AI and media: After platform-ad revenue monopoly, Big Tech now targets Sh16trn news product

But brokers in some of these sectors did not start out this way. Take the example of agriculture. The power equation has been shifting over time in favour of the broker. Initially, they were indispensable and dependable players linking farmers to the market.

They carried out both farm and market research and delivered invaluable information on crops to grow, varieties that fetch good prices, markets to deliver the produce, peak market seasons, and even which buyers pay a premium and promptly.

Over time, however, they discovered the power of market research and business intelligence, and decided to withhold it from farmers, take advantage of the latter, and exploit their sweat and farm investments at zero cost.

From delivering information, clearing the route to market, helping farmers sell profitably at a commission, brokers in unregulated and poorly regulated agribusiness sectors have today turned into vultures— selectively or totally withholding market intelligence, erecting obstacles on route to market, and switching positions from intermediaries to direct buyers, who pay peanuts as farm gate prices.

From collaborators, some brokers have decided to become farmers’ direct competitors, fighting to grab and own farm produce (the product), as they seek to make a killing on the latters’ bended backs.

Unfathomable as it may sound, journalism— a profession that for long has relied on technology firms as its certified brokers and partners in matters content production, distribution and audience engagement— appears doomed to suffer a similar fate at the hands of Big Tech in the fast unfolding AI Age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Since the advent of the Movable Type printing press by Johannes Gutenberg around 1450, and throughout the first and second industrial revolutions, tech companies served the Fourth Estate as enablers of content gathering, processing and distribution with admirable sense of responsibility, dedication, integrity and fidelity.

In the First Industrial Revolution, for instance, the steam engine enabled mechanised and industrial printing and publishing of newspapers, powered mass distribution and consumption, and boosted literacy and readership in the Americas, Europe and parts of Asia.

During the Second Industrial Revolution, the invention of the light bulb, linotype machine, and advances in telecommunications— including the advent of the telegraph, the camera and radio— gave rise to global news networks and birthed broadcast media.

During these two revolutions, tech companies either were or appeared satisfied with the big money they minted through sale of tech tools and solutions to the Media, and in most cases, earned their commission for researching and delivering market intelligence to publishers.

But in the Third Industrial Revolution, with the emergence of computers, the internet, digital publishing, e-commerce and social media, things started to shift beneath the feet of the Media, journalists and content creators.

The Big Five— Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft— for instance, became dissatisfied with the commissions they earned from the media through advertising monopolies, platform and software sales, and started salivating for the news product (media owners’, shareholders’ and journalists’ lunch).

In 2025, the World Association of News Publishers put the value generated by the global news publishing industry (daily and weekly news publications) at $125.7 billion (Sh16.3 trillion).

While their intentions were clear for all to see, their approaches were subtle. They researched the product (the story), went ahead to deliver self-serving innovative forms and formats, diversified distribution platforms, created an online marketplace, and gathered and aggregated audiences (allegedly) for publishers.

All this while, they monopolised advertising dollars and weaponised algorithms as they keenly eyed their pound of flesh.

As the Media hang on Karl Marx’s 19th Century school of thought that power and money flowed from owning the product and means of production— printing presses, computers, newsprint and inks— the Big Tech pounced. Silicon Valley merchants embarked on changing the content business to the chagrin of publishers.

Like brokers in agriculture sector, Big Tech understood that in the digital age, influence and wealth flowed to the people who own the means of distribution, the networks that get information to people, even as they sought to grab the product from the Media and sell it themselves.

And for more than a decade now, the media has been trying to win a rigged game, struggling to survive in an ecosystem where reader attention is dominated by a handful of Big Tech apps.

They have pivoted to video, pivoted back again, they have written short posts, long posts, attached images, detached images, re-inverted the inverted pyramid and even stopped including links to their actual content — all in a bid to please the unknowable algorithmic gods.

Today, publishers are reporting a 55 percent drop in search traffic, thanks to Google Zero — the moment when AI news overviews take over completely, and Google stops sending users to outside websites altogether.

Online discovery is happening inside opaque answer engines, and media’s visible marketplace of links has dwindled to a single, pre‑digested verdict where ranking, sourcing and even dissenting views are either suppressed or hidden.

For publishers, this extractive AI search means less direct audience contact, weaker brand recognition, and fewer chances to explain context, nuance, and methodology in their own voice. In this environment, the real leverage lies in shaping the knowledge that bots and AI systems rely on behind the scenes. It goes without saying that Big Tech is hellbent on pushing the Media, journalists and content creators out of business.

In this emerging reality, journalists and content creators risk being reduced to data collectors and data-entry clerks, as their editors and producers settle for data verifiers and data feeders roles. Algorithms, on the other hand, are poised to assume the product curation and gatekeeping role as bots take up the customer service role.

Machines will firmly be in the driver’s seat of the global content map and will soon dictate not just what people should think about but how they should think about it.

Unlike in the human-led era, the algorithmic gatekeeping role will involve transformation of what that information is, its meaning, intent and purpose, and even its accuracy— if the current AI-enabled fake news pandemic is anything to go by.

The ongoing decimation of the click economy as Big Tech battles out for the crown jewel of answer economy, in the semantic web comes with a hidden cost to the Media: Loss of (and control of) the product (content), the only element the Fourth Estate held in the publishing marketing mix.

Pushed to the corner and literally gasping for revenue, major publishers have been forced to cut content deals with AI companies as others, such as The New York Times, sue Big Tech for stealing their content to train models. OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, Meta Platforms and xAI are striking major licensing deals with AP, Axel Springer, FT and News Corp.

Most of these deals come after Big Tech ran out of quality content to train models, and benefitting from the initial unauthorised and secretive scraping of the entire internet.

Where markets are opaque and regulation is weak, brokers gain power—and abuse it. As their peers in the Global North cut deals, media investors and players in the Global South continue losing their hard-earned content to Big Tech.

At both country and continental levels, Africa, for instance, has not taken any serious steps to rein in Big Tech. Afraid of backlash from Donald Trump administration, some countries have gone ahead to roll out red carpets for these companies, including granting them unfettered access to data, free land for data centres and even tax emptions.

Like rogue brokers, AI companies realise that journalism, just like energy for data centres or chips for training clusters, is essential ingredient for semantic web, but they do not want to pay for it. And where they offer to buy, the contracts are skewed in their favour to ensure they get quality content for a song.

Sadly, the hope that has sustained the Forth Estate through waves and repeat waves of digital disruption appears to be thinning out, with the AI race between the US and China working in Big Tech’s favour.

The Trump administration, for instance, is clearing the way for OpenAI, Google DeepMind and other AI companies to get everything they want with almost no oversight — like quick approvals of nuclear power plants for data centres, access to government data for training, juicy federal contracts, and maybe even a future bailout if and when the bubble pops.

As the situation stands, AI companies are set to become the biggest consumers of journalistic content, and by extension bankrollers and determiners of what is covered, how it is covered, the formats, distribution channels and ultimately what is accessed by the audience, thanks to invisible gatekeepers that are algorithms.

In its social contract with the public, the Forth Estate has always strived to protect its editorial independence, albeit with varying degrees of success, from commercial contamination and interference.

Once Big Tech becomes the biggest consumer of journalistic content, the revered Chinese Wall, the strict separation between the Editorial department and the commercial side of a media organisation, is bound to get eroded (read collapse).

And that looming eventuality raises several concerns. First, what will be the fate of truth and the public’s right to know in such an arrangement? What happens when the largest consumers of journalism, a public good, are also its funders? Who sets editorial ground rules? And who ensures independence when the news becomes part of the model-training pipeline?

Secondly, will the journalism that trains AI remain accountable to the public — or to the platforms? What degree of editorial access or financial fealty will be required to strike content deal deals with AI behemoths? Still on the commercial front, whose shareholders are being enriched and whose are getting squeezed in all this deal-making?

Lastly, will communities, journalists and regulators create the governance scaffolds needed to keep AI-funded news independent? And at what point does the watchdog that is media become an employee of Big Tech? These concerns should force news organisations and publishers to double down on their efforts to define and buttress their protective and sustainability moats in the AI-brokered information landscape.

One way could involve choosing not to play into the hands of the brokers or what I would call Algorithm-proofing. This would involve building a community of readers, watchers, listeners and event-goers who rely on journalistic work so deeply and who find it so meaningful that they seek it out on their own, even as Big Tech makes media reporting harder to find.

As the president of The Economist Luke Bradley recently put it “the Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI ecology is evolving very, very quickly, and it is going to be extremely hard for any brand to get a foothold within that ecology. Actually, the most important thing is to work out how you must survive outside of that ecology.”

Such efforts would include investing in events designed for community connection first, giving the media a chance to convene audiences that include the politically disconnected. More importantly, at the heart of this strategy is a community-first vision that insists journalism deliver value to people, not corporations, even if it means going back to basics like pivoting to print.

At the local level, mission-focused newsrooms should build distribution strategies that prioritise listening, human connection and in-person presence.

But importantly, the Media should start thinking about their bridges, i.e the different ways news can interface effectively with the technological landscape. In other words, news leaders should move beyond defining a unique value proposition and also define a complementary value proposition, naming where journalism, technologies, and in-person ways of building community and sharing information all complement each other.

At publisher, industry, national and continental levels, Media players in the Global South should take deliberate steps to regulate the emerging commercial tyranny of Big Tech, including adopting laws and policies that force the Silicon Valley to pay for content, and limit the editorial roles of bots and algorithms.

And instead of grabbing the news product, Big Tech should also consider external links from AI search boxes. The AI companies could discern user intent, or even particularly high-value queries, and guide certain users back to the sites that provided the initial information.

Misiko is a Digital Journalism Lead, UK Chevening Scholar, Google Journalism AI fellow and Web 3.0 Enthusiast is Nation Media Group's Managing Editor in charge of Content Strategy.