[ad_1]
Microsoft introduced another way for publishers to monetize artificial intelligence this week. And, despite being early days on the buzzy new tech, it’s had a lukewarm response from publishers.
With the ads for chat API for publishers, apps and online services, a publisher can add chatbot technology to their website—either from Microsoft or another company—and Microsoft will power ad monetization within the chat, the company announced.
Relationships between tech firms and publishers, already tense, have become even more fraught with the rise of generative AI. Increasingly, tech powers Microsoft and Google are integrating the tech into their search engines and other products.
Publishers fear that AI will scrape their content without compensation, and that chatbots will limit traffic to their websites if the search experience of a list of links becomes obsolete.
Against this contentious backdrop, Microsoft’s new publisher-oriented tool is a bit of an olive branch.
“Given the time to market that we’ve had over the last three months, the scale that we’ve already had, we are learning a lot about how to effectively integrate ads into a helpful organic flow,” said Kya Sainsbury-Carter, corporate vice president of Microsoft Advertising, told a room of reporters last week. “Bringing that to our publishers is something we feel good about.”
Microsoft, which also recently clarified how advertising works in its new AI-powered Bing and released new product updates, is working with a few partners to test the tool, which it wouldn’t name. The economic model will likely be some form of revenue sharing, Sainsbury-Carter said.
Publishing sources who spoke to Adweek were not particularly enthusiastic about the tool, given that generative AI still has copyright and accuracy risks that publishers are wary to take on. Moreover, if AI does remake the internet in its image, the utility of website-based widgets may be limited.
“Assuming this becomes a dominant paradigm as to how people experience digital media … people aren’t going to be on your webpage to see the [chatbot],” said Brian Morrissey, author of newsletter The Rebooting. “The whole point is to get around going to various webpages.”
