The next ad market may be built for machines
For publishers who make their money through advertising, it’s difficult to see bots as anything other than a threat. They crawl their content, chop it up into machine readable code, and then serve up the information as context in AI summaries, usually without leaving so much as a dime in the tip jar. With bot activity surging as human referral traffic plummets , it’s no wonder that many publisher…
The advertising market for publishers might soon pivot towards machines. Bots can crawl and distill publishers' content into AI summaries, often without any financial gain for the publishers. With a surge in bot activity, many publishers are now considering if bots could be an audience to cater to. One publisher, Time, is already serving ads specifically tailored for bots in an attempt to monetize this growing audience.
Time has started incorporating machine-readable versions of its pages, which include tailored FAQ sections intended for bots. These ads are invisible to human readers but visible to bots. When a bot crawls the page, the content is ideally repeated in a summary presented to the person who made the query. Time is selling one ad per machine-readable page at premium rates, treating bot requests as impressions.
The model is intriguing because it redefines the value of ad impressions to bots. Instead of treating bots as a threat, publishers can monetize their machine-readable pages as ad inventory. However, the advertiser is buying a possibility - the chance that an AI system will retrieve the sponsored content and incorporate it into an answer. There's no guarantee of placement or even that the message will appear in the response.
Despite this uncertainty, disclosing the ad to bots is crucial. If not disclosed, the ad could be unintentionally mixed with the content. This disclosure must function as data rather than just a label and be recognized as commercial by the AI system. While there's no set standard for AI systems, it's becoming increasingly important for them to identify and properly handle commercial content.
The approach of big tech in AI ads, such as ChatGPT and Google, emphasizes clear labeling and separation from the answer. This contrasts sharply with the bot ads approach, where bots see the ads but humans do not. The industry is experimenting with ways to monetize bot traffic as it has yet to generate significant revenue from pay-per-crawl and pay-per-use models.
However, selling ads to machines comes with its own set of challenges. The bots, acting as intermediaries, could potentially influence user choices before they even see the options. The advertising industry must navigate ethical considerations as it seeks to sell influence over recommendations to these bots.
Written by urgent.news from Fast Company's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — it may contain errors, so check the original before relying on it.
