Inside Bloomberg Media’s survival guide for the AI era

Indeed, the AI compensation model for publishers seems to be shifting toward usage-based payments that are more recurrent compared to the lump-sum licensing deals for AI companies to train on publisher’s data. “It’s a fairer, hopefully recurring-based model. I’m not sure it’s the end-all, be-all for publishers,” Saltser said.

Fair. But is it enough to get Bloomberg to the negotiating table?

“It’s fair enough for us to have conversations. We are thinking about AI and how we run out business in slightly different ways than licensing being a big part of it at the moment,” said Saltser.

Bloomberg has the benefit of its subscription and advertising businesses continuing to grow, lessening the near-term pressure for revenue from the AI companies. The publisher’s paid subscriber base has grown by 16% this year to “just under 670,000 subscribers,” Saltser said. Meanwhile, its advertising revenue has increased by 6%.

And on that note, Bloomberg is using AI to give its business a boost. Case in point: Roughly a month ago, it relaunched its on-site search engine to be powered by AI and has recorded a 15% increase in people using its on-site search engine as well as a 15% increase in click-through rate. Those stats don’t directly contribute into revenue, but they do reinforce Bloomberg’s utility to its audience at a time when people are getting a lot of use out of ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews for accessing information they would otherwise visit publishers’ sites for.

“There really should be no better place to find the Bloomberg content, data, information that someone’s looking for than on our own site,” said Saltser, who noted that the publisher has not yet done much promotion or marketing of its new on-site search engine.

Same goes for Bloomberg’s introduction of AI summaries on its article pages. “It was really to give our subscribers the opportunity to actually consume more. So if they’re getting what they need from the bullets, great, they can go on to the next [article],” said Saltser. Bloomberg is evaluating the impact of the AI summaries — which are reviewed by human editors before publication — based on the number of pages people consume on its site and the active time the spend on the domain. And both metrics are up by high single-digit percentages, she said.

As for the advertising side of Bloomberg’s business, publisher has used AI to process its editorial videos for real-time contextual targeting. “So if an anchor is talking about luxury autos, we can quickly in the next ad break insert a Genesis ad,” Saltser said.

But there is one area of Bloomberg’s business that’s relatively insulated from AI impacts: live in-person events. “As you talk about AI, the direct relationship with the customer, whether that’s a subscriber or an attendee at an event, is even more critical going forward than it is today,” said Saltser. She added, “that has been a real growth engine for us and not powered by AI. It’s just powered by people.”