Almost Everyone is Taking Money from OpenAI. Why is Ziff Davis suing them?
Summary
Vivek Shah, CEO of Ziff Davis, details how his company, unlike many digital publishers, has achieved profitability through strategic acquisitions. He explains their proactive approach to Google's zero-click search and AI overviews, having diversified traffic sources to mitigate dependency. Shah elaborates on why Ziff Davis chose to sue OpenAI—alleging unauthorized content use for training and rebuffed licensing offers—rather than strike a deal, arguing for the necessity of protecting intellectual property and securing compensation for AI model usage, which he sees as a significant future revenue opportunity.Episode description
In the future, digital publishers could get run over by AI. In the present, they are deeply concerned about Google, and the prospect that the search giant is going to choke off their last reliable traffic stream.
That may explain why lots of publishers are making deals with OpenAI now -- and doing a lot of grousing about Google.
Ziff Davis CEO Vivek Shah is going the other way: he's one of only two big publishers to sue OpenAI (the other one is the New York Times) and he says his portfolio of sites would like more traffic from Google, but is confident things will work out.
Shah and Ziff Davis never got the attention some of their digital peers did a decade ago. On the flip side, they're still standing in 2025. So this is a POV worth paying attention to.
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