For publishers, it’s tempting to frame the current moment as an “AI problem.” Crawlers, large language models, and automated summarization have undeniably changed how journalism is consumed and redistributed.
The deeper challenge is economic, predating generative AI.
For years, publishers have been navigating the slow erosion of the traditional value exchange that funded quality reporting.
Advertising was once a reliable pillar on which much of the industry was built. Over time, however, it has been diluted by low-value impressions, automated ad buying, and pricing systems that reward cheap volume over quality.
Subscriptions and paywalls, while still essential, increasingly ask readers to pay for broad bundles of content when they may only find a fraction of it relevant. Licensing models, particularly those designed for scale, often struggle to reflect how journalism is actually discovered, shared, and valued in today’s environment.
What AI has done is expose these weaknesses more clearly and more quickly, leaving many in the industry looking at the present and future knowing something has to change, but unsure what that change should look like.
Research from the Reuters Institute has consistently shown that audiences are less willing to pay for general news, especially when relevance is unclear or inconsistent, even as trust in high-quality journalism remains strong.
At the same time, Pew Research finds that most readers who encounter paywalls leave rather than convert, not because they don’t value journalism, but because the value proposition no longer aligns with how they consume information.
AI-mediated consumption has introduced new anxieties: content extracted without attribution, summaries that replace original reporting, and traffic that never returns to the source.
New models, from pay-per-crawl licensing to verified bot programs, are emerging to protect publishers' rights in an AI-driven ecosystem. They are important developments.
But they don’t address another equally important question: how human readers actually discover, trust, and engage with journalism today.
Discovery is driven not by homepages or search alone, but by trusted professionals, advisors, and peers — real people who recommend articles within their own networks.
Relevance, not volume, determines what gets read, shared, and remembered.
The future of publishing will be shaped not only by how content is protected from machines, but by how effectively it is connected to the right human audiences — and how publishers are compensated when that connection succeeds.
If the core issue is economic, it’s worth examining where today’s revenue models begin to crack under pressure.
Most publishers operate within some combination of three primary pillars:
Each plays an important role. Each also carries structural friction.
Advertising remains a significant revenue source for many organizations, but it depends heavily on scale. High-quality journalism and highly targeted journalism are not always the same thing in programmatic markets. An article that deeply serves a specific audience may generate fewer impressions than broad, general-interest content, even if its value per reader is significantly higher.
For publishers serving professional, regional, or niche audiences, this tension is constant.
Paywalls and subscriptions have become essential for sustaining original reporting. Yet subscription models typically bundle access: readers pay for the entire publication, not just the pieces most relevant to them.
That model worked in a world where the daily paper arrived on the doorstep and was consumed front to back. Today, audiences are accustomed to paying for what they use, not what they don’t.
Licensing models attempt to bridge this gap. In theory, they allow third parties to access and distribute content while compensating publishers.
In practice, many licensing agreements assume broad, uniform demand.
And that’s where relevance gets lost.
A financial advisor in Maine might find an economic piece from a local publication incredibly valuable to share with clients. It speaks directly to their community, industries, and concerns.
An advisor in Dallas likely has no use for that same article.
Yet under many traditional licensing structures, access functions like a blanket: either a content library is unlocked for everyone within a platform, or it isn’t unlocked at all.
For large national publications with ubiquitous demand, that structure may be workable. For niche, regional, or specialized publishers, it becomes inefficient, and at times, exclusionary.
The result is a mismatch between how journalism creates value and how compensation flows.
Value is created at the moment of relevance when the right article reaches the right reader.
But many current economic models are structured around access at scale, not relevance in practice.
As discovery becomes more fragmented and more personalized, that gap only widens.
If today’s economic friction stems from misalignment, the question becomes: what should alignment look like?
For decades, scale was the dominant metric in publishing. Circulation numbers, unique visitors, impressions, pageviews — volume determined value. The more broadly the content could be distributed, the greater its revenue potential.
But digital abundance has changed the equation.
When information was scarce, bundling made sense. Readers paid for an entire newspaper because there was no efficient way to separate what was relevant from what wasn’t. Distribution costs were fixed. Attention patterns were predictable.
Today, information is infinite, and attention is fragmented.
Audiences no longer consume news in neat, bundled packages. They encounter individual stories in feeds, newsletters, group chats, LinkedIn posts, Slack channels, and text messages.
And increasingly, they expect to pay, if they pay, in proportion to the value they receive.
This is why relevance matters more than ever. It determines:
Yet many of the economic structures supporting journalism still reward access and scale over precision and intent.
If publishing is to be sustainable, compensation must better reflect actual usage and meaningful engagement, not just availability.
But relevance does more than increase engagement. It strengthens direct relationships between the reader and the publisher.
When journalism consistently reaches readers in ways that feel personal and contextual, it builds affinity. Affinity drives willingness to support, whether through subscriptions, memberships, or voluntary contributions that sustain reporting for a broader community.
The same dynamic applies to advertising. In environments where content is trusted and highly relevant, advertisers behave less like transactional bidders in an auction and more like sponsors or underwriters aligned with the audience’s interests.
Relevance increases perceived value, and perceived value supports sustainable revenue.
The question, then, is not simply how to protect content from extraction, but how to ensure that when journalism resonates with the right audience, the publisher benefits proportionally.
What if publishing economics looked less like bundled distribution, and more like value flowing toward what people actually choose?
The music industry faced a version of this problem years ago.
For decades, consumers bought entire albums; even if they loved only two songs, they paid for twelve. Bundling was the default because distribution required it, and we as consumers didn’t question it.
Digital distribution changed that.
Platforms like Apple Music and Spotify shifted the economic model from ownership of bundles to access, and, more importantly, to usage. Subscribers pay a flat monthly fee, but artists are compensated based on listening behavior. Money flows toward the songs people actually play.
If one listener streams a single artist repeatedly, that artist earns more from that subscriber’s fee. If another listener prefers a different genre entirely, the revenue follows their usage instead.
Compensation is tied to relevance.
Publishing has not fully made that shift.
In many cases, access is still bundled. Libraries are unlocked in bulk. Subscription revenue is distributed across an entire publication. Licensing deals are structured around access at scale rather than engagement at depth.
This is not about replacing subscription models or dismantling paywalls. It’s about layering in a mechanism where value flows more directly toward what resonates.
In a relevance-driven ecosystem, journalism that truly connects with specific communities is not diluted by scale; it is rewarded for precision and relationships.
The real opportunity for publishers may not lie solely in protecting content from extraction, but in redesigning economic systems to reward relevance itself.
If trust flows through individuals as much as institutions, then compensation models must evolve to recognize that reality.
The future of publishing may belong to those who can answer a simple question:
What would it look like if journalism were compensated not just for being accessible, but for being chosen?
If stories are increasingly discovered within trusted networks, perhaps compensation should follow those choices.
So what would it look like to build a model that rewards being chosen?