Services powered by artificial intelligence (AI) have become “an easy scapegoat” for news publishers to blame for their decreasing reader numbers, a leading media executive has said at Web Summit, with changes in more traditional online algorithms acting as the “main function” behind the decline.
“We don’t see any loss of subscriptions because of AI – we are still increasing our portfolio of subscribers,” said Louis Dreyfus, the group chief executive of Le Monde, which publishes in both English and French.
“We don’t explain a decrease in audience with AI, the change in algorithm discovery is the main function in the decrease – but not AI,” Dreyfus, who has worked for the French newspaper since 2010, added.
The new technology “offers an easy scapegoat for the publisher to say ‘it’s not us, it’s AI’” when addressing the industry’s challenges, he said.
Le Monde holds a multiyear licensing agreement and training programme with OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, to allow the chatbot to access the newspaper’s archives and current reporting when responding to questions and prompts.
“This agreement is historic as it is the first signed between a French media organisation and a major player in this nascent industry,” the publisher wrote in a 2024 statement announcing the deal. It “is further recognition of the reliability of the work of our editorial team”, it added.
Speaking to hundreds of Web Summit attendees on Tuesday, Dreyfus continued: “What we’ve seen with our partnership with, let’s say for example, OpenAI [is] we use this new audience that is coming from ChatGPT to Le Monde, because there was an answer made with Le Monde or Le Monde was quoted in it. They’re coming to us and it’s converting into subscriptions.”
Pointing to the results, he said ChatGPT has attracted far more subscriptions than traditional online services: “Thirteen times more than those coming from Google search, 26 times more than Facebook and 250 times more than Discover”, a Google mobile initiative.
“It’s working for us. It’s giving us a fantastic opportunity to add an additional stream of new subscribers. That’s why I’m quite optimistic about it,” Dreyfus continued.
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The organisation, founded in 1944 that remains one of France’s most widely-read national daily newspapers, released their 2025 financial accounts in July this year. They showed growth for the 10th year in a row, with €306 million in revenue and €11.5 million in pretax profits.
“We are lucky enough that 75 per cent of our revenue comes from readers,” Dreyfus said. “If at some point in that, the reader thinks that what they are reading is made not by a human, but by an AI model … the whole industry understands that risk, it’s the main difficulty faced by us”.
