Content Aware media news: July 25, 2024

Mums on the warpath, fighting fashion, and paywalls for robots - all in this week's Content Aware weekly newsletter.

Published: 18:04, 25 July 2024

Last updated: 18:54, 25 July 2024

The cookie tastes like ****
As Glide's true thinker Corbidge takes a well earned break, GPP rent-a-quote Richard steps in with thoughts on the Google Privacy Sandbox reverse ferret extraordinaire. It's the bait and switch of the decade for advertisers, but will it usher in the end of Google as we know it?
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Mum's the word
OpenAI may have had its hands full with the New York Times case that pitches content makers against content takers, but it has a new enemy: 9 million British mums. After an attempt to play nice, UK site Mumsnet are going to law after finding fairly convincing signs that OpenAI ripped off some or all of its billions of words of content. Ricky Sutton re-dons his journo hat to interview Mumsnet CEO Justine Roberts.
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Haute couture vs hot manure
Conde Nast have slapped content-users Perplexity.ai with a cease-and-desist to stop using CN content to generate responses for their AI search engine, accusing them of plagiarism. The accusations renewed criticism from content creators, and shed more light on the broader issue of AI thievery and scraping content without permission.
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Paywalls for robots
As media firms struggle to work out just who is pinching their content and who isn't, this video podcast looks at the rise of new tools to act as paywalls against AI scrapers - handy since we know they can happily ignore your robots.txt instructions.
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The simplest is often the best
And how else do you find out who's taken your work? Sometimes, it can be as simple as searching for it in AI itself.
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Time for the good AI
INMA's Sonali Verma highlights AI's widespread use in newsrooms for tedium-reducing tasks, stressing the need for human oversight will continue. Her advice is to start small, show value quickly, and establish guidelines and teams. Alternatively of course - speak to us! Glide can tell you about our approach to Augmentative Intelligence and how it is having immediate, positive impact.
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It's just the way Google cookie crumbles
Google's reversal on eliminating third-party cookies sparked various reactions both in the publishing industry as well as digital advertising. Much like the clunkfest that was the rollout of GA4, Google seems to have lost the ability to cook up decent products that work for people other than Google. Both industries have expressed uncertainty about what this decision will bring, on top of ongoing challenges in balancing privacy and ad strategies. For publishers that have made significant investments in advance, this will leave a sour taste (that's enough ed.) at a time when the budgets could have been used elsewhere.
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Have you Reddit about this SEO trick?
Reddit seems today to have blocked all crawlers via their robots.txt file. If you search for site:reddit.com on Bing and order by the last 24 hours, nothing appears. If you do the same thing on Google, results aplenty. This either means Google is ignoring robots.txt, or they are populating their search results directly as part of their $60m deal with reddit for AI training. One to keep an eye on.

G, Thanks
Use Google shorteners for URLs and links? The goo.gl URL shortening service is being shut in just over a year, meaning billions of URLs will turn into 404s. Start planning now if you lean on the service.
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