“Frankly, there is no one silver bullet platform,” says Abi Watson, senior media analyst at Enders Analysis. “There has been a huge proliferation of platforms and changes where people spend their time online.”
“Google’s monopoly over search is an obvious risk,” says Watson, while “longer-term risk of an AI-enabled search engine that cuts publishers out entirely is an existential risk.” Google has reportedly begun paying some smaller publishers to test an AI tool that lets them scrape other news sites’ content and aggregate it into a new article, a practice that a news industry executive called “potentially troubling.”
“The benefit of LinkedIn is that it has some aligned incentives with publishers. LinkedIn wants to become the centre of people’s online professional life, rather than a platform they visit during a job search,” says Watson.