{"id":294539,"date":"2025-11-19T09:33:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-19T09:33:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/294539\/"},"modified":"2025-11-19T09:33:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-19T09:33:08","slug":"why-buy-the-cow-iab-tech-lab-warns-publishers-over-ai-traffic-losses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/294539\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Why buy the cow?\u2019 IAB Tech Lab warns publishers over AI traffic losses"},"content":{"rendered":"

The head of the IAB Tech Lab has urged Australian media owners to join forces and collectively block AI models from scraping their content, likening the current dynamic to: \u201cWhy buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?\u201d<\/p>\n

Anthony Katsur, the New York\u2013based CEO of the IAB Tech Lab, said large language models are already wiping out up to 60% of US publishers\u2019 referral traffic, an \u201cunsustainable\u201d trajectory for the media industry.<\/p>\n

Speaking to Mumbrella during an IAB trip to Sydney, Katsur said LLMs perform \u201canywhere from 250 to several thousand\u201d crawls before delivering a single site visit, compared with roughly six crawls per visit from Google Search.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s still a debate amongst some publishers on whether or not to block [LLM crawlers]. I would advise any publisher \u2026 you should block. No market has ever been created when people give things away for free.\u201d<\/p>\n

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In terms of the market, IAB Australia\u2019s latest annual report<\/a> found online advertising expenditure reached $17.2 billion in FY25, a 10% increase, although local media investment continues to lag.<\/p>\n

According to the IAB, digital advertising makes up nearly three-quarters of the paid ad market, with search driving roughly 44% of that investment.<\/p>\n

In light of this, Katsur is in Sydney meeting media owners to explore \u201cpublic policy or publisher coalitions\u201d that could help block traffic losses to LLMs.<\/p>\n

The current situation carries notable echoes of the mid-2010s, when publishers relied heavily on referral traffic from social platforms, particularly Facebook, to drive audience growth.<\/p>\n

That model collapsed when Facebook abruptly shifted its algorithm to de-prioritise news, triggering a sharp drop in traffic and ultimately prompting government intervention.<\/p>\n

This paved the way for the development of the News Media Bargaining Code, forcing platforms and publishers into a series of negotiated deals, of which the latest proposal could see platforms with revenues of at least $250 million face a levy on revenue of perhaps 2.25%.<\/a><\/p>\n

Katsur said he\u2019s seeing the early signs of a similar tension emerging around generative AI, with Australian publishers divided on how aggressively to push back.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

IAB Tech Lab\u2019s Anthony Katsur<\/p>\n

\u201c[In Australia] it\u2019s a blend,\u201d he said. \u201cSome licensing agreements have already been cut. Other publishers are still plotting out their strategy for how they want to approach the LLMs, which isn\u2019t too dissimilar to what I\u2019m seeing in the US.\u201d<\/p>\n

Enjoying Mumbrella? Sign up for our free daily newsletter.<\/a><\/p>\n

On the technical front, Katsur described blocking measures as a \u201cbit of cat and mouse,\u201d but stressed they are not hugely difficult. Major edge-compute platforms such as Fastly, Akamai, Cloudflare and Cloudfront, along with tools like Datadome, can block known and unnamed LLM crawlers.<\/p>\n

For Katsur, the challenge is more business than technical.<\/p>\n

Publishers will need to rethink metrics and monetisation models for AI-era content. He warned that many current approaches, such as charging per crawl, \u201cdon\u2019t scale and aren\u2019t viable long-term.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to Katsur, this structural approach will reflect a publisher\u2019s contractual agreement with any LLM, while tracking \u201chow that content is accessed, how that content is tiered from a pricing perspective and, most importantly, how publishers can measure how that content is used and how it manifests itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said the framework will apply both to what he terms a \u201cclassic chat response,\u201d such as ChatGPT, as well as new browsers like OpenAI\u2019s Atlas.<\/a><\/p>\n

Despite the rise of LLMs, Katsur remains somewhat optimistic, noting that a \u201chealthy scepticism\u201d will keep consumers returning to the media source.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you are a quality media company that has scale, I think it\u2019s going to be a rocky road, but I think it\u2019ll be fun,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The head of the IAB Tech Lab has urged Australian media owners to join forces and collectively block…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":294540,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,169131,254,255,64,63,169132,8393,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-294539","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-anthony-katsur","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-artificialintelligence","12":"tag-au","13":"tag-australia","14":"tag-iab-tech-lab","15":"tag-llm","16":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294539"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294539\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/294540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}