IAB AI Scraping Legislation, Audio is Found Time, & More

IAB AI Scraping Legislation, Audio is Found Time, & More

February 5, 2026

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A Few Notes About Fixing Conference Panels by Tom Webster

Tom Webster has moderated his fair share of conference panels, and often agrees to do so when invited. With such experience, he shares the concepts he believes make the difference between an unsuccessful panel (a montage of random ‘clips’ of information) and an engaging one that leaves the audience better off. 

Core to the Webster methodology is approaching panel moderation the same as someone giving a speech solo. He collects all of his guests’ notes, intended talking points, and sketches out a narrative that is effectively a talk he’s giving, but the guests are the ones actually speaking. With that narrative arc in place beforehand, he can prepare tons of questions so he has a selection of quality directions to steer conversation without needing to write new ones on the fly. 

A lot of questions will never be used, but the handful that do afford more time and brainpower to actually listen to the speakers and adjust accordingly. Also, he pitches a simple yet powerful mentality: the panel moderator is an advocate for the audience, not the speakers on stage. As such, the moderation the title implies is vital.

“Be merciless about protecting the audience’s time. The audience paid to be there, one way or another, and they are your responsibility. If a panelist veers off-topic or starts into a sales pitch, I am merciless. Absolutely merciless. Never be afraid to cut off windbags and quickly redirect. Your audience will love you for it, and it is the single biggest source of positive comments I get on panels I moderate. A firm but polite interruption is just the ticket.” 

A bland panel is forgettable, but if a moderator puts the time and effort into preparation beforehand, it can become a well-oiled machine that creates a valuable and memorable story the audience will remember long after leaving the room. 

 

Audio Is the Only Medium We Can Consume in Parallel by Nick Cicero

Cicero starts off strong with a simple notion: audio podcasts exploded into popularity thanks to them filling time that already existed, not demanding net-new time to enjoy. Audio can scale on time substitution (chores, commutes, exercise) while video podcasts are scaling on time competition, having to compete for watch-time with video games, movies, live sports, social scrolling, video essays, anything visually-engaging. Audio courts parallel consumption, video promotes serial consumption, and traditional TV promotes programmed serial consumption. 

The trick is that video podcasting works best in spikes. A quote from the article:

“When Netflix licenses shows like Pardon My Take or Spittin’ Chiclets, it’s not making a bet on podcasts. It’s making a bet on habitual programming.

  • Daily or near-daily cadence
  • Studio-based formats
  • Clear visual grammar
  • Predictable attention patterns

That’s not podcast logic. That’s channel logic. Netflix doesn’t need more episodes. It needs repeatable attention engines that behave like TV without the cost of TV.” 

A play that might help with the platform’s ebbing presence in the Luminate 2025 Year-End Film & TV Report, in combination with their increased focus on licensing YouTube content from creators like Ms. Rachel and Mark Rober.

 

IAB Releases Draft Legislation Addressing AI Scraping

The new proposed draft, titled AI Accountability for Publishers Act, aims to address the large-scale scraping of publisher content for training data. Here’s a quote from IAB President David Cohen’s official statement:

“The proposed language released today is designed to protect publishers from AI companies becoming unjustly enriched. Unjust enrichment is a straightforward concept: if someone receives a benefit at your expense, it would be unfair for them to keep it without paying for it. This concept is so fundamental that it has literally been around since the Romans. That’s why we have built our proposed language around the concept of unjust enrichment. It’s basic fairness: you take my content, you pay for it.”  

Speaking of the proposed language, that draft is available here as a four-page PDF.

 

The Longest Shortest Time(s) by Eric Nuzum

A profile of Hillary Frank, host and creator of the podcast The Longest Shortest Time. A unique story in that Frank was a successful podcaster early in the industry, having launched her show in 2010. After a successful Kickstarter campaign, partnership with WNYC, and eventually signing to Stitcher, she had a consistently sold-out ad inventory through to retiring the show in 2019. Now she’s back, and finding things are much different seven years later. 

The Longest Shortest Time still was able to sell out ad inventory immediately and find sponsorships easily, but at much lower rates than a decade ago. Since she last sat behind the mic, minimum guarantees have faded from memory, CPMs are lower, and she’s flying solo. Even her successful feed is considered less-so as her last benchmark for “good” numbers was formed before iOS17 course-corrected the download as a metric. 

Back in the Stitcher days she had a support staff and a producer to help out, now Frank finds herself fully DIY. With the industry having shifted out of the “dumb money” early era, the middle class of podcasting (shows that, by most metrics, are “successful”) finds itself downgraded as a gulf widens between “hobbyist” and “big” podcasting. A show transplanted from 2019 can’t sustain the production capabilities it had in 2019 because, as much success as the industry has had, several resources that specifically benefitted the middle-ground podcaster have dried up. 

As for the rest of the news…