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The media trade has no scarcity of existential crises on its plate. From the disruption posed by synthetic intelligence to the precipitously low ranges of shopper belief, publishers typically discover themselves on the defensive, reacting to adversarial situations that threaten their very capacity to outlive.

I cowl these components incessantly and with the suitable measure of sobriety, however Thursday within the U.S. is Thanksgiving, and it pays to keep in mind that the media trade is just not totally bereft of its tailwinds. Plus, as Cormac McCarthy as soon as wrote, you by no means know what worse luck your dangerous luck has saved you from.

So, in that spirit, listed below are 5 tendencies within the media trade that I’m grateful for, which supply no less than some morsel of optimism for the long run.

1. The daybreak of the pay-per-crawl

As I have amply covered, one of many chief threats to the media trade is the unpaid use of its content material to energy AI reply engines. Exterior of a handful of bespoke offers, the overwhelming majority of content material creators have watched powerlessly as AI companies hoover up their information, repackage it, and use it to reply customers’ questions.

In current months although, a number of new initiatives have emerged that supply a framework for a market that would enable this mannequin to persist whereas nonetheless managing to compensate the publishers that allow it. 

Simply final week, I wrote about an experiment involving Criteo and the media community Raptive that used a pay-per-crawl infrastructure to generate $174 in a case research involving an impartial meals writer. These are also known as “the Spotify mannequin,” because it successfully does for textual content content material what streaming did for music.