Despite record investment in the creator economy, not every creator is cashing in.
U.S. brands are expected to spend $13.7 billion on influencer marketing by 2027, according to eMarketer. It’s a cash grab, but the competition has outpaced brand budgets, according to agency execs. That outpacing has left mid-tier creators — those with moderate followings of between 50,000 and 500,000 —...
WPP has been flirting with the idea of becoming an “AI-driven platform business” for some time – mostly in earnings calls and on strategy decks. Now, with a new CEO incoming, the holdco might finally be ready to turn the tagline into a throughline.
That job now falls to Cindy Rose, a longtime Microsoft executive and current chief of operating officer of its global enterprise business. She’ll...
Condé Nast and Hearst have signed multi-year agreements with Amazon to license their content for use in its AI shopping assistant Rufus.
The news comes just six weeks after The New York Times revealed its own AI licensing tie-up with Amazon, which allows Amazon to use articles from The Times and content from NYT Cooking and sports website The Athletic for its AI products.
A Hearst...
In this week’s Media Briefing, Digiday senior media editor Jessica Davies looks at how the AI compensation model is evolving beyond flat-fee licensing, with options like pay-per-crawl and pay-per-query starting to emerge as ways for publishers to monetize AI bot traffic.
Pay-per-query vs. pay-per-crawl
The media’s “traffic apocalypse,” Bloomberg cuts newsroom staff, and more.
New ways...
Two trends are emerging in the world of AI and search: AI platforms are sending more traffic to publishers’ sites, while Google’s AI Overviews is reducing click-throughs across more search queries.
Recent data is helping to show the impact of AI tools and features on the search landscape and on referral traffic. And while it seems the percentage of queries triggering Google’s AI Overviews...
Linda Yaccarino had the title. She had the industry patter, the resume and the profile. What she didn’t have was control — or at least not the kind that mattered.
Her role was never about real power. It was about optics: a seasoned media executive instilled to calm brands and play the adult in the room while the walls burned. But this wasn’t just a case of being handed a no-win script....
After just over two years at X, CEO Linda Yaccarino is stepping down from the role.
“When @elonmusk and I first spoke of his vision for X, I knew it would be the opportunity of a lifetime to carry out the extraordinary mission of this company. I’m immensely grateful to him for entrusting me with the responsibility of protecting free speech, turning the company around, and transforming X into...
Whenever ad dollars swell around new channels — search, social, email — the industry reaches for the same playbook: cut out the middle, get closer to the source, and stop paying for junk reach. The creator economy is no different.
Marketers aren’t just experimenting with creators anymore, they’re institutionalizing them. As that happens, conversations about them have moved upstream, from...
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Publishers have always had a love/hate relationship with digital transformation. It’s given them more ways than ever to reach readers and potential subscribers, while at the same time it’s brought on challenges related to site traffic and AI.This is a member-exclusive article from...
Google’s AI ambitions are moving fast, and the old architecture of search advertising is starting to show its age. As user behavior shifts toward more conversational, visual queries, the need for automation is growing. But automation comes at a cost: marketers still want control. Google’s latest update — with AI Max — is an attempt to square the circle.
Rolling out this summer, this suite of...