THAT'S A WRAP #8

HAPPY FRIDAY! Please enjoy this week's serving of tasty news morsels.

PUBLISHER EVENTS INCREASE REVENUES AND ADD PERKS FOR SUBSCRIBERS

Events made up 30% of digital media startup Semafor’s revenue in 2022. The company, whose founders list Bloomberg CEO, BuzzFeed News editor-in-chief, and New York Times media columnist on their combined CVs, appears to be doubling down on this strategy with an invite-only star-studded event to be held in New York next month, among others that are open for registration.?

Meanwhile, El País’s subscribers-only book club hosts monthly events with the author of the book being read by the group. Members are able to enter a raffle for 20 coveted tickets, while the rest can access the livestream on Facebook. The next event will be a discussion of the Julius Caesar biography Roma soy yo with the author Santiago Posteguillo, hosted by FNAC in Valencia on March 30th.?

#publishingevents #eventmarketing

ALL IS FAIR IN LOVE AND AI

The U.S. Copyright Office announced it is investigating the use of copyrighted materials in AI training. OpenAI cites fair use in response to questions about the fairness and legality of AI tools scraping publisher content for its chatbot, noting that it will pay for content when appropriate. One example of this is a licensing agreement with Shutterstock, which in turn created a fund to compensate artists who contributed to training the AI.?

Should publishers press for similar licensing deals, a la Google Showcase? Is there any deal that can make up for the loss in search traffic that conversational chatbots portend? Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella noted that many don't realize “everything on Bing Chat is clickable.” Nor does anyone know if users will want to click on these contextual links, once they realize they can.

On the other end of the spectrum, it appears the founder of investigative journalism site Bellingcat got himself banned from Midjourney, an AI image generator, for tweeting a slew of images showing Donald Trump’s arrest and life in prison. When the tweets went viral, Midjourney banned the word “arrest”.?

#AI #chatGPT #contentlicensing

SAD WORDS IN HEADLINES GENERATE CLICKS

An “unusually rich dataset” analyzed titles from the viral content generator Upworthy to conclude that negative words in headlines generate a positive effect (in terms of clicks) and vice versa. Negative words correlate to an increase in clicks of about 2.3%, according to the study, which analyzed approx. 5.7 million clicks in total. It looked at which emotions headlines triggered, with sadness having the most significantly relevant effect. Overall, the effect of negative emotions was shown to decrease over time as Upworthy, founded in 2012, and similar sites’ sensational headlines ultimately created a certain wariness for so-called clickbait.?

#viralcontent #clickbait

...and that's a wrap!