Who's blocking AI bots and who's not | Future buys beauty brand for £40m

Hello from the team at Press Gazette on Thursday, 22 January.

Here’s our daily round-up of media news, brought to you this week in association with Wordpress VIP.

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🚫 New research shared with Press Gazette reveals today that eight out of ten the world’s leading news publishers have taken steps to block AI crawlers.

Among sites that block crawling by all generative AI companies are the BBC, The New York Times and Daily Mail.

The reason why they do it is, according to Telegraph SEO director Harry Clarkson-Bennett, because “there’s almost no value exchange”. The AI companies are, in other words, purely parasitical in their dealings with most news publishers.

Most bona fide companies respect the robot.txt protocol, but there are clearly ways around it. I’ve been in correspondence this week with a company that claims not to scrape Press Gazette but has published AI-generated articles based on information that only we have reported (including exact exclusively-sourced quotes).

Halting the theft of journalism without recompense to feed AI-written content is going to be a herculean task. But it is a war we must win, otherwise the financial incentives for original reporting will disappear.

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💷 1.6 billion is my number of the day. This is the amount in £ that Future plc has spent on acquisitions over the last decade to create a company whose total market value currently stands at just over £500m.

I totted up the total value of Future plc’s decade-long buying spree as it announced this morning the purchase of fashion/beauty brand and social media marketing company Sheerluxe for £40m.

It signals a big move into the creator-led social media advertising market for Future. And it has prompted a reasonable bump in the company’s share price.

Hopefully, it finally marks a turnaround in fortunes for a company that is currently worth far less than the sum of its many parts.

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⚖️ And Prince Harry took the stand yesterday during his privacy trial versus the Daily Mail.

Harry said the Mail has made his wife’s life “an absolute misery” and described appearing in court as “a horrible experience”.

His cross-examination was limited to just two hours. Harry’s legal team saw this as a vindication of his performance and his case.

In reality, the case rests not on the testimony of Prince Harry but on the activities of his legal research team and the various private investigators they have interviewed.

The real popcorn moment for me will come when editor-in-chief Paul Dacre takes the stand. Eight more weeks to go.