OpenAI has been promoting partnership opportunities to news publishers through its Preferred Publishers Program. This initiative began in July 2023 with a licensing agreement with the Associated Press. Other partnerships include Axel Springer, The Financial Times, Le Monde, Prisa, and Dotdash Meredith.
The Preferred Publisher Program is exclusive to select, high-quality editorial partners. Its goal is to facilitate the discovery and engagement of ChatGPT users with publishers’ brands and content. Members of the program enjoy priority placement and richer brand expression in chat conversations, and their content benefits from more prominent link treatments.
The financial incentives for participating publishers are divided into two categories: guaranteed value and variable value. Guaranteed value is a licensing payment that compensates the publisher for allowing OpenAI to access its backlog of data, while variable value is contingent on display success, a metric based on the number of users engaging with linked or displayed content.
In exchange for these payments, OpenAI gains the ability to train on a publisher’s content and the license to display that information in ChatGPT products, complete with attribution and links. It also gets to announce the publisher as a preferred partner.
The program is designed to create a better experience for OpenAI users and shift engagement toward browsing, i.e., queries that result in responses with links. About 25% of ChatGPT users already use the browse function, but the company expects that a majority of users will do so once the feature is broadly rolled out.
The relationship between digital publishers and OpenAI is complex due to the uncertain legal standing of the data-scraping methodology that OpenAI uses to power its large-language models. Some publishers, including The New York Times and eight Alden Global Capital titles, have sued OpenAI for using copyrighted articles without permission. However, OpenAI is looking to attract more publishers into their partnership program.
