“Leaked Deck Reveals How OpenAI Is Pitching Publisher Partnerships: OpenAI’s Preferred Publisher Program Offers Media Companies Licensing Deals”, 2024-05-09 ():
…The [OA] Preferred Publisher Program has 5 primary components, according to the deck.
First, it is available only to “select, high-quality editorial partners”, and its purpose is to help ChatGPT users more easily discover and engage with publishers’ brands and content.
Additionally, members of the program receive priority placement and “richer brand expression” in chat conversations, and their content benefits from more prominent link treatments. Finally, through PPP, OpenAI also offers licensed financial terms to publishers.
The financial incentives participating publishers can expect to receive are grouped into two buckets: guaranteed value and variable value.
Guaranteed value is a licensing payment that compensates the publisher for allowing OpenAI to access its backlog of data, while variable value is contingent on display success, a metric based on the number of users engaging with linked or displayed content.
The resulting financial offer would combine the guaranteed and variable values into one payment, which would be structured on an annual basis.
“The PPP program is more about scraping than training”, said one executive. “OpenAI has presumably already ingested and trained on these publishers’ archival data, but it needs access to contemporary content to answer contemporary queries.”
In return for these payments, OpenAI would gain two benefits.
It would have the ability to train on a publisher’s content and the license to display that information in ChatGPT products, complete with attribution and links. It would also get to announce the publisher as a preferred partner and work with them to build out these experiences.
…PPP members will see their content receive its “richer brand expression” through a series of content display products: the branded hover link, the anchored link and the in-line treatment.
In the hover treatment, which is available today, OpenAI will hyperlink keywords in its responses to search queries. The links appear as blue text and reveal a clickable tab when moused over.
In the anchor treatment, branded, clickable buttons appear below ChatGPT’s response to a user query. And the in-line product inserts a pull-quote into the text of ChatGPT’s response, whose font is larger and includes a clickable, branded link.
All 3 content display products seek to cite the publishers whose writing is being used to answer the search query, although the setup will likely lead fewer users to visit publishers’ websites.
A recent model from The Atlantic found that if a search engine like Google were to integrate AI into search, it would answer a user’s query 75% of the time without requiring a clickthrough to its website.