AI search engines arguably make “advertising” obsolete. One issue this raises is how publishers will be compensated for creating that content that powers AI replies. Perplexity is taking a stab at a solution with a new program that gives publishers a share of the revenue generated by subscriptions to its (paid) Comet web browser.
AI-based ad generator Jivox has released “agentic shopping ads” to handle the seller side of the AI shopper agent-to-seller agent dialog. DaVinci Commerce generates personalized responses to either human or agentic visitors, including LLM prompts. Whether it’s “industry-first” is questionable; Dailymotion released EchoAI “conversational ads” last month.
Content creators argue that compensation for use of their materials should be legally required, not voluntary. Unfortunately for them, the judge in an author suit against Anthropic ruled that unpaid scanning of copyrighted materials is permitted as “fair use”. Anthropic and the authors have now avoided a trial by settling the case.
Amazon agreed to pay $2.5 billion to settle a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit charging it tricked customers into signing up for Amazon Prime and then made it difficult for them to quit. A jury trial in the suit had already begun. We can only assume that Amazon didn’t like its chances.