Latest news with #BarbaraPeng
Axios
3 days ago
- Business
- Axios
Business Insider CEO details post-layoff strategy
Business Insider's recent layoffs and changes were "very difficult" but necessary to put the business back on track, CEO Barbara Peng said at an Axios event at Cannes on Wednesday. "We have a responsibility to build a sustainable business. If we can't support ourselves, we actually can't do all the good journalism that we want to and really reach that potential," she said. Why it matters: Publishers are reckoning with declining search traffic across the media industry and reinvesting as they prepare for potentially even greater disruption from AI. What they're saying:"We had to let go of a lot of really talented people, and that's hard for an organization, but the reason we made these changes was because of our strategy," Peng said. "About a year and a half ago, I took us back to being Business Insider after we were Insider for many years and focused us back in on our core and our strengths and what people love about us, which is business, tech and innovation journalism," she said. Catch up quick: BI laid off 21% of its staff last month as the organization goes "all-in on AI." In May, Peng said in a staff memo that BI has launched several AI-driven products, including onsite search and paywall technology. "This just in general is not new for Business Insider. We were born in the moment that the smartphone launched, and it was really a moment that we embraced. We were very curious. We found joy in it. We tried things. We were risk tolerant, and we're approaching this moment exactly the same," she told Axios on Wednesday. Zoom in: Peng said BI has pulled back on areas that were sensitive to search traffic like its SEO- and Google-driven commerce business and has invested in new experiments like an AI-generated audio briefing. "You can imagine that this really opens up other times in the day, other audiences that wouldn't have had access to us," Peng said. Peng said BI's revenue will be more heavily weighted to subscription and events. Its audio briefing isn't yet monetized. "One of the things you have to think about especially with innovation and trying things is you kind of have to give a little bit of space for the product to launch and to take hold," Peng said. "If we can engage an audience, if we can bring them value, we can monetize it afterwards."
Mint
14-06-2025
- Business
- Mint
Google Search is fading. The whole internet could go with it.
Experience a random pain in the 21st century and an internet search usually comes before a call to the doctor. Googling 'chest pain," 'high fever," or 'skin rash" calls up a series of blue links followed by a frenzied trip across the web. A similar pattern plays out, minus some anxiety, for 'today's weather," 'restaurants near me," and 'high-yielding dividend stocks." Roughly one in five visits to the world's top internet sites begin on search engines, according to data from analytics firm Semrush. At Wikipedia, search generates 63% of global visits. For travel site Tripadvisor, it's 58%; for local review site Yelp, it's 51%. But internet search traffic has been falling for much of the past year as web surfers experiment with artificial-intelligence-powered search from OpenAI's ChatGPT and AI start-up Perplexity AI. So far, referrals from AI search engines have replaced about 10% of the traditional search losses, according to Similarweb data. Google is pushing back by adding AI-powered summaries to the top of its search results, de-emphasizing its traditional blue links and thereby further reducing search traffic. May could prove to be a tipping point. Last month, search referrals to top U.S. travel and tourism sites tumbled 20% year over year, according to the latest data from Similarweb. E-commerce companies saw their referrals fall 9%. For news and media sites, search traffic dropped 17%. The finance, lifestyle, and food-and-drink categories all saw similar types of declines on the month. Across the web economy, the trend is clear: Search is drying up, and Google is no longer the clear-cut way to drive audiences to websites. The changes have begun to force a reckoning across various industries. Late last month, Business Insider, a leading digital news publication, cut 21% of its staff, citing traffic drops that were 'outside of its control." 'Business models are under pressure, distribution is unstable, and competition for attention is fiercer than ever," Business Insider CEO Barbara Peng wrote to employees. Reddit, the social-media site and source of answers to many random questions, which gets 57% of its visits from search, is making deals with AI firms and rolling out its own AI-driven search engine. Chegg, a homework-help company, worth $15.1 billion at its peak in 2021, said earlier this year that traffic declines had given it no choice but to explore strategic alternatives, including a possible sale. On Wall Street, no company has faced greater worries about the future of search than Google itself. Shares of parent Alphabet are down 7% on the year; the company now gets counted as a value stock in some investor benchmarks. But Google has countermeasures. For one, it has diversified itself into a cloud-computing giant, and it's a winner in the nascent category of autonomous driving. Google itself is also no slouch in the generative-AI world, with massive resources to build and improve its Gemini large-language models. Instead, as traditional search fades in importance, it's the rest of the internet that will suffer. In May, monthly U.S. search traffic to fell for the first time in at least two years, according to Similarweb, down 14%. A year ago, search referrals to Schwab were up 179%. TripAdvisor's search tumbled 34% on the month, while Starbucks saw a 41% decline to its website. Search to Netflix, a pioneer in digital strategies, was down 23%. The traffic conversation has the feel of the 1990s and early aughts before Google arrived and companies were still trying to figure out how to attract audiences across the World Wide Web. Executives are talking up deals with OpenAI's ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI-driven search tools. 'We're partnering with AI search companies to ensure our brands show up well across customer queries," said Expedia CEO Ariane Gorin in May, 'and building new experiences to connect with travelers outside our ecosystem." There's a long way to go. Based on Similarweb's U.S. estimates, Expedia got 88,000 referrals from AI search engines in May. It got 34 million referrals from search. ChatGPT was something of a novelty when the model made its public debut in November 2022, generating a wave of songs, poems, and essays across the web. But the latest models, which are more sophisticated and promise humanlike reasoning, have spurred a surge of new use. ChatGPT had 500 million weekly active users in March, rising from 300 million in December. Many of them pay $20 a month for service; parent company OpenAI says it reached an annualized revenue run rate of $10 billion this month, up from $5.5 billion at year end. Another start-up, Perplexity, has taken on Google more directly. 'A direct line to the world's knowledge—compressed, cited, and made clear," Perplexity says on its about page. 'No gimmicks. No fluff. Just answers that make sense." (Barron's owner Dow Jones has sued Perplexity for copyright infringement.) As AI pressure mounts on Google, the company has moved to defend its 89% U.S. market share in search. A year ago, it launched so-called AI Overviews atop Google search results, promising condensed AI-generated answers to search queries. Those overviews, which initially appeared on a small number of searches, have been appearing more frequently. An analysis by research firm Ahrefs said that the prevalence of AI Overviews have more than doubled from March 12 to May 6. The AI summaries have spurred debate across the internet, with publishers worried about a search query that delivers answers in a few paragraphs, with no need to click for more info. According to Similarweb data from March, searches with AI Overviews resulted in a click 23% of the time. For searches without the overviews, the click rate was 36%. 'Looking at search results that do show an AI answer, comparing that with search results that do not show an answer, we found a crazy drop-off," said Kevin Indig, a search-engine optimization, or SEO, consultant and author of the Growth Memo blog. 'This is a click killer." Google told Barron's that third-party data offer an incomplete picture of search trends. In February, online education platform Chegg said search trends had crushed its business. CEO Nathan Schultz told investors: 'We would not need to review strategic alternatives if Google hadn't launched AI Overviews, retaining traffic that historically had come to Chegg, materially impacting our acquisitions, revenue, and employees." Asked for comment, the company directed Barron's to a lawsuit it filed in February against Google. It alleges that Google is using its search dominance to 'coerce online publishers like Chegg to supply content that Google republishes without permission in AI-generated answers that unfairly compete for the attention of users on the internet." Chegg shares have tumbled 99% since 2021. Google says its AI Overviews have improved the search experience and are being embraced by users. A Google spokesperson says that AI Overviews show more links to a wider range of sources on results pages. 'More than any other company, Google prioritizes sending traffic to the web, and we continue to send billions of clicks to websites every day," the Google spokesperson told Barron's. In April, during Google's earnings call, an analyst asked company executives about the impact that AI Overviews was having on click-through rates. 'I don't think this is the moment to go into the details of click-through rates and conversion and so on," said Philipp Schindler, Google's chief business officer. 'But overall, we're happy with what we're seeing." Reddit has become a battle ground and flashpoint in the argument about search's future. The stock is down 28% so far this year as investors worry about slowing user growth on the social-media site. It's a trend the company has attributed to an evolution in search. The company remains a standout in search, and it points out that 'Reddit" is the No. 6 searched term on Google. Still, traffic trends have notably shifted in recent months. In May 2024, Reddit's search referrals soared 78%, according to Similarweb. This past May, searches to the site were up 14%. Reddit's daily user growth, meanwhile, has gone from 37% in the first quarter of 2024 to 31% in 2025. Reddit Chief Operating Officer Jennifer Wong said in an interview with Barron's that search is under 'heavy construction." Wong is confident about the long-term opportunity for Reddit, noting that its human-generated content will be especially sought after to train the large language models that run AI. Reddit has a deal with OpenAI. For now, that kind of licensing is a small part of the business, accounting for less than 9% of revenue in the most recent quarter. 'Nobody knows how Google is going to cross this canyon and the kind of ripple effects that they'll have across the internet," Wong says. 'What I do know is that I think human intelligence is still going to be worth a lot, and it's going to go up and up in value, and I think Reddit is the place for that." Wall Street generally agrees. Across 29 analysts covering Reddit, the average price target is $152, 31% above its recent close. Going forward, investors should pay attention to a company's search exposure. Across the categories, certain brands are far less dependent on Google's referrals. Airbnb, for instance, got 14% of referrals from search in March, versus the 58% for travel firm Tripadvisor, according to Semrush. DoorDash and Uber Technologies were 13%. Social-media apps like Pinterest and Meta Platform's Instagram also tend to be far less search-dependent than much of the internet. Their sites drew 23% and 17% of referrals from search, respectively. In May, Pinterest's CEO told investors that 85% of users come directly to the company's mobile app. Meta Platforms, which essentially shares the online advertising pie with Google, is in an enviable position. As search traffic falls and traditional search advertising wanes, businesses will be compelled to advertise on Instagram and Facebook, Meta's social networks that are insulated from search disruption. Meanwhile, Meta can use AI to improve ad effectiveness and personalization. As Google defends itself against AI, Meta is free to fully embrace it. Ultimately, the best hedge against AI disruption is the company empowering it all: Nvidia. As AI explodes, Nvidia will sell more AI chips and the infrastructure to power data centers. Newer reasoning-focused AI models are particularly profitable for Nvidia because they require 100 times the computing resources compared with prior AI chatbots, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told investors on Nvidia's recent earnings call. 'Reasoning models are driving a step-function surge in inference demand," he said. As Google Search comes under threat for the first time in two decades, a U.S. district judge is determining the company's fate. Judge Amit Mehta ruled in August 2024 that Google was a monopoly in general search services and general text advertising. Alphabet and its investors are now waiting for the judge to determine potential remedies. A penalty phase of the trial concluded last month, and Mehta is expected to issue a final decision in August. The timing is notable. Alphabet was ruled a monopoly around the same time that it was pushing out AI Overviews. Less than a year later, search is facing a massive competitive shift as users increasingly embrace chatbots. Apple's senior vice president of services, Eddy Cue, testified that searches in Apple browsers fell for the first time in April as people increasingly turned to AI for search queries. Google pays billions of dollars to Apple annually to make its search engine the default option on Apple browsers. But don't expect Google's recent weakness to affect Mehta's decision. Antony Haynes, partner at Dorf Nelson & Zauderer, told Barron's that even though these new competitive threats have become more prevalent since the judge made his ruling, it's unlikely those threats will affect his decisions regarding remedies. 'We're not thinking about a remedy for potential future technology changes. We're looking at what they did in the past," Haynes said. That past includes one of the best business models ever created. Last year, Alphabet's operating margin was 32% versus an aggregate 14% for S&P 500 index companies. Meanwhile, since Alphabet went public in 2004, the stock has returned an annualized 23.7%, versus 10.6% for the S&P 500. A post-search world will probably weigh on those margins, but Alphabet stock already reflects the next phase. It trades at 17.8 times expected earnings for the next 12 months, below the S&P 500's 22.5 multiple. Barron's has remained bullish on the stock, including in a November 2024 cover story and a follow-up last month. Google will be fine. It's the rest of the internet that should be worried. Write to Adam Levine at Tae Kim at and Angela Palumbo at
Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Google's AI Is Actively Destroying the News Media
Google's pivot to AI-powered search is proving disastrous for the digital news media landscape. As the Wall Street Journal reports, the company's latest tools, including its wildly hallucinating AI Overviews and chatbot-style AI Mode, are causing the traffic being sent to publishers to plummet as users no longer feel the need to click through to the actual source of information, cutting already-slammed journalists off from ad revenue and subscriptions. It's an existential threat. News publications, already gutted by the internet, have been hit hard as they try to adapt to a post-organic-search world. Per the WSJ, search traffic to Business Insider's media empire fell by a whopping 55 percent between April 2022 and April 2025. Last month, the company cut roughly 21 percent of its staff, with CEO Barbara Peng noting that it had to "endure extreme traffic drops outside of our control." How to respond to this existential threat remains a major point of contention. "Google is shifting from being a search engine to an answer engine," The Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson told the WSJ. "We have to develop new strategies." Some publications, like the New York Times, are taking legal action, with the newspaper suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement. It's a thorny debate, with publishers accusing the AI industry of exploiting their content without ever fairly remunerated. Plummeting traffic due to AI-enhanced search on Google is only exacerbating the tension. Google is under threat from AI itself. Apple executive Eddy Cue admitted in federal court earlier this year that Google searches in the company's Safari browser had fallen for the first time in 20 years, indicating the end of traditional search as we know it could be nigh. Confusingly, Google has since disputed the claim and has remained adamant that its number of total searches is still going up — while going all-in on its glitchy AI products. "This is the moment that propels us forward in our ability to achieve our mission and really deliver a transformed search experience for users," Google's head of knowledge and information division Nick Fox told Adweek. The digital media landscape and Google are now caught in an unfortunate race to the bottom. The tech giant's search and AI features rely on a steady stream of news and original content. But by cutting the creators of that material out of a once lucrative organic search-driven revenue source, that stream could soon be reduced to a trickle, if not an incestuous swamp of AI-generated nonsense. Well-established outlets will likely weather the storm better. Research revealed last week that Google's AI Overviews favors major news outlets, while smaller publications struggle for visibility. Meanwhile, the media industry has no other option but to look for new business models in light of an existential threat. Legal challenges to Google's indiscriminate scraping of copyrighted materials are likely to continue to crop up as well. "Links were the last redeeming quality of search that gave publishers traffic and revenue," said trade association News/Media Alliance CEO Danielle Coffey in a statement last month, following Google's announcement of its AI Mode feature. "Now Google just takes content by force and uses it with no return, the definition of theft." More on Google's AI: "You Can't Lick a Badger Twice": Google's AI Is Making Up Explanations for Nonexistent Folksy Sayings
Fast Company
06-06-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
Why digital-native publishers like Business Insider are most exposed in the AI era
For the past year and a half, there's been a simmering concern over what AI is going to do to the workforce. Last week, that concern boiled over in a big way following back-to-back news stories: First, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei set off alarm bells by predicting that AI would wipe out half of entry-level jobs and massively drive up unemployment. As if on cue, Business Insider announced it was laying off 21% of its staff. While the two obviously aren't directly related, the one-two punch landed hard in the media business, which faces an existential threat to its business model (in a nutshell, AI answers mean less traffic than search). But like all demographics, it's important to remember that the media isn't a monolith. While AI summaries mean rapidly changing audience habits for all publishers, BI 's move emphasizes that digital-native brands are particularly vulnerable. In her memo to BI staff, CEO Barbara Peng said the company was 'going all-in on AI,' explaining that the layoffs were part of a broader strategic shift and that, going forward, the publication would need to reduce its dependence on traffic in general. In addition to cutting click-dependent areas like its commerce business, BI would launch live journalism events, double down on subscriptions, and encourage all its journalists to embrace AI tools. This is far from the publication's first move on this course. Not long ago, the company had ambitions to become a general interest brand, but after changing its name to Insider in 2021, it switched back to Business Insider less than three years later. Since then, the publication has been investing more in unique voices and talent instead of the volume content that fueled the company's rise in the 2010s, when media brands like Vice, Quartz, and Buzzfeed were dominant. The old media playbook meets a new world The thing about BI, though, is that it was one of the few success stories to come out of that era. The publication sold to Axel Springer for $343 million dollars back in 2015, just before the bottom fell out of the scale media market. Perhaps that's why it took BI so long to adapt. It's been shedding its workforce for a couple of years—now roughly half the size of its 2022 peak of 1,000 people, according to Press Gazette. Now AI is forcing the issue. Peng's memo says that 70% of BI 's business suffers from 'traffic sensitivity,' a euphemism for content designed to attract eyeballs on the open web by appearing in search, social, or feeds. Who are those people? How do you keep them coming back or transacting with your brand? In the media model BI was built for, it didn't matter—it only mattered how big the number was on any given day. Now BI is doing exactly what any media consultant would recommend: adopting tactics like paywalled subscriptions, events, newsletters, and first-party data. It's the right strategy, but for BI the moves are reactive retreats rather than proactive bets. That doesn't mean they're bad ideas, but BI 's DNA was born out of a different era. It has a brand, but is it strong enough to make the transition that AI demands? I don't mean to pick on BI, but I do think it exemplifies why digital media companies from the 2010s are likely going to have the hardest time in the AI era. Legacy mainstream outlets like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have built moats with their strong journalism and diverse revenue streams. On the other end, smaller digital upstarts like 404 Media, The Ankler, and The Free Press are finding success by cultivating talent, getting scoops, and offering unique perspectives. It's the brands in between—the ones that followed the same playbook as BI —now scrambling to re-architect themselves to meet this moment. Ziff Davis (owner of PCMag, Mashable, and IGN) is similarly feeling pressure, as seen in its lawsuit against OpenAI, arguing that its strategy of publishing evergreen, free content on the internet to maximize clicks has made it particularly vulnerable to substitution by AI. Experimentation isn't transformation As evidence of the BI 's all-in bet on AI, Peng talked about AI-powered features like its site search and dynamic paywall. She also mentioned that 75% of the staff were now using AI tools, specifically ChatGPT Enterprise, with the aim to get the figure to 100%. The note encourages 'bold experimentation,' and says they're building prompt libraries and sharing everyday AI use cases among staff. However, this description of AI initiatives, while directionally solid, sounds like it's still in the early stages. Contrast that with an AI-forward newsroom like Reuters, which has built modular tooling tailored to newsroom workflows, under a clear 'reduce, augment, transform' framework. It's great that they're moving forward, but without a focus on systems, transformation will be piecemeal. And while the choice of ChatGPT is expected given the company's partnership with OpenAI, pushing a single AI model over all the others is inherently limiting. For other digital media brands who fear death or downsizing, BI 's approach is instructive. It's urgent to rethink dependency on traffic, and even the lens of measuring success through traffic. Certainly, ad impressions are the KPI driving all this, and it's not going to go away overnight (or ever, really). But a long decline seems inevitable. Shifting focus from traffic to metrics that measure impact, engagement, and loyalty is step one. That's the path to cultivating direct reader relationships—essential to building media brands that are sustainable in the AI era. BI 's shift is a step in the right direction, but survival won't come from cost-cutting or tool adoption alone. The digital media brands that make it through this next wave will be the ones that know who they're for and what makes them worth returning to. That means being willing to rethink how things get made in the first place—and why.
Belfast Telegraph
04-06-2025
- Business
- Belfast Telegraph
Media firm with base in Belfast to slash more than fifth of its global workforce
The announcement of the job cuts was made by Barbara Peng, chief of Business Insider's parent company. She added: 'We're also proposing changes that impact our UK team, but the process is a bit different there; separate communication will follow. 'We are reducing the size of our organisation, a move that will impact about 21% of our colleagues and touch every department. 'This will be a difficult day, and our first priority is to provide clarity and support to those colleagues whose roles are being eliminated.' Ms Peng said only those employees impacted would receive an email that included details for a meeting with the 'people and culture team', who would talk them through next steps and answer any questions. She added that the media industry 'is at a crossroads'. She said: 'Business models are under pressure, distribution is unstable, and competition for attention is fiercer than ever. 'At the same time, there's a huge opportunity for companies who harness AI first. 'Our strategy is strong, but we don't have the luxury of time. 'The pace of change combined with the opportunity ahead demands bold, focused action — and it's our chance to lead the pack.' Gordon Lyons visited Insider Inc's New York headquarters in 2022 in his role as Economy Minister to announce the new Belfast base. At the time it employed more than 1,000 people, with 10 global editions in six languages. He said then: 'Insider is expanding its engineering resource and is now establishing a technology and product hub in Northern Ireland, with plans to initially recruit 50 roles by the end of June 2024. 'The roles will include data engineering, project management and IT support. 'This was a highly mobile project with a number of locations in the running. 'As part of Invest NI's engagement with the company to help win this project, I first met the senior team in March. 'I am delighted to be back with the team to make this announcement. 'Invest NI has done a great job helping to secure this project, the new jobs and over £2m investment in our local economy through annual salaries.' Henry Blodget, co-founder of Insider Inc, added: 'Our team there will be focused on improving our data products, subscription services, content syndication and testing automation processes — all of which are so important to our business.'
