LLMs remove a key competitive advantage of publishers. You need to find a new one.

It still surprises me that I’m old enough to have been part of the transition from print publishing to digital, but what surprises me more is that publishers are again making some of the same mistakes they made in that early internet era. But this time, it’s about the use of large language models to generate content, and it’s even being made by digital natives.

A little bit of history is probably useful here. Back in the mid to late 1990s, many publishers saw online content in terms of its ability to reduce their costs. Paper, printing and distribution of physical magazines were expensive. Publishing content online, though, was basically free. This, the theory went, would allow publishers to cut costs those costs and make more money.

What most publishers didn’t understand was that the high costs of production associated with print were their main advantage because they acted as a barrier to entry for new competitors. Starting a magazine was hard: you had to not only have enough capital to allow you to print and distribute the thing, you needed access to news-stand distribution, which in the UK meant working with big distributors who had to be persuaded to stock you. You needed a sales team to sell enough advertising to support it, and they needed contact books that were thick enough to get their feet in the doors. Magazine publishing was expensive, and only large publishers were able to get it done at scale.

By the mid-1990s, though, anyone could publish online. All those competitive advantages disappeared within a couple of years. You could publish easily using platforms like Blogger, WordPress, or even Myspace. You could get ad revenue from systems like Google Ads, without a sales team of any sort. Not only that, but you could get your content seen via Google search and social platforms.

It took publishers a long time to realise that the old barriers to entry no longer protected them. Some publishers still act like they think they do, and so appear consistently dazzled when a new platform comes along and makes individuals who take advantage of it into millionaires. TikTok is the latest, but it’s by no means the first. Online was a burning platform moment for publishers, and some of them took far too long to see it.

The next burning platform

The ability of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT to create content is, of course, being seized on by publishers who see it as a method of creating editorial content without having to pay anyone to do it – or, at least, by paying fewer people to do it (and probably cheaper ones too – that was another outcome of the move from print to digital). If you’re a publisher reading that and shaking your head, thinking “well that’s not what we’re doing” I am going to give you a small monkey side eye because we all know that if you’re not thinking that way, your CFO probably is:

There’s nothing wrong with using new technology to reduce costs, as long as you retain your competitive advantage. And here’s where things are difficult for publishers because what LLMs do is similar to what happened with web publishing in the 1990s: it removes the competitive advantage of publishers in the creation of content, just as the web removed their advantage in publishing and distributing it. It is the next step in the democratisation of publishing.

In the early internet publishing era, anyone could create any content and put it online, but to be successful they needed to have the expertise to write the content in the first place. That’s why niches like technology publishing were impacted early and heavily: there was plenty of expertise out there, and suddenly, they could create content directly without an intermediary.

Now, thanks to LLMs, anyone in the proverbial bedroom can create swathes of “good enough” content on any topic they want. They can churn out hundreds of average pieces about anything, just by taking a list of the most popular search queries in that topic as their starting point. They’re not flawless, but they’re good enough, particularly to answer the kinds of search queries which publishers have used to generate traffic at scale.

This is why, for publishers, AI content creation is another burning platform moment. Combine it with the move towards providing more answers directly on search pages, and you have a one-two punch to publisher traffic which Mike Tyson would be proud of.

Of course, publishers can use LLMs too. But, as with early internet publishing, their size means they can neither move fast nor with low enough fixed costs to make it work. If a proverbial 16-year-old can create an article with ChatGPT on “10 things you didn’t know about Mila Kunis” at the same speed as a celebrity magazine, at the same quality, the magazine loses even if it has used technology to eliminate roles and cut its costs. Because, unlike our 16-year-old, it has big fixed costs: offices, equipment, pensions, you name it. And it has margins to protect because the stock market expects to see revenue growth every year.

Regaining competitive advantage

So what can publishers do to retain their competitive advantage? There really is no point in trying to pretend that the AI genii doesn’t exist, in the same way that publishers couldn’t pretend in the 90s that people would just carry on buying huge volumes of print.

Nor will legal claims aimed at the likes of OpenAI, Google and Microsoft succeed. Yes, your content has been scraped to create the language models in the first place. But given the result in the Author’s Guild vs Google Books case, I expect courts to hold that this kind of use is transformative, and therefore fair use. Either way, it will be tied up in the legal system for far too long to make a difference.

Some have suggested that the way forward will be private large language models built solely using the corpus of text publishers hold. There are a few issues with this, but the biggest one is simply that the horse has bolted. OpenAI, Google and others have already trained their models on everything you have published online to date. They probably even have access to content which you no longer have. How many redirects of old, outdated content do you have in place where the original no longer exists? How many of your articles now only exist in the Wayback Machine?

Instead, the only option for publishers is to focus on creating content of a higher quality than any current LLM. You cannot gain competitive advantage at the cheap, low-cost end of the market. Trying to do so will not only make you vulnerable to anyone else with the same tools (at $20 a month) but also devalue your brand over the long term.

Creating higher quality content means employing people, which is why that urge to use LLMs to replace your editorial teams will actually undermine the ability of publishers to survive. Putting that cost saving towards your bottom line today is a guarantee that you will be out-competed and lose revenue in the future.

So what can you do with LLMs? The most important thing is that LLMs can be used as a tool to amplify the creativity and ability of editorial teams. They are most useful as what Steve Jobs used to call “a bicycle for the mind”, capable of amplifying human creativity. An LLM can give you a starting point, suggest an outline on any topic, rewrite a headline 100 times using the word “crow” and it never gets tired doing so.

If you’re a publisher, you probably still have decades worth of experience, context, contacts and knowledge of audiences in your editorial teams. Train them on how to use LLMs to amplify their creativity (and if you want some help with that, email me!)

You’re going to have to change your content strategy to adapt to the new world of falling Google traffic anyway. LLMs should be seen as a chance to exit the market for low-quality, high-volume content.