Category: In the News

This week’s Media Briefing looks at why shrinking referral traffic is giving registration walls a new purpose, one that publishers are testing in different ways: turning fewer, anonymous visitors into known — and potentially more valuable — users.

• The registration wall revival
• 3 Qs with Joy Robins, The New York Times’ global chief advertising officer
• Apple plans to block programmatic tech companies, Google gives publishers “Preferred Sources” counts, and more.

The registration wall revival

As referral traffic shrinks, publishers can no longer afford to let the readers who do show up to their sites remain anonymous. That’s prompting many to revisit a familiar tactic: registration walls. 

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In case anyone at Advertising Week New York had lost track of why ChatGPt carries ads, OpenAI’s Samantha Jacobson offered a reminder that the company pursued it “so that all of humanity could benefit from AGI”. 

Jacobson, OpenAI’s vp of monetization partnerships, made the claim during a panel question about privacy and consumer trust, and her version of the ad-funded bargain sounds a lot like the ones that came before it. Ads cover the people who won’t pay for ChatGPT, since “not everyone’s going to be able to,” she said. She then drew comparisons to Paramount’s subscription tiers, priced by how many ads a viewer will sit through, with owner Skydance’s ad tech boss Derek Michael a few seats away on the same stage.

But a pre-roll costs a Paramount viewer a few minutes. Free ChatGPT asks for something more personal since its ads are matched to what someone is asking and, unless they switch personalisation off, to signals from their wider use of the product. People raised on the ad-funded internet learned the hard way that when they don’t pay for a product they become the product, and that lesson leaves OpenAI with a delicate bargain to sell. Jacobson, naturally, was keen to stress that “consumer trust is the single most important thing,” and that the company would protect it “even if it’s at the expense or revenue or other partnership opportunities”.

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