AI is rewriting publisher economics and legacy monetisation won’t survive it, say experts

New Delhi: As digital newsrooms navigate shrinking yields, shifting discovery patterns, and the accelerating integration of artificial intelligence into content consumption, a central question looms large: what will the next engine of publisher revenue look like?

The discussion, moderated by Puneet Jain, CEO of HT Digital, featured Toshit Panigrahi of TollBit, Gowthaman Ragothaman of Saptharushi, Marcus Pousette from Magnite, Aaron Rigby of Taboola, and Bharat Gupta, Founder of ToBe and former CEO of Jagran New Media.

Spanning conversations on AI-led licensing, supply-path optimisation, contextual intelligence, performance-led native models and the growing premium on credibility, the exchange pointed to a structural shift: publishers can no longer rely on legacy monetisation logic in a marketplace being reshaped by machines, data ownership and trust signals.

AI licensing: revenue hope or slow burn?

The session opened with a direct question: will AI-driven monetisation, whether via advertising or licensing, deliver meaningful revenue for publishers in the next 12 months? 

The mood ranged from cautious to optimistic.

Toshit Panigrahi offered the most bullish take. “Our goal is to try to get publishers paid. It is not aspirational. I think it is essential for that zero-click world,” he said, pointing to tangible payouts already happening across TollBit’s network. What began as “thousands of dollars” earlier in the year, he said, has scaled to “hundreds of thousands in aggregate".

For Panigrahi, AI is not merely a copyright debate, it is a new audience. “You have many ways to monetise your human visitors. You have nothing to monetise your AI audience. It's a new audience. It's a different value exchange. It's a different tech stack altogether.”

His framing was simple but profound: publishers must stop thinking about AI as theft and start thinking about it as traffic, albeit non-human traffic. “Human attention has a limit. Bots don't do that. The net amount of content access in the world is about to explode because bots don't get tired.”

Licensing, in his view, must therefore evolve into structured, recurring access, particularly in retrieval and grounding use cases, priced dynamically on four variables: brand, paywall status, uniqueness, and freshness.

Others were more measured. The broader consensus: licensing may deliver revenue, but institutional frameworks, negotiation maturity, and market standardisation are still evolving. The opportunity is real, but not yet systematised.

The biggest leak in programmatic? Commoditisation

If AI is a new revenue frontier, programmatic remains the current battlefield  and according to Marcus Pousette, publishers are fighting the wrong war.

“The single biggest value leak is the commoditisation of the environment,” he said bluntly. In a system where impressions are traded like interchangeable goods, price inevitably wins over quality.

Pousette believes that the long arc of digital is clear: “All advertising will become digital. I believe that all digital advertising will become programmatic.” That inevitability, however, does not mean publishers must surrender to commoditised pricing.

Instead, he called for active curation and demand-path control. Premium publishers must package their trusted environments intentionally and take them to agencies as differentiated offerings. “If you don't define your market for you, I think the algorithms will.”

The warning is pointed. Programmatic infrastructure is machine-to-machine, but value creation is not. Without assertive positioning, premium journalism risks being flattened into anonymous supply.

Context and collaboration in an AI-first stack

Gowthaman Ragothaman approached the challenge from two structural lenses: context and collaboration.

“AI is all about context,” he said. Without richer signals and sharper audience inputs, publishers cannot command better yields. Contextual intelligence must go beyond keywords to deep behavioural and first-party layers.

But context alone is insufficient. The more uncomfortable truth is cost.

“Programmatic is expensive,” Ragothaman noted. “It's expensive for advertisers. It's expensive for publishers because you're going to give away at least a part of your CPM to the technology infrastructure.”

His solution borrows from telecom history. Just as telcos collaborated on tower infrastructure to reduce capital intensity, news publishers may need shared technological frameworks. A collective infrastructure, he argued, could accelerate adoption while protecting margins.

In a fragmented open web competing against scaled platforms, scale through collaboration may be the only rational path.

Native and performance: from clicks to outcomes

While infrastructure debates continue, performance dollars are already dominant. Aaron Rigby described how native advertising has evolved from click-chasing to outcome-delivery.

Through Taboola’s newer performance models, algorithms now optimise for advertiser-defined objectives, whether test drives, first deposits, or other measurable conversions, rather than mere traffic.

“It could be a click. It could be a test drive. It could be the first dollars on the platform,” he said.

The shift matters for publishers. Outcome-based buying rewards those with deeply understood audiences, even if those audiences are smaller. “We’re seeing outcome-based campaigns performing significantly better when publishers have a much smaller audience… but they have a very deep understanding of how that audience is engaged.”

As roughly 70% of digital ad spend leans toward performance, the implication is clear: publishers must build conversion-ready ecosystems, not just reach engines.

“Understand your valued audience and build on it,” Rigby advised.

Trust as the next currency

If AI threatens attribution and content is increasingly remixed, what anchors value? For Bharat Gupta, the answer is trust.

“The volume of content which is getting produced is so tremendous that it's becoming increasingly difficult for end users to trust what they touch,” he observed, warning of a “trust-deficit economy".

In such an environment, mere brand presence is insufficient. Verification, compliance, and transparent sourcing must become structural layers within publishing operations.

“Until and unless it can be verified, it cannot be trusted,” he said. “I truly feel that in this dynamic world, trust will be the new currency.”

That currency, however, requires investment, credibility frameworks, compliance standards, and auditable signals that distinguish journalism from synthetic noise. If commoditisation is the enemy in programmatic, trust may be the differentiator.