📥 Hello, and greetings from the Central Office
January saw meaningful progress across multiple plugins, including PDA Magic Link, PDA Protect WordPress Videos, and PPWP Group Plugin. The team resolved PHP warnings, released updated versions, and coordinated structured testing across multiple PHP environments.
A strong emphasis was placed on reproducibility, version specific testing, and clear QA feedback loops to ensure stability before release.
Outcome: cleaner builds, fewer warnings, and more confident releases across our plugin ecosystem. 🔧
Publishers Train the AI, Lose the Revenue
The Economics Are Brutal
ChatGPT now serves 300 million weekly active users with AI-generated answers that synthesize publisher content without sending clicks. When ads launch, OpenAI captures 100% of that advertising revenue. Publishers who created the underlying content get zero. This isn't a revenue share-it's a complete value transfer.
Publishers cannot opt out without consequences. Blocking OpenAI's crawlers means losing visibility in ChatGPT's answers entirely. Allowing access means training the system that replaces your traffic. Google created the same trap: Googlebot crawls for both search indexing and AI training. You cannot separate them.
The distribution model has inverted. Traditional search sent users to publisher sites where publishers controlled the ad inventory and user experience. AI answers keep users inside the platform. OpenAI owns the interface, the user relationship, and now the advertising. Publishers become invisible content suppliers in their own value chain.
Infrastructure Ownership Is the Only Defense
Publishers who control their own distribution-email lists, membership systems, direct reader relationships-can bypass platform dependency entirely. A newsletter with 10,000 subscribers generates revenue whether or not AI platforms scrape the content. A membership site behind authentication walls trains no models.
The pattern repeats across platforms. Facebook promised traffic, then changed the algorithm. Google promised search visibility, then added AI overviews that answer questions without clicks. Now ChatGPT promises "exposure" while monetizing your content directly. Each platform follows the same playbook: attract content, build audience, capture revenue.
Question for you: If AI platforms monetize your content without compensation, why are you still optimizing for their crawlers instead of building owned distribution channels?
75 AI copyright lawsuits now filed as YouTubers sue Snap, music publishers file second Anthropic case. Two new cases in January bring total AI copyright litigation to ~75. YouTubers allege Snap scraped YouTube videos for AI training without licensing. Music publishers claim Anthropic downloaded from pirate sites like Library Genesis. For WordPress publishers: every AI company now faces legal risk for unlicensed training data.
Google exploring opt-out for AI Overviews after UK regulator pressure. No timeline or specs, but Google acknowledges gap in current controls. Publishers can block AI training (Google-Extended) or snippets everywhere (nosnippet), but can't selectively opt out of AI Overviews while staying in regular search. 79% of top news sites already block AI bots-this would formalize that choice.
AI platforms now measure 'utility' separately from human relevance-your content can score high on one, zero on the other. New research shows LLMs evaluate content differently than humans do. A page can solve a real problem for readers but get ignored by AI answer engines because it lacks extractable signals. Classic SEO metrics miss this gap. For publishers: 'quality' is no longer universal-you need separate strategies for human traffic and AI citations.
Apple reinstates November 2026 deadline forcing Patreon to route all iOS subscriptions through App Store. Third policy reversal in 18 months. Apple demands 30% cut of all iOS subscriptions despite only 4% of Patreon creators still using legacy billing. Patreon proposed compromise tools-Apple declined. For membership sites: platform fees aren't negotiable, and deadlines shift without warning even when compliance affects tiny user segments.
The creator economy's dirty secret: most creators earn less than a junior employee while platforms capture the majority of value through fees, algorithmic distribution control, and data ownership. WordPress creators who own their infrastructure keep more-but only if they can drive their own traffic.
Michael
Operator @WP Folio - now WP Defense Lab. Same Plugins. Different Name.