Microsoft will pay publishers for content featured in Copilot Daily, a new feature of its cross-platform assistant powered by Copilot AI.
Copilot Daily, announced Tuesday along with other Copilot upgrades, provides users with an audio summary of the weather and current events. Alexa and Google Assistant have long offered similar daily summaries, but Microsoft describes the effort as “an antidote to the familiar feeling of information overload.”
“Clean, simple, and easy to digest, Copilot Daily pulls only from approved content sources,” Microsoft wrote in a blog post, adding that reminders and customization options will be added over time.
Reuters, Axel Springer, Hearst Magazines and the Financial Times have signed up to Copilot Daily, and at launch it will only be available in the US and UK. Microsoft hasn't disclosed how much it's paying publishers or other terms of the deal, but it said it plans to add more publishers and expand Copilot Daily to new countries “soon.”
Microsoft has been rewarding publishers for years in the form of content licensing agreements on the MSN platform. But until now, these licensing agreements did not cover the company's AI products.
Copilot Daily screen on Windows. Image credit: Microsoft
None of Copilot Daily's publisher partners responded to TechCrunch's requests for comment at the time of publication.
The partnership is also intended to help some AI vendors, including OpenAI, Perplexity, and even Apple, accept payment agreements to defend claims that their AI tools infringe on copyrighted works. It was held at a time when Many of the deals will provide AI vendors with much-needed data to train their models. According to some estimates, the market for AI training data could grow to nearly $30 billion within 10 years.
Perplexity recently began sharing ad revenue with publishers, with its AI-powered search tools surfacening articles in response to queries. Meanwhile, OpenAI licenses content from publishers such as Condé Nast, Time, NewsCorp, Vox Media, and The Associated Press.
Some publishers, writers and unions have criticized the structure of these deals, saying they undervalue journalism. For context, OpenAI's junior checks reportedly range from $1 million to $5 million annually. Others pointed to their poor execution. As of June, OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot was generating links to news partner articles, but it wasn't working.
But the news industry is in desperate need of a break.
The industry could be on track to shed 10,000 jobs this year, according to Fast Company. That's an improvement over last year, when more than 21,400 journalism jobs were cut, but the outlook isn't exactly bright.
Many factors are contributing to the decline, from slower growth in advertising budgets to inflation (which is hurting subscription prices). The struggle to find sustainable business models has not been helped by big tech companies either. In addition to AI-generated search summaries, changes to search and feed algorithms reduced traffic to news sites.
Experts say technology is training people to expect free content (nearly half of U.S. residents get their news from social media) and increasing their share of ad spend at the expense of publishers. claims. Approximately 60% of global advertising spend is currently concentrated in Big Tech companies such as Google and Meta. According to one study, broadcasters lose nearly $2 billion in ad revenue annually to Google and Meta's platforms.