Louis Dreyfus, the ceo of Le Monde, explained that he decided to sign deals with AI companies to allow them use the French newspaper’s content because they were doing it anyway.
Speaking at WAN-IFRA’s Digital Media India conference in Chennai last week, Dreyfus said: “You can put a sign on your lawn that says ‘Please don’t walk on the lawn’. But do you think that people don’t walk on your lawn?”
He said that this being the case, the business wanted some compensation and secured “very significant revenue” from its deal with OpenAI. It has also proved “a strong source of new subscriptions”.
He added that another consideration was making sure Le Monde had a presence on platforms that “will be the main source of information for the younger generation”.
Le Monde is using OpenAI to help it with translations for its English language edition – which has grown since 2022 to have 12,000 subscribers; for text to speech; UX ideation; and reader feedback analysis.
Through a separate deal with Perplexity, it has built an answer engine trained on Le Monde content.
Dreyfus said that Le Monde’s overall attitude towards the platforms was they are an opportunity but also a risk. “We will leverage them, while keeping an eye on our reliance,” he said.
Le Monde now has 660,000 subscribers – 90% of them digital – and is on course for reader revenue to be able to support the newsroom at its current size in two years’ time, said Dreyfus.
The publisher is also looking at other ways of raising revenues. Dreyfus said it had recently launched Le Monde Insights, a FT Strategies-like way of providing digital strategy consultancy services to other publishers based on what Le Monde itself has learnt.
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