During the INMA Los Angeles Innovation Study Tour last week, I had one of those big ah-ha moments when speaking with a large AI company. 

We were debating search and what news publishers would get out of it this particular answer engine, which largely boiled down to traffic for most. The new AI-driven search engines hold much more of an answer onsite, with attribution links which may give more qualified traffic as consumers may want to dig deeper or see more context — or they could well have already answered the question. 

For the sake of this discussion, let’s assume the former is true: New organisations will get less but more qualified traffic. There will therefore be a handoff from the answer engine to a news organisation site. 

We can also make the logical assumption that hardware and software both point to this: Audio is on the rise and this will be accelerated with AI-enabled hardware and software. 

What does the handoff on audio look like? 

It’s hard to see how an audio answer can naturally switch to one of our two biggest audio outputs: podcasts and narrated articles. The easiest and most likely output is a link sent to a device to specific audio. But the number of people who are likely to follow-up when it means a switch of medium are greatly reduced. The traffic benefit simply isn’t there.

To be clear, it‘s very very easy now to make audio content from written text. Many news organisations use Elevan Labs, and there are a myriad of other companies offering similar services. It’s also becoming easier and easier to create podcasts from published content. Check out this podcast I created on this newsletter in approximately five minutes using Notebook LM. 

But in these instances, where is the benefit to the original content creator? There is no traffic benefit to be had. 

Therefore we either need to figure out new audio products that can fit into this environment or create a robust monetisation method based on content used. 

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