Google's AI search overhaul & what it means for content creators
And why understanding the ad market is becoming a core part of the job.
Hi all - this week, I’ve touched on Google’s huge search overhaul integrating AI, and which journalists, bloggers and publishers are worried means yet more bad news for their business model of search engine referrals to their websites.
Plus I’ve written a whole lot about advertising, and why understanding how this market works is crucial for all of us working in the content production sector.
Google announces huge Search overhaul by blending in AI
This week at the Google I/O conference, the company unveiled a huge overhaul to their search, which they describe as the biggest change to search in 25 years.
TechCrunch reported it as follows:
Instead of returning a simple list of links, Google Search will drop users into AI-powered interactive experiences at times. Google is also introducing tools that can dispatch “information agents” to gather information on a user’s behalf, along with tools that let users build personalized mini apps tailored to their needs.
While Google says that AI Mode is not the default experience, Search’s user interface encourages users to ask follow-up questions instead of scrolling down to the links to other pages. (The links, to clarify, have not entirely disappeared; they are just no longer the priority for many types of searches.)
For writers, journalists, bloggers, publishers and the like, this news went down exceptionally badly, especially after years of feeling like Google was increasingly chomping into the old model and reducing referrals to their websites. Here is a flavour:
To explain the search and advertising model - I asked ChatGPT to visualise it (but note, I didn’t say Google, I just said a search engine. ChatGPT added in its competitor Google’s logo all on its own):
To give more of a flavour of the responses. Here is a post from a website call ‘All About Berlin’, who wrote:
AI is killing All About Berlin. When you Google something, you used to get a link to my website, but now you get an AI-generated answer trained on my work. This has a devastating impact on traffic.
While others wrote posts such as the one below.
The reason for drawing this to your attention is that what happens to newspapers and publishers first, then usually comes for TV. As Marion Ranchet said:
As always press publishers are first, we’re next. It’s inevitable, we (in video) need to have a GEO strategy to make sure we drive users to our streaming platforms. The thing we have for us vs press is we can’t be summarized, folks wanna watch content. However we are being «clipped» more and more.
So in part, this is about content discovery and where content owners monetise their content. But it is also about scraping material published online - such as YouTube - to share in results that don’t necessarily refer users back to the original source at a level needed to make money. And then from that, there are serious concerns about the degradation of the source material AI is relying on, if people stop publishing new material as there is no business model to support them doing so….
Understanding the advertising market is increasingly essential
I’ve been doing a lot of events recently - some public, some more private for particular training or development programmes. This week, I chaired a day for producers taking part in the Indielab 2026 accelerator cohort. I also did a talk called ‘What You Need to Know That No One Tells You’, covering all those messy details that everyone working in digital inherently knows, but perhaps we don’t talk about enough.
There were so many nuggets of insight from the amazing speakers who kindly lent their time and expertise, covering podcasting, membership, live events, managing TV assets on YouTube, branded content, vertical dramas, IP and franchise management and more.
The biggest theme that kept cropping up was how everyone needs to get their head around the advertising market.
For all we talk about audiences and fandoms, views and reach and algorithms and attention; content, titles and thumbnails, niches and demographics, the reality is that all roads lead back to advertising. In the linear TV, broadcast VOD or the cinematic movie world, then you can build an entire career without ever really needing to consider the needs of the ad industry. Despite it being fundamentally important to the health of a TV or movie business, it is something that happens separately to all the activities involved in commissioning and producing shows.
But now, it is the biggest factor in working and building businesses across the digital economy (or convergence economy, as Jon Stahl has suggested calling it).
Here is how it came up at Indielab.
Firstly, was in relation to podcasting. Ben Kerr from Cold Glass Productions (producers of the smash hit podcast, Dish) and William Miller from Raconteur Studios (producers of BBC Sounds/Radio 4 podcast/show When It Hits the Fan) both highlighted the very real imbalance between the volume of podcasting advertising slots available, and there not being enough adverts to fill all the slots. This was something I witnessed at close quarters, when back in the heady days of the second podcast gold rush around Covid, there was a high sell through rate and a high demand for podcast advertising inventory (in other words, there were too few advertising slots in podcasts for the amount of buyers out there wanting to buy the slots). Very quickly, that has reversed, where there is now a vast volume of supply, and not enough demand to pay for it all.
So here is where you can see other types of monetisation come to the fore: in the case of Dish, it is thanks to the brand partnership with Waitrose, or for other podcasts, it is about converting to a live event (indeed, in the case of the Dish, they sold out the Royal Opera House for an event off the back of one Instagram post).
For others, it is their subscription model driving the financials, thus reducing the dependence on ad income. To give an example I spotted recently: crime podcast Red Handed has 23,000 members via Patreon, where they make around £45k per month.
And you can see this trend in the most recent numbers of the global podcast economy from Hernan Lopez below - the consumer revenue growth is where users are paying for some sort of subscription or membership around a podcast (and while the advertising income has grown 28%, the point here is that the volume of podcasts has outstripped this growth, which explains the point around there being unsold inventory).
The second place the advertising market came up was in two great presentations on branded content and branded entertainment; first by Jade Raad of Jungle Creations and the second by Charlie Read of Upstream Consulting. Both emphasised the importance of understanding the minds and needs of brands, how they work and how content can help deliver their objectives. Here, again, was the emphasis on the significant knowledge gap that exists between how TV and content production works, and how brands and their marketing activities function.
The third place that advertising came up is in how to manage and exploit TV assets on YouTube. Alex Hryniewicz, MD of Little Dot Studios, talked through all sorts of insights into how you can build a channel on YouTube. One element stood out, which is how your financial return is dependent on how the specifics of your content appeals to advertisers.
To cherry pick a couple of examples how this can work. Alex gave an illustration of how the different length of a video hugely influences how much money can be made. So, the magic number is anything eight minutes long and above, as then a mid-roll can be put in a video, which drives up the amount of advertising that can be displayed, plus longer videos have a better chance of being surfaced to users. More than that, the longer the video that someone watches, the more valuable it becomes, and not just because they watch more adverts within the longer video. To use some very rudimentary numbers to illustrate this point (vats of salt all around of course): say a 20 minute video generates $180, a two hour video generates $3000. The reason the two hour video has generated 16 times the revenue (and not just six times the revenue) is partly because of more adverts, but also because the viewing itself has become more valuable.
Another way this shows up is around those subjects or niches that might be hugely popular with audiences, but might not be appealing to advertisers. This is not a new concept - after all, Channel 4 News has no advertising around it because brands don’t want their ads to be associated with dark or negative stories. However, it is interesting that this reticence is wider than just news or current affairs content, and also stretches to genres that are popular with audiences (and also with commissioners) such as true crime. And it is also worth keeping in mind that content such as true crime has a much heavier requirement for compliance and editorial oversight, in comparison to other, more lightweight subjects. So what this can look like in practice is that true crime content can end up with a lower RPM (revenue per mille, or revenue per thousand views after YouTube’s 45% share) in comparison say to other genres such as art history which can achieve higher RPMs, without as much compliance work involved.
To build on this theme: not all niches are created equal as ad spots are sold at different rates depending on the niche of the channel. So the more lucrative ones as what you’d expect - say finance or tech. However, other niches can be hugely popular - say World War 2 content - but are over saturated and therefore massively competitive (plus may have the same issue as true crime does, where brands don’t want to appear next to videos about Hitler). Meanwhile, kids content may be hugely popular, but thanks to the issues around monetising kids content online, there is a significant gape between views and income: it is reported that 15% of all YouTube views is for kids content, but it only generates around two percent of YouTube’s $40 billion in annual ad revenue. On this point, Jo Redfern interviewed Greg Dray from Animaj on this recently:
So perhaps the biggest takeaway here is to be careful of which niche you choose as your content might appeal to audiences, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to the best result in terms of appealing to advertisers. On that note, I thought this lesson in choosing the right niche worth sharing with you all…
Graphic of the week
Jim Waterson, ex of Buzzfeed and the Guardian has built up a chunky following for his publication London Centric. He recently shared the results of an experiment he’s been running on TikTok, where he’s been publishing some of his investigative journalism videos and then seeing their reach and revenue.
As he said over on LinkedIn:
How much do you actually make from doing news videos with original journalism on TikTok? I’ve been experimenting … on TikTok. All backed by journalism that took weeks, then scripting/filming time, then paying for a high quality edit and legal checks. No one owes me a living, this isn’t a moan, perhaps the videos aren’t right, this is just a side project to the newsletter, I see the benefits in other ways…. But yeah £70/month doesn’t cover the cost of reporting and never will! But it might if I was banging out dozens of hot takes a day.
Interestingly, Jim said as part of his experiment he published the same videos to YouTube Shorts and Instagram, which he summarised as:
Yeah they seem to be bombing on YouTube. While also flying on Instagram. No idea why!
All this may not come as a surprise to regular readers, as the monetisation on both Reels and TikTok is notoriously poor, it is another little evidence point around how people can (or not) make money online.
We should all switch to DuckDuckGo now...