The Economist has not licensed its content to AI platforms like ChatGPT because it considers them to be a competitor publishing platform.
However The Economist’s president Luke Bradley-Jones said AI chatbots may prove useful for brand visibility as a shopfront for what the brand does.
Bradley-Jones was the opening speaker at Press Gazette’s Future of Media Technology Conference in London last week. His conversation with Press Gazette editor-in-chief Dominic Ponsford is now available as a podcast.
Many publishers have done deals around the use of their content with ChatGPT owner OpenAI, including The Washington Post, The Guardian, Axios, Future, Hearst, Conde Nast, Time, Vox Media, The Atlantic, News Corp and Dotdash Meredith. However The Economist has not signed with OpenAI or any of its competitors.
Bradley-Jones explained: “I think we see those products as publishing platforms. That’s fundamentally what they’re trying to create. And why would you license your content in any meaningful volume to a competitor platform? And especially when you look at the experience those platforms are creating, it is an end user destination. There is no intent to create links through or traffic through to third parties.”
He added: “That’s not to say we will never be on those platforms. It’s going to become an important interface to the internet for many people over the next few years – it already is – but we’re not under any illusions that it’s going to be a source of traffic. It’s really kind of a PR or brand visibility channel, no more than that.”
Despite this, The Economist is “not in the game” of looking at lawsuits against AI companies currently.
Bradley-Jones said this was partly because The Economist is “relatively small” and it would “need to commit very significant resources to going down that path”.
He added: “But I think, for me, it’s more that we’ve got to get our own house absolutely in order first of all,” for example by working with Cloudflare to block AI scrapers and challenge bots whose provenance is unknown. The Economist has also just signed an agreement with Tollbit, which is helping publishers monitor and manage AI visitors.
Bradley-Jones continued: “I think from that point, you’ve then got a much more robust position to decide whether you’re going to find a way to trade with those players, or whether you’re going to go down the legal route.”
How to grow and thrive in a ‘post-search world’
Bradley-Jones said The Economist is “not as exposed” to the decline in referrals to publishers from Google since the introduction of its summarisation features AI Overviews and AI Mode “as some other brands may be”.
He said Google was not a “big part” of the brand’s traffic or customer acquisition “but it has played a meaningful part”, adding that the change is “not existential for us, but it still affects us”.
Bradley-Jones added: “We are definitely now working on how we continue to grow and thrive in what I would call a post… it’s not even a post-Google world, it’s a post-search world.
“Because I think all of us who use the LLM platforms, the answer engines, know that those product experiences are designed as end destinations. They’re not looking to refer on traffic to third-party publishers.
“So we shouldn’t expect the next phase of search coming from those LLM platforms. So we’re very focused on how we continue to grow and thrive in a post-search world, sort of assuming that Google or search referral traffic trends towards zero.”
This means The Economist is focusing on three Ds, he said: differentiation, direct relationships with customers, and discoverability.
Differentiation, he said, means “making sure that what we have to offer is unique and can’t be found elsewhere.
“And for us, that means leaning into the human crafted, editorially created, what I would call artisanal product that The Economist represents. That means doubling down on our text, but also our audio and, increasingly, our video product, because those things are really hard for AI to replicate.”
The second D, he said, is about “avoiding being disintermediated and creating really good reasons for customers to use your products directly”.
And focusing on discoverability means “creating bridges into the brand and creating entry points for customers to come and find and enjoy our journalism”.
To do this, The Economist has increased its spend on brand marketing, is investing in its social media presence, and has partnered with Google’s NotebookLM to create a “featured notebooks” based on its annual The World Ahead report that people can use as an interactive, AI-powered research tool.
Why The Economist has launched a separate subscription on Substack
It has also just launched its first newsletter on Substack, creating a separate subscriptions revenue stream for users that are deemed unlikely to pay for the entire Economist product.
Data journalism newsletter Off the Charts is now available on Substack as well as to subscribers of The Economist through the brand’s own website.
On Substack, free subscribers get the main weekly newsletter but if they upgrade to a paid subscription (£7 per month or £70 per year) they can access the full archive, take part in the comment sections and receive two bonus pieces of data journalism each week.
This is separate to the main subscription to The Economist which costs £167.30 for the first year (currently including free bonus access to The New York Times) and then £239.
Bradley-Jones said they saw it as an “opportunity to sort of nurture more of a niche audience around a particular area of interest, which isn’t in any way going to cannibalise our core subscription base”.
He added: “We think there’s a really large potential audience on Substack who are engaged in that form of journalism, really interested in data journalism, which is a real sort of flourishing space on Substack.
“But also, when we looked at the consumption patterns of that journalism within The Economist’s base, there’s nobody just consuming that content. So they’re not going to spin down from The Economist to take out their Substack subscription. They’re consuming geopolitics, international economics, business and finance and so on.
“So it was a sweet spot where we think there’s an audience to go after, but it’s not going to cannibalise what we offer through our core subscription.”
Bradley-Jones noted that although Substack takes a 10% cut of paid subscriptions on the platform, this is still lower than the 15% taken by acquiring customers through the Apple and Android apps.
Although Substack is often seen as an outlet for individual writers and personalities, and The Economist’s journalists are becoming prominent through the expansion of newsletters, audio and video products, Bradley-Jones said: “I don’t think we’re in the business of trying to build personalities, and they become more prominent than The Economist’s brand.
“We still believe in the hive mind of The Economist and the collective viewpoint of The Economist.”
‘There are no sacred cows’
Overall, Bradley-Jones said, The Economist aims to end 2025 with “subscription growth, revenue growth, profit growth”.
In the year to 31 March 2025, The Economist reported a record year for revenue (£368.5m) fuelled by growing subscriptions, with operating profit of £48.1m up 2% or 11% at constant currency.
Bradley-Jones said that advertising is a growing area for the business: “Our advertising business, I would say, has not been a big strategic focus for us for the last five years, so we’ve probably left some money on the table there, but it’s something which we’re focused on now.
“And I think partly because we’re not protecting a big, mature business that’s growing nicely at the moment, we’ve got more demand than we can serve for our digital advertising products. We’re busy developing a new product suite and increasing the advertising load to accommodate that demand.”
The Economist runs about 130 events a year and that has “been growing really nicely the last few years as well”, he added.
And Economist Intelligence, which provides macroeconomic forecasts and data analysis for various market sectors, is a “good-sized business”.
“I think the demand for structured data products is growing nicely. So we believe pretty strongly in the future of that product, and we’re expanding into new sectors. We’re investing in our US presence for that business as well, because we’ve got a big opportunity there.”
Asked his key advice for publishers looking to survive and thrive in the current disruption, Bradley-Jones said: “This might sound a bit sort of overly iconoclastic, but I think there are no sacred cows.
“As you look at your business and work out how to sustain it in a world where AI platforms are taking huge amounts of people’s time and energy, and that’s only going to continue to accelerate, you’ve got to stay focused on those three Ds, and you have to have an honest conversation with yourself about what is differentiated and what isn’t…
“I think you have to look at your proposition and take a really sort of dispassionate and sometimes brutal view of which bits should you carry on doing, and which bits should you stop: just because they were successful in the past, they’re not going to be successful in the future.”
The post Why The Economist isn’t doing AI deals but has launched on Substack appeared first on Press Gazette.
