons’ new MCP server bridges public datasets — from census figures to climate statistics — with AI systems that increasingly depend on accurate, structured context.

Source: Google makes real-world data more accessible to AI — and training pipelines will love it | TechCrunch

In ‘landmark’ move, SESAC and GMR join ASCAP and BMI’s ‘Songview’ database 

In December 2020, US PROs ASCAP and BMI launched a public performance copyright database called Songview as a “groundbreaking collaboration” aimed to serve as a “comprehensive data resource for music users.” A “landmark expansion” of the platform was announced on Monday (September 29), with data from all four major performing rights organizations in the United States –  ASCAP, BMI, GMR and SESAC – to be integrated into the Songview platform.

Source: In ‘landmark’ move, SESAC and GMR join ASCAP and BMI’s ‘Songview’ copyright database, expanding platform to 38m+ works

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