ChatGPT-Bard: Change in search landscape denting digital publishers’ ad revenue?

With people shifting to AI-chatbots for their queries, referral traffic from Search towards news websites is declining, say industry players

by Kanchan Srivastava
Published - February 15, 2023
4 minutes To Read
ChatGPT-Bard: Change in search landscape denting digital publishers’ ad revenue?

Microsoft-backed ChatGPT hasn’t only impacted Google Search but Indian publishers as well who are at loggerheads with Google to get a fair share in the latter’s digital advertising revenue. 

Publishers have already started feeling the pinch due to the rising popularity of three-month-old ChatGPT. Recently launched Bard which is still in its beta version has the potential to make things worse for publishers. 

Karnani says, “Chatbots will surely impact referral traffic and ad revenue. We are all eagerly waiting to see their evolution.”

Gyan Gupta, a digital leader, who is currently Chief Product, Technology and Growth Officer at Bada Business and has earlier worked with Dainik Bhaskar Digital, echoes the sentiments.

“Ad revenue model may not be sustainable in near future. Like global publications, Indian publications will also have to focus their energies on earning revenue through subscription," Gupta remarked.

"News sites haven't been impacted by ChatGPT," says Pradeep Gairola, VP & Business Head - Digital, The Hindu Group. He, however, says, "AI-powered chatbots have the potential to change the entire search landscape. If you go to the very crux of why people search, you will realize that a lot of it is aimed to find answers. In many such use cases, the search process is inefficient, as the user has to first search then study many results that are displayed and then finally get the answers. AI tools can remove this inefficiency and provide the answers directly. So a lot of search that is aimed at finding answers may move to AI tools over a period of time.”

Content websites as footnotes? 

Clicks and traffic to most of the content sites will come down by 40 per cent soon, SEO and digital experts warn. 

Interestingly, chatGPT collects information from the internet itself while answering the questions. Most of its answers are allegedly sourced from news websites only. 

Bing chat mentions them as footnotes which will impact their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs), which has further angered the publishers. It takes multiple hops to reach the website in the chatGPT-powered Bing. Experts are expecting a similar experience in Bard-AI as well. 

“Not only news sites, but sports, travel and other domains and even Wikipedia will also be affected as chatbot makers have not invested in content creation. They are picking information from other digital platforms at no cost and presenting them as their chatbot’s answers. This is unfair to content producers,” says Sandeep Amar, digital expert and founder of pdlab.me. 

DNPA concerned

Sujata Gupta, secretary general of India’s Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA), a body comprising leading print and television media companies, said, “Too early to say, but looking at the initial outcomes from these tools, there is a very high possibility that there will be a significant disruption in the search and content discovery space.”

“Search business, which is the world's leading ad revenue driver and accounts for the largest share of Google ad revenues, is all set to face disruption perhaps for the first time ever in the last couple of decades,” Gupta said. 

She added, “It's too early to say how user behaviour will pan out and if sufficient user mass will move away from traditional search engines to conversational AI tools like ChatGPT. But either way it will need credible content generated by the news media to answer user queries.” 

Currently AI tools do not show the source of information, so journalists and other researchers who write well researched content pieces may have issues with the answers provided by AI tools, she noted. 

Bing getting popular 

Google pocketed Rs 25,000 crore from digital advertising in India alone in FY22. India’s overall digital ad revenue has been growing consistently so far with Google having the lion’s share of about 70 per cent. 

However, with the entry of ChatGPT, things have changed suddenly. Bing’s search jumped 10x in Apple phones. Google lost hefty revenue after gaffes emerged in the hastily launched Bard’s preview video.  

The emergence of ChatGPT and Bard is unlikely to affect the search engine results or the digital ad revenue much, says Sanjay Sehgal, Chairman & CEO at MSys Technologies, Venture & Angel Investor, Philanthropist. 

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