Publishing is dying—again. Only this time, it isn’t a metaphor. The patient flatlined somewhere between “pivot to video” and “pivot to AI,” and the industry is still waiting for a miracle that isn’t coming.

The open web is now an all-you-can-eat buffet, and guess what? Publishers aren’t on the guest list—they’re the buffet.

Every industry event has become a group therapy session with worse lighting. Panels full of “strategic leaders” talk about “new monetization frameworks,” which roughly translates to “please, someone, give us traffic.” Everyone’s smiling, but the smiles look like taxidermy.

For two decades, publishers built their business models on the benevolent dictatorship of Google and Meta. Now the dictators have decided they’d rather keep the oxygen for themselves.

Search traffic? Gone. Google’s AI Overviews are basically cliff notes for your content that no one has to visit your site to read.
Social reach? Choked. Facebook turned off the news tap, TikTok doesn’t care about your link, and X is too busy setting itself on fire to notice you screaming.

Your beautifully optimized headline is now a speed bump on the AI highway.

Generative AI doesn’t link to your site—it digests it. Every LLM out there is munching on decades of journalism, recipes, and listicles, and belching out “original” content like a polite intellectual cannibal.

Publishers spent years trying to game search algorithms, only to become the raw ingredients for the next generation of bots. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude—they all learned to write by chewing through your archives for free. You trained your replacement, and it doesn’t even have the decency to cite you.

Once upon a time, buying traffic made you a pariah. It was “inauthentic,” “low quality,” “not organic.” Now? It’s oxygen in a vacuum.

Chris Kane—one of the few grown-ups left in adtech—put it bluntly all the way back in 2024: “Every web publisher is going to have to figure out how to buy paid traffic in an effective way.” Translation: if you’re not paying to get noticed, you’re not getting noticed.

The era of “build it and they will come” died around the same time people stopped typing URLs into browsers.

Today’s game is feeding DSPs what they eat. Tomorrow’s game? Feeding LLMs what they eat.

There’s a new kind of hustle emerging, and it’s not built on ad slots or affiliate links—it’s built on licensing your data to AI.

The Associated Press has already drawn the map: structure your archives, tag your content, clear your rights, and start charging the machines that use it.

In the future, your content isn’t a web page—it’s fuel. The smart publishers aren’t chasing clicks; they’re packaging verified, rights-cleared journalism and selling it directly to the tech companies training their AIs.

It’s not glamorous. It’s not romantic. But it’s sustainable.

The open web won’t die in a blaze of glory—it’ll fade out like a banner ad no one bothered to close. But there’s money to be made in the decay.

Those who adapt—who treat content as infrastructure, not performance art—might just make it through the collapse.

They’ll license their data, build direct enterprise relationships, and turn their archives into living assets instead of digital fossils.

Publishing is terrible. But it doesn’t have to stay that way. Someone’s going to get rich feeding the machines—might as well be the ones who know how to write.

Chris Kane has always been the guy who made sense of chaos — the spreadsheet philosopher who could explain why everyone in ad tech was broke while pretending to innovate. He built Jounce Media by mapping the underworld of supply chains and middlemen, exposing how much money disappeared between a publisher’s pageview and an advertiser’s invoice.

Now he’s rewriting the whole playbook.

The man who once believed the open web could be fixed has stopped trying to save it. He’s moved on to feeding the machines — literally. Kane now argues that publishers should stop obsessing over ad slots and start structuring their content to feed LLMs what they eat.

In his new worldview, the goal isn’t to survive programmatic—it’s to outlive it.

For years, the industry treated paid traffic like contraband. Buying it meant you weren’t “authentic,” that you couldn’t “build a real audience.” Kane helped shape that thinking — and now he’s publicly tearing it down.

“I wish in retrospect I had had a more nuanced approach to thinking about paid traffic,” he’s said, calling the industry’s stance “a real misstep.” He admits that publishers were unfairly villainized, saying, “Publishers who buy paid traffic aren’t bad. I regret doing that.”

That’s not a rebrand; that’s a mea culpa.

He’s blunt about what comes next. “Every web publisher is going to have to figure out how to buy paid traffic in an effective way. It’s an increasingly pay-to-play world.”

Translation: if you’re still waiting for organic traffic, you’re waiting to die. The open web’s old oxygen supply — search and social — has been cut off. Google’s AI Overviews are stripping clicks from search results, and social platforms are allergic to links that lead people off their apps.

Kane’s new realism is harsh but liberating: the future belongs to those who treat traffic as a product, not a miracle.

Kane doesn’t sugarcoat it. “I’m sad to say, I think programmatic has lost the war.”

The whole ecosystem — SSPs, DSPs, resellers, verification layers, “AI optimizers” — became a giant machine for transferring publisher margin to middlemen. Social and search took the top of the funnel, and programmatic was supposed to make up the difference. Instead, it just buried publishers under fees and abstractions.

He puts it plainly: “Social and search are low-margin channels for agencies. Those margins get made up through programmatic by trying to find the lowest possible cost placements.”

That’s the quiet part everyone avoided saying out loud: the business model depended on making publishers poorer.

And Kane knows it can’t be fixed with another acronym or curated marketplace. “There is no model where display and video alone can reasonably compete with the value preservation of search and social,” he says. The only way to “recover value,” as he put it, might be “taking a blowtorch to the industry.”

He’s not joking.

Kane’s most quoted line is also his most prophetic: “Today’s game is feeding DSPs what they eat; tomorrow’s will be feeding LLMs what they eat.”

That’s the entire roadmap in one sentence. The future of publishing isn’t about fighting for ad impressions — it’s about making content structured, rights-cleared, and license-ready for the AI systems that will consume it.

In other words, if the machines are going to eat your work, you might as well charge them for the meal.

Publishers who still think their competition is each other are missing the plot. The real rivals now are AI companies training on their content without paying. Kane’s conversion isn’t about abandoning media; it’s about saving what’s left by making it enterprise-grade, API-accessible, and monetizable through licensing instead of banner ads.

He’s not nostalgic for the old days of open web idealism — he’s pragmatic enough to build for the next one.

In his own quiet way, Chris Kane is telling every publisher what they already know but are too afraid to say out loud: the pageview economy is dead, and the machines don’t click.

AP just pulled off the cleanest pivot in modern publishing, and the part you’re missing — the part all the “strategy guys” will pretend they understood later — is the Chris Kane framework behind it.

Structured archives.

Rights-ready data.

Direct demand.

Licensing as a real business.

Not vibes. Not SEO prayers. Actual strategy.

The people reading ADOTAT+ aren’t smarter than you.

They’re just reading the stuff that actually explains what’s happening.

If you want to stop guessing and start steering, move to paid.

Stay Bold, Stay Curious, and Know More than You Did Yesterday.