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The advice show for creators that tells it like it is. Host Stephanie Woodin takes calls from web creators grappling with the big questions: burnout, branding, revenue, and keeping up with AI and SEO changes. Each episode, an expert guest or fellow creator joins Stephanie to answer your questions with research-backed, practical advice you can put to work in your own business.
Brought to you by Raptive, the full-service creator media company that empowers creators to turn their passions into thriving, profitable brands.
Do you have a question? Record yourself on video or audio, or write it up and email it to ctrlaltask@raptive.com. Anonymous questions are welcome!
Nate Hake:
These AI companies, we have something that they want as publishers. They want our content. In fact, they need our content. And without our information, these models really don't have economic value. The problem is us alone at Travel Lemming blocking the AI bots doesn't really make me feel like we have enough leverage, but maybe if we all acted together, we might have more leverage.
Stephanie Woodin:
Sometimes they're called AI bots, other times AI crawlers. Either way, these automated programs are scanning the web and scraping content from websites and often using that content to compete with the websites themselves. So, if you're a creator and you don't want to feed these AI bots your data, what can you do about it?
In this episode, we're hearing from a travel publisher who wants creators to take their power back, and I'm joined by Marc McCollum, Raptive's Chief Growth Officer. He's all about championing creators' rights and fighting for policies that protect their livelihoods. This is Ctrl Alt Ask, the advice show for creators. I'm your host, Stephanie Woodin. Marc McCollum, welcome to Ctrl Alt Ask.
Marc McCollum:
Love it. Happy to be here.
Stephanie Woodin:
Thanks so much for joining us. Before we begin, we always on the pod like to break the ice just a little bit to get our wheels turning on the topic, but also learn a little more about you. So, I'm just curious if you have ever in your schooling days, work days, had your work copied, and if so, if you could tell us a little bit about it.
Marc McCollum:
All right. I was not expecting we would start there.
Stephanie Woodin:
I know. Yeah.
Marc McCollum:
In fact, yes. When I was in college, I remember very clearly my freshman year I had a biology paper to write, which I wrote myself. And then, one of my suitemates, who I will remain nameless, but he may be out there listening to the pod, he literally took it off my word processor at the time, it was before I had a laptop, took it off my word processor and printed out the same one, just changing the name, turning it in. And we got caught and we both had to go into the dean of students' office at my university. And fortunately, justice prevailed and I was acquitted of all charges. But yeah, it was an awful feeling, awful feeling.
Stephanie Woodin:
It is. It's an awful feeling. I had that happen to me, I was accused of cheating on a summer assignment, but really I just talked to my girlfriend about ideas and then we went back and wrote our papers, but they were similar enough that we got flagged and it's an awful feeling. You feel a little bit icky, betrayed, all of the above.
Marc McCollum:
Yeah, you were like a human LLM before your time.
Stephanie Woodin:
Exactly. Perfect segue. We have a really interesting question from a creator today. So, without further ado, let's get into Nate's question.
Nate Hake:
I'm Nate Hake. I'm a recovering commercial litigation attorney, and in 2016 I left my job for what I thought would be a one-year sabbatical trip around the world. Went to 43 countries in that year. Along the way, bought a course from a travel blogger on how to become a travel blogger and started my travel blog called Travel Lemming. What was originally a solo travel blog has now grown and we provide travel advice, and I've just been so grateful for that journey to be able to really do what I love and I'm definitely living my dream.
So, the big wake-up moment for me, as I think it was for a lot of people, was when ChatGPT came out and so many of the initial use cases that people were putting forward was for travel advice, was for exactly the sort of things that we provide at Travel Lemming.
One of the things we do is we write itineraries. We have a local guide in Paris. She has written some wonderful itineraries that you can follow for your trip to Paris, but people were using these chatbots for basically doing the exact same thing. So, for me, that was really a wake-up moment of being like, "Wow, this is really competitive with exactly what we do," and that just made me super nervous.
So, as I started to learn more about how these AI companies work, one of the things I learned that there's the whole issue of them training the underlying models on our content, but they're also using our existing content to scrape and provide real-time information. They'll send the scraper, it'll pull from our site and in real time will help use that information for these competing travel itineraries.
And I learned that one thing you can do is that you can block bots, and it became really a game of whack-a-mole for me where I was trying to find all the different AI bots out there and put them all in our file to block them. I certainly am of the opinion that blocking is what makes a lot of sense, and that's been my own lived experience. I know many publishers who have a ton of search traffic and still block all these AI companies, but it does leave us with this perspective of these AI companies we have something that they want as publishers. They want our content.
In fact, they need our content, and without our information, these models really don't have economic value. The problem is that if they don't scrape our Paris itinerary, there's a hundred other sites out there that also have Paris itineraries. And so, simply us alone at Travel Lemming blocking the AI bots, doesn't really make me feel like we have enough leverage, but maybe if we all acted together, we might have more leverage.
So, I guess my question is how should publishers think about whether and when to block AI bots and how can we participate collectively in putting pressure on these companies so that they give us the sort of economic model and remuneration that we need in order to really incentivize the kind of content that we all want to keep producing. How can we take action steps now that will help ensure that our business models are still around as the web transitions to this AI feature.
Stephanie Woodin:
Wow.
Marc McCollum:
Wow.
Stephanie Woodin:
First of all, Nate-
Marc McCollum:
Great question.
Stephanie Woodin:
I know. It's such a good question and I just want to thank Nate because he's not just thinking about himself, he's thinking about the collective and the creators at large and what this means for his entire community. So that's something we'll get into later, but as we talk about bots and really this topic today, I thought we could take a step back for a second Marc and really delve into what exactly Nate's talking about, which are AI crawlers or if that's even the right word?
Marc McCollum:
It's something that sounds a bit technical. It's actually not. It's pretty straightforward. Crawlers and sometimes called bots, it's pretty interchangeable in this context. It's essentially automated programs that scan websites to collect information, and Google has been doing this for a couple of decades now to scan sites, to index specific pages for search, and that is legitimate and it's beneficial.
So, not all crawlers or bots are bad, but that's essentially the definition. What's happened as Nate so eloquently called out is that AI companies are now deploying their own crawlers not to index like Google had done originally with its search crawler, but to harvest content, and that content is used to train and power their models. So, these crawlers essentially visit websites like Travel Lemming. They copy the text, they copy the images, they copy the metadata, and they feed that content into their large language model.
Stephanie Woodin:
And it's funny to mention just the Google search of it all because that is a mutually beneficial relationship for creators. What it sounds like now is it's gone into a direction that the crawler is going into a creator site scraping training off of what they have there, but there's no mutually beneficial at that stage for a creator. And so, I think that's where this fear from creators is coming in. And so, what do you feel are really those big fears coming through and is there misinformation and should they be so fearful?
Marc McCollum:
Well, you start off the question, Stephanie, by suggesting that it's not beneficial like search. And the truth is these crawlers from AI companies could be beneficial...
Stephanie Woodin:
Could be.
Marc McCollum:
... if the AI company were paying the creator to come in and scrape their site. So, I want to be clear about that because in many cases with larger media companies, they are. So, they are paying many media companies licensing fee to be able to extract their content for the purposes of training their models and using their content in their answers.
Stephanie Woodin:
Very good distinction. Yes, I appreciate that.
Marc McCollum:
And our goal, and we'll get into this, I'm sure as the conversation progresses, is that everyone who's creating high quality content on the internet deserves to be paid for it. And so, part of this entire game right now is essentially AI companies taking for free what we think they should be paying for.
Now, to your question about fears, there are some fears, and we heard a little bit from Nate and I hear it all the time from other creators in the Raptive network, the biggest fear is that blocking AI crawlers is going to tank traffic. And I think we hear that in two different ways.
One is around search traffic specifically and one is around traffic that would come from the various chatbots, like a ChatGPT. They're worried about if I block these crawlers, am I going to actually lose more traffic? And the answer is no. I can go through it one by one, but for Google, and bear with me, because this gets a little complicated, but I'll try to be brief, Google actually now-
Stephanie Woodin:
To our listeners, take out your pen and paper.
Marc McCollum:
Yeah, no, it's not that hard. Google now has two crawlers, one called Google Bot, which is for search, and the second one is called Google Extended, which is for Google's AI products. So, things like Google Gemini, and there are other AI products that they're rolling out. So, they have two separate crawlers.
If you block Google Extended, you are still able to have Google Bot index your site for search. So therefore, there's not a correlation between the two. And we've actually tested this among Raptive creators who have blocked Google extended, and we've seen that there's been no meaningful impact to search traffic coming from that.
Stephanie Woodin:
That's great.
Marc McCollum:
Now, Google's also doing something else that's a little sneaky, which is it's AI products that are a part of search like AI Overviews, which is the snippet that often appears at the top of search results, that is actually pulled from using Google Bot, the search crawler. So, if you want to appear in a search including AI Overviews, you have to keep that search crawler on, but you can turn off Google extended, which is the AI products crawler, and it will not impact your source traffic.
Stephanie Woodin:
That's really interesting to hear. So, it sounds like there's two sides of this that a creator might have the option to block certain bots, but others could be helpful and continue to help them get discovered. Are there other reasons that blocking crawlers should come into play? What are the other reasons that it would make sense for someone to block a crawler?
Marc McCollum:
I mean, it's very simple. No one is going to pay for something that they're getting for free.
Stephanie Woodin:
Exactly.
Marc McCollum:
So, if you, as a creator, have any desire today or in the future to make a case to any of the AI companies to pay for your content, then you have to stop giving it to them for free, which is what you're essentially doing if you are not using blockers today.
Now, some creators have thoughtfully gone through this calculus and decided that it's worth it for now to give it for free, and they believe that that's going to help them have more visibility in tools like ChatGPT. But what we're seeing is that referral traffic coming to creators' websites from ChatGPT, Perplexity, even things like Google Gemini is minuscule, minuscule across our Raptive network, and as a reminder, we have 6,000 websites that are a part of Raptive's network, so we can see a lot of data across the internet. Less than 0.2% is coming from AI platforms today, 0.2%...
Stephanie Woodin:
Wow.
Marc McCollum:
... compare that to 60 plus percent that comes from Google search. So, it's nowhere close. It's a tiny, tiny slice of a pie chart. So, for creators who are making the decision to not block and they're doing it in the name of getting more traffic, most of them are not seeing a meaningful increase in traffic. So, our encouragement is to continue to reevaluate that. Now, this could change over time. AI is a very dynamic space, but for now, there's no meaningful traffic coming, so we believe that creators should block.
Stephanie Woodin:
I was going to say, I think that's a really powerful point that maybe not all creators understand, which is how minuscule that traffic is. And when you're not getting paid for this content and they're training off of your site, I feel like this is a PSA. Everyone listened to Marc because that's such a small number for the trade-off of your content getting farmed for free.
I'm curious around the verticals because to Nate's question, he was talking about travel sites and obviously itineraries, people are going into ChatGPT to look for itineraries. I could see that travel would be very affected by that, but is this affecting all creator verticals right now? What are you seeing from your vantage point?
Marc McCollum:
Yeah, I don't think there's a vertical that's not been impacted by the rise of generative AI and Stephanie, across Raptive, we're AI optimists. We believe that AI can be a tool for good, and there's a lot of great benefits that have come to many of our creators and our own business from AI innovation.
Stephanie Woodin:
For sure.
Marc McCollum:
However, we just believe it needs to be done ethically and that creators deserve to be compensated for their IP and how it's being used. They should be giving consent and there should be clear citations back to their IP. Now, to your question on verticals, as I said, I think every vertical's been impacted. Travel has been particularly vulnerable as Nate has described, but I think pretty much any vertical that provides really useful information that people are going to go to a chatbot to discover or engage in has some level of vulnerability.
Stephanie Woodin:
Yeah, I think speaking of Nate's second question is that what can creators collectively do about it? Because you talked about if you're on your site, different ways you can block, but as a collective speaking up about this issue, feels like a step that has to come next in order for real action to be taken in the industry. And I know we're just at the beginning stages of all of this, but what could creators collectively do about it? That might be an existential question, but one that I'd love to answer.
Marc McCollum:
It's existential, but it's also practical. I mean, as you said, actively blocking the AI crawlers signals collective resistance. So, there are millions of websites on the internet of those, we know that there's at least 100,000 creator websites on the internet. And it's clear to us the more that group of creators operates as a block and blocks the more leverage that they're going to have for fair compensation deals. And as I said a moment ago, and I'll probably repeat again by the end of the podcast, nobody's going to pay you for something that they're getting for free today.
And so, you can look at that on an individual side level, but also across the content ecosystem. And all of the big media companies have either blocked the crawlers or have licensing deals. None of them are giving their content away for free.
Stephanie Woodin:
Wasn't the New York Times early on in that and saying, "We have to strike a deal here?"
Marc McCollum:
So, the New York Times, in particular, is actually suing OpenAI. They're one of several lawsuits that they were watching closely, but in order to have any standing in a lawsuit, they had turned on their blockers very early at the very beginning so that it was clear that OpenAI, in that case, was violating their request in terms of service.
Stephanie Woodin:
With the lawsuits, are there other class action lawsuits? You mentioned the big media companies, but for creators on Nate's level, is that a possibility?
Marc McCollum:
So, to answer that question, let me just run through quickly the key lawsuits that are out there...
Stephanie Woodin:
Great.
Marc McCollum:
... that we all, as an industry, need to be watching. So, one of them is New York Times versus OpenAI, and Microsoft is also a defendant. That was the first one to go out. It is clearly squarely about this issue of LLM's copyrighted materials for their own commercial purpose. Ziff Davis, another media company, has also lost its own lawsuit against OpenAI, and The Authors Guild, which is book authors, have also launched the same against OpenAI. So that's underway.
Stephanie Woodin:
Wow.
Marc McCollum:
The second one is Penske Media, which owns brands like the Hollywood Reporter, Rolling Stone and some others, they are suing Google, and they're suing Google for exactly the same thing that we were just talking about, which is leveraging their content without paying for it in both search and in their other AI products. By the way, I was quoted in the complaint that Penske filed against Google referencing the experience that Raptive creators have had...
Stephanie Woodin:
Wow.
Marc McCollum:
... as evidence that this is an industry-wide issue.
Stephanie Woodin:
That's huge.
Marc McCollum:
The final lawsuit is the News Media Alliance versus Cohere. Cohere is a very small AI company that's been doing some what seems to be pretty explicit plagiarism of copyrighted materials. So, the News Media Alliance is the trade group that represents media companies, including newspapers and magazines across the US. You'll notice what I did not mention is anything about creators and lawsuits.
Stephanie Woodin:
Right. I was about to ask.
Marc McCollum:
And so, that was the core of your question. Right now, there are no active lawsuits that include creators. I'll share that here at Raptive. We've explored that extensively. And for a number of reasons have come to the conclusion that with these five lawsuits that I just mentioned, the ideal outcome is for those to ultimately reach a verdict in favor of the media company, which would create precedent that would then need to be enforced across all digital media, including creator sites.
Stephanie Woodin:
Wow.
Marc McCollum:
So, while there's not a class action that includes creators, what creators should be doing is watching those five lawsuits really closely, knowing that if any of them or when any of them reach verdict, that will ultimately impact their business as well.
Stephanie Woodin:
I think that's great. I think everyone should set up an alert for those...
Marc McCollum:
Totally.
Stephanie Woodin:
... and follow them now, and I'm now going to set up those alerts.
Marc McCollum:
Let me also mention, because you had talk about class action, and I just want to spend one minute on that. Class action lawsuit is a term that is thrown around a lot. To be clear, what that actually means is you are pulling together multiple plaintiffs into a class where they're all treated equally. And we actually do not recommend that for this particular situation because all creators and publishers have not been harmed equally.
And what often happens in class action is the award goes to the lowest common denominator. So, they would pick the impact to the person who's had the least impact and then spread that across everybody. So, we don't expect that to actually have the result we want, but that monetary reward is not going to make up for your traffic loss from AI.
Stephanie Woodin:
And I was going to say, the monetary reward, the ideal would probably, and correct me if I'm wrong, be that it's an ongoing monetary systematic protocols that are put in place so that when this is happening, it's not just a one-time, here's $35 for your troubles.
Marc McCollum:
You're right, that is the ideal. And the optimist in us hopes that that's what comes out of one of these copyright rulings. Because again, if the verdict suggests that the LLMs are violating copyright, they cannot train on or use copyright-protected content without consent and compensation through a license fee, then that would have to be applied broadly to anyone whose content that they're using. So, that is the ultimate remedy that we're hoping comes together.
Stephanie Woodin:
Is there anything else that creators can be doing today or in the near future?
Marc McCollum:
Yeah, so blocking the crawlers, as we mentioned, and there's a pretty straightforward way to do that, which here at Raptive, we can guide you through, or if you are a Raptive creator, we have a way to simply log into your dashboard and select the crawlers that you'd like to block.
The second thing is implementing language on your site that makes it very clear that you prohibit any unauthorized scraping of content for any commercial purpose, including training or otherwise. And any creator who works with Raptive, has the opportunity to opt into our terms of content use, which is essentially a blurb that gets added to your site that states that explicitly, and anyone who's not with Raptive can go on a Raptive site and see what the language is and implement it on your site, because we believe every creator should be doing those two things in order to make it very clear that copying and using their content is prohibited. It's just like having a no trespassing sign in your yard.
It's not going to prevent someone from breaking in or from trespassing on your lawn, but you've posted your expectation and gives you higher standing if you want to press charges. If anyone is ever looking to get a licensing deal and get paid for content or wants to explore suing an AI company, if they do not have this language on their website, they will have no standing. If they put the language on their website right when they're about to do the lawsuit or try to strike a deal, it's not going to work. You need to have it on your site. It needs to have been there for a long time, likewise with the crawlers.
Stephanie Woodin:
And it sounds like if more people talk to each other, more creators are talking to each other and saying, "Hey, I'm adopting this language, I'm opting in." It sounds like there can be a little bit more of a collective understanding and then collective action. And so, I'm curious too, because I just saw a tweet that got a lot of attention from MrBeast about, he being one of the biggest content creators out there, is raising a flag of this is coming for all of us, whether we like it or not. So, would you suggest other creators follow in MrBeast's footsteps?
Marc McCollum:
I think this is an issue that is well understood by creators and not well understood by many other people, including oftentimes, lawmakers and people who are actually in a position to influence what's going on. What's awesome about the creator economy is the breadth of audience. And many listen to this podcast have thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and some of you have millions of followers who really take what you have to say seriously.
So, use your platform to spread information around this issue to not only encourage other creators to take a stand and block and participate in other type of advocacy activities, but also your audience, who by the way, are voters and people who care about your content and about issues like copyright protection.
Stephanie Woodin:
I think that's a great note to end on, because while we're talking to creators, some of their biggest fans, advocates is their audience and they don't want to see them go away. And we talk a lot about what would the world look like without creators and that human connection, and that's not a place I want to be in.
So, I think these creators tap into your audience. Like Marc said, it can really make a difference. But Marc, thank you so much for coming on and unpacking this and speaking to someone who doesn't have as much intel, I learned a lot, and I hope our listeners did too.
Marc McCollum:
Great. Thanks, Stephanie.
Stephanie Woodin:
Thank you. Thanks again to Marc and Nate for starting a really important conversation today. We'll keep you posted as the story evolves and look forward to more news in the future. If you're a creator with an issue you'd like advice on, we'd love to hear from you. Get in touch on our website, raptive.com/ctrlaltask and tell us your story. For more information on everything we talked about today, including how to go about blocking bots, you can check out our show notes or go to our website at raptive.com/ctrlaltask.