The Rebooting Show

The shift to performance marketing has increased thei importance of affiliate operations at publishers. AI is upending the old playbook.

That’s because of AI agents. Agents will increasingly be on the loose to make buying decisions. The question is how publishers will influence those agents with their commerce content but also how they’ll get credit. The recent controversy over Phia’s cookie stuffing is testament to how affiliate is premised on getting credit for the sale.

"If you have an AI agent, the cookie is injected into your browser,” said Madeline Sullivan, founder of shopping app Scout and affiliate publishing veteran who spent eight years at Forbes Vetted. “So if an agent is using a different browser — let's say you have a Mac Mini where your agents live — that agent is going to be on a completely different browser. How are we thinking about people's digital identity to provide credit to the publishers?"

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Mike Nuzzo, svp of Hearst Data Solutions, explains how Hearst is measuring its visibility and favorability inside answer engines, restructuring editorial content into formats LLMs can more easily use, and exploring how GEO could become part of its advertising business.

We also discuss the collapse of the traditional marketing funnel, the difference between machine knowledge and human wisdom, and the possibility that publishers will eventually operate separate layers of the internet for humans and robots.

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USA Today Co CEO Mike Reed explains why he's willing to walk away from Google search traffic within the next 12 months, how the company is building direct-to-consumer relationships through newsletters and social to offset the loss, and why he thinks the "one crawler" problem — Google refusing to let publishers separate AI Overviews from search indexing — is forcing his hand.

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Daniel Scharff isn't a media guy. He's a CPG operator who stumbled into community-building almost by accident, looking for people to talk to at trade shows. That accidental start turned into Startup CPG, a Slack-based community that's become a trusted gathering spot for direct-to-consumer operators in packaged goods.

We talk through what it actually takes to build a community that people show up for: why "the things that don't scale" are the whole point, why Slack works better than purpose-built community platforms despite not being designed for the job, how to think about trade shows versus owned events, and why proximity to the industry — not content production — is the real unlock for publishers trying to build the same thing.

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AI agents are consuming content at a scale the web was never built for — and they don't watch ads, subscribe, or click. In this episode of TRB Conversations, powered by EX.CO, recorded at Cannes, Brian Morrissey talks with Cosmin Ene, CEO of Supertab, about why the old ads-vs-subscriptions dichotomy breaks down in an agentic world — and why micropayments, an idea publishers have circled for two decades, may finally have found its moment.

Cosmin makes the case that grounding — not AI training — is the real emerging monetization opportunity, why bulk licensing deals actually hurt publishers by capping upside and hiding usage data, and why he believes the market for AI-agent content payments will regulate itself the way any two-sided market does. He also walks through how Supertab Connect works in practice: rights declaration, pricing, metering, and settlement — and makes the case that this is publishing's "YouTube moment," circa 2007, not a fast-money play.

Topics covered:

00:00 Intro — is AI scraping breaking the open web?

04:00 Why ads and subscriptions don't work on AI agents

12:00 What "grounding" means and why it's the real opportunity

16:00 The math problem with suing AI companies for content

25:00 Inside Supertab Connect: rights, pricing, metering, settlement

38:00 Why publishers shouldn't expect fast revenue

At the Bloomberg Studios in Cannes, Bloomberg Media chief commercial officer Christine Cook and HSBC CMO for corporate and institutional banking Nicole German joined me to discuss the current and future shifts as media moves into an agentic era. The conclusion: Lots of change is still to come, but the one thing that won’t change much is that humans will continue to trust other humans rather than handing over important decisions to robots. Topics we discuss:

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People Inc CEO Neil Vogel explains his beef with Google and how publishing now requires running multiple playbooks customized for each brand. Axios chief media correspondent Sara Fischer says an AI marketplace can only emerge if Google participates.

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Esses is betting a high-end print magazine will help establish brand credibility an email list alone cannot. Founder Ojus Jain is building a model that uses that credibility and editorial distribution to power brand activations around the crowded F1 race calendar.

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KCRW is a local institution in Los Angeles, home to Morning Becomes Eclectic, the long-running music-discovery program. The public radio station is using its standing to lean into a community model that includes 100 events per year, such as a pie baking contest that drew 400 bakers and 10,000 attendees and a summer series of 18 free, all-ages events at cultural centers across Southern California. Its membership program has 55,000 paying members.

"We use media to cultivate this community,” Jennifer Ferro, president of KCRW, told me on The Rebooting Show. “ We don't build a community in order to make media."

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The Reuters Institute's new digital news report lays bare the challenges facing journalism as people increasingly stop seeking out news products. Instead, news is a feature of other products. Jim Egan, one of the report's authors, joins me to discuss the implications.

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