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Billionaire tech executive Matthew Prince predicted Friday that the “massive consolidating force” of AI that has disrupted legacy news outlets’ relationships with their readers will in the long run bring attention to the value of more granular and local journalism.
“I believe that a whole bunch of existing media companies are about to get crushed, and I believe that we’re on the verge of the next golden era of content creation,” said Prince, the co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, at Semafor World Economy in Washington, DC. “And the reason why is I think that things that are local, unique, differentiated are gonna be much more valuable.”
Prince said the newspaper he bought in 2023 in his hometown of Park City, Utah — The Park Record — has turned out to be a surprisingly good business. It’s on track to make more money this year by licensing its content to AI companies than on digital media, thanks to the one-of-a-kind information the reporters turn up about the local community.
Prince sees opportunity even in the details of reporters’ notebooks that traditionally would not make the cut for a story. He’s much less optimistic about national coverage that can be more easily disintermediated by AI.
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Prince, a prominent critic of Google, argued that the search giant has transformed from a “superhero” of the internet into a villain, wielding its leverage over publishers for monopolistic ends. Google has threatened to pull publishers’ content from search if it’s not allowed to also use it to train AI models.
Prince said they should play by the same rules as other AI companies, many of which are now paying to license content they use in their models.
“Everything that’s wrong with the world today is Google’s fault,” Prince said. “That’s too strong, but only slightly too strong, because Google beget Facebook, which beget TikTok, which beget basically us chasing this deity, which is traffic. Traffic is a terrible proxy for quality.”
In January, at Semafor House in Davos, Prince predicted that Google could “run away” with the AI race thanks to its deep access to information. The company pulls more than three times as much data per web page as OpenAI and five times as much as Microsoft and Anthropic. Prince’s solution is a more open marketplace for buying and selling data.