Many publishers are playing catch up. Affiliate marketing is one of the oldest internet business models, with its growth turbocharged by the ease and rise of e-commerce. Many legacy publishers were behind in adopting affiliate models, seeing performance ads as scraping the bottom of the barrel compared to impression models. “The biggest publishers in the world are scrambling to compete in this area that they kind of ignored for a generation,” Lavin said.

Affiliate stresses silos. The entire idea of affiliate runs contrary to the notion of church and state. At one of The Rebooting’s dinners focused on commerce, I heard a large publisher lament how the editorial team would battle to control personal finance reviews rather than the commerce team. They were basically working against each other internally. "Some publishers it's the main thing, but for a lot of marquee publishers, it's a department, and they have to figure out where it fits because it's not really editorial, but it's not really sales."

Dotdash Meredith is an anomaly. Dotdash Meredith is the manifestation of these worlds colliding, with the internet-native Dotdash taking over the legacy Time Inc publications. It’s telling that as publishers sound the alarm over AI, DDDM has weathered this storm and returned to growth. "They came from a commerce first angle, which is operated with CPS for a large degree. And then eventually with Meredith, which was CPM, they tried to find middle ground."