In the future, digital publishers could get run over by AI. In the present, they are deeply concerned about Google, and the prospect that the search giant is going to choke off their last reliable traffic stream.
That may explain why lots of publishers are making deals with OpenAI now -- and doing a lot of grousing about Google.
Ziff Davis CEO Vivek Shah is going the other way: he's one of only two big publishers to sue OpenAI (the other one is the New York Times) and he says his portfolio of sites would like more traffic from Google, but is confident things will work out.
Shah and Ziff Davis never got the attention some of their digital peers did a decade ago. On the flip side, they're still standing in 2025. So this is a POV worth paying attention to.
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