- The Trade Desk’s publication The Current is placing its content behind a registration wall
- Warning signs are sounding for AI-generated content
- Consumers say they’re open to paying for brand content
The Current raises a registration wall
The Trade Desk’s ambitious digital marketing publication, The Current, has begun placing content behind a registration wall. Readers are required to register with TTD’s OpenPass single-sign-on service to unlock portions of content, granting it access to their email address and the ability to track them across other OpenPass sites in the process.
While some content is locked behind a hard registration wall, other stories remain free to read but include prompts asking users to register to gain access to an “unlimited number of its most premium content.” What constitutes “premium” content isn’t clear.
The risks of AI-generated content
Last week’s news about Sports Illustrated’s purported use of AI in the production of a series of articles that were attributed to people who do not exist should serve as a stark reminder to any brand publishers dabbling AI-generated content that they should tread carefully.
Some have argued that brands are more likely to gravitate toward AI-generated content, partly because audiences are likelier to forgive lapses in quality because they hold brands to a lower standard than they do other publishers.
But the data suggest this may not be true. In this new information landscape, consumers are increasingly holding brand publishers to the same standards as “traditional” publishers. Audiences may turn to brands for slightly different types of content, but they still expect it to be well-written, authoritative and factual.
A study of 1,007 U.S. digital content consumers we conducted last month found that 36% trust content published by brands more than content from traditional media organizations – including TV news, newspapers, magazines or online news sites. Only 26% said they trust brand content less than they do content published by media companies. The rest – 38% – said they were unsure. It’s possible for brands to produce high-quality content that audiences actually are willing to consume. It also suggests that brands can produce content audiences trust.
The competitive advantage for anyone creating content on the Internet is new ideas, new information and new research – everything AI can’t do. Melanie Marcus, CMO at Surescripts, put it well: “AI generated brand content, assuming you’re reviewing it with a human eye and you’ve got an editorial perspective, is useful and good. But it cannot take the place of freshly generated research. I worry about it replacing new information and ideas.”
Consumers say they are open to paying for brand content
A growing number of brands are now exploring ways to directly monetize their content, and new research from Toolkits and National Research Group suggests that a large portion of consumers would consider paying to access it.
In a survey of 1,007 digital content consumers, 86% of respondents said they’re open to paying for at least one type of branded content.
Sixty-three percent of respondents said they would be open to paying for TV, video, and film content produced by brands, while 53% said they would consider paying for live event content.
Considering paying for content and actually doing so are two vastly different things, of course, but the data does imply that some consumers would pay for brand-produced content provided it’s compelling enough.
The content that consumers said they’d least consider paying for were email newsletters, opinion pieces, and memes or humor content.
New magazine from the A.Team
On-demand tech talent marketplace A.Team launched a print magazine. Published quarterly, BuildMode covers the future of work and its intersection with generative AI. The company also recently launched a weekly newsletter, and in an editor’s note, Benjy Hansen-Bundy writes that it’ll be “considered, researched and reported.”
The company has also been organizing a variety of AI-related events, most recently an AI and Future of Work conference in New York City.