Publishers

“Everything has gotten basically, assuming you're a publisher, from the publisher's perspective it's gotten twice as bad. They just double every one of those numbers over the last year.”

“Yeah, the problem is the merchants who will drive, make that bundle valuable, have no incentive to join the bundle because they could make more just monetizing users directly.”

“I own all my content. Publishers do not own my books. I do. Oh yeah, I do joint ventures. And I've severed all my audio rights.”

“I think they're dead at 250 or 1500 to one that we're seeing with OpenAI and completely dead at 60,000 to one that we're seeing with something like Anthropic.”

“And so that's the sort of thing where I think a marketplace over time can develop where original valuable content will get compensated and there will be a clearing price in the market once we have that scarcity that's created by that wall.”

“What I know won't work is if open AI is paying for your content, but you're giving it away for free to everyone else.”

“They feasibly cannot talk to every single publisher and have a conversation, have a request. Like, their business model is dependent on not having those conversations”

“Publishers have to build it themselves, and in no way, shape, or form should be turning that data over.”

“The idea behind some of those deals is it will bring forth all sorts of new product innovation for news and other things, and I think it won't. I think basically these companies will be happy to pay the checks and take the checks, but that once again, a lot of…”

“All of these publishers are screwing up yet again with these open AI deals, right. Giving away all the value is information and it's very scarce.”

“So I think maybe other publishers also think my publisher pays for these things, but it's really just me out of pocket as a business.”

“Publishers are dead, dead, dead, dead. Not subscription publishers, everyone else.”

“Here's a bunch of teams, not just one, but many AI teams standing on the precipice of making a moral decision. And they knew they either needed to pay for it or steal it. And some of the teams chose to steal it instead of paying for it.”

“Like, they're all sitting here now saying, you know, do we take the relative pennies from OpenAI and Apple and everyone who wants to license our content? And I actually think, unfortunately, they are, because publishers are so scared about what any kind of dro…”

“I think it's just going to incentivize people to publish higher quality content. In order to get cited by an LLM powered answer, like Substack or things like that try to do, like you want to own your content and you publish it and make sure it's high quality a…”

“Now, from a business model perspective, I don't think that publishers are really the play anymore, but I do think that platforms are going to be the play. And the platform tooling that enables the individuals to do this stuff and the platform tooling that enab…”

“So this is going to happen for these agents. It's unrealistic to expect that it won't.”

“First off, like Google today, just so people know on AdSense is typically paying out 70 cents on every dollar to the publisher.”

“And if you try and break this up, and if you actually do try and, you know, get into the weeds of this whole system and change it, the publishers ultimately will make less money.”

“At the very, very best, you're gonna be able to get those books at 50% off from the publisher.”

“If you have a small advance under 50 K, no one works hard to promote you because if it flops, no one loses their job. It's more than a 200 K advance. Somebody's getting fired.”

“So the aggregate of all of this is basically the strong get stronger, the big get bigger. The advertising moves to the big, strong, established sites. Small sites, new interim sites, less targeted sites makes less money. Content moves behind paywalls.”

“Obviously publishers are not going to be, You know, despite their best efforts, they are not going to be marketing experts. And so, yeah, you have to take it in your hands completely.”

“What I learned is that I think a lot of self-publishers out there whose content is evergreen, but they've gotten to a point where they don't have enough time to support the book or maybe to do more marketing. Maybe they're seeing sales drop off. Selling the bo…”

“So they'll start you at 10%. And then once you kind of prove that you can make them more money, then they'll expand you more and more.”

“About like, 70% of those relationships that we have with those publishers are exclusive. So there is no way to get the buying signals anywhere else other than through Bombora.”

“So the way it works is a publisher offers you a lump sum of money to get the lifetime rights in all the rights. They're going to get the Print rights, the digital, the audio, the foreign rights by offering you a typical advance might be like 15 to 25,000 dolla…”

“Giving worldwide rights to publishers now is crazy because the world market is getting more and more lucrative.”

“I think the reason you will see a consolidation, but you still have a lot of specialization in terms of, you know, being able to develop top-notch, state-of-the-art technology, and I do not think that the majority of publishers can afford, you know, to develop…”

“And I would say the big ones all have a focus on getting branded content money.”

“If you are now also a publisher, if you're also running a media business, you would actually measure yourself. And it's obviously a conflict of interest, which you cannot go with.”

“80% of our business happens here. 80% of the traffic for a publisher happens here on the phone.”

“You know, the problem with publishers is they're very romantic about what they make. GE just wants to survive or win.”

“The main type these days is we will pay by the read of the book. So this way it, from their perspective, it more or less looks like a sale. So just like they're selling the book, we'll pay them anytime the user reads the book.”

“So it's usually about 20% of the book is when that triggers the payment.”

“What we found is about 20% of publishers are finding programs from the retailers.”

“Over the past year or so, we've paid about 20,000 different publishers.”