‘Why buy the cow?’ IAB Tech Lab warns publishers over AI traffic losses
"No market has ever been created when people give things away for free" (Midjourney)
The head of the IAB Tech Lab has urged Australian media owners to join forces and collectively block AI models from scraping their content, likening the current dynamic to: “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?”
Anthony Katsur, the New York–based CEO of the IAB Tech Lab, said large language models are already wiping out up to 60% of US publishers’ referral traffic, an “unsustainable” trajectory for the media industry.
Speaking to Mumbrella during an IAB trip to Sydney, Katsur said LLMs perform “anywhere from 250 to several thousand” crawls before delivering a single site visit, compared with roughly six crawls per visit from Google Search.
