One-and-done needs to be done if publishers hope to survive in the current media landscape.
In recent years, many online media brands—including leading newspaper and magazine publishers—developed an unhealthy dependency on search and social referrals to grow their audiences. New visitors could stop by once for a quick look-around and publishers were content to sell ads against those eyeballs while they had them.
And while there was long a nagging sense that this audience-growth-at-all-costs mentality was a race to the bottom, it was easy to stuff that queasy feeling down as long as traffic and ad dollars continued to flow.
Search sites and social platforms are increasingly changing their monetization models and tweaking algorithms, dramatically reducing the amount of traffic they drive from organic searches to publishers’ sites.
Google made several updates to its search algorithm in the last year that led to declines in publishers’ search referrals and organic traffic.
In September, Chartbeat reported that social traffic fell from 6% to 4% of total traffic for U.S. news publishers between January 2023 and July 2024, and that during the same period , traffic from external sources that are neither social nor search rose from 16% to 20%. A Digiday/Arc XP survey of 115 publishers found that 80% saw search traffic declines in 2023.
“Unfortunately, the outlook on referral traffic isn’t getting any better,” AdExchanger wrote after Google updated its algorithm in November 2023. “Search and social platforms are taking a more oppositional stance with publishers as they try to keep users from leaving their own walled gardens.”
AI-powered searches are expected to further drive down traffic since they often deliver valuable results without having to link through to the articles they sourced. And Google recently cracked down on the use of affiliate partnerships by several prominent news sites, reducing their visibility even more.
Speaking of AI, if you ask ChatGTP to sum up the publishing industry’s over-reliance on digital traffic sources, you get a pretty clear answer: “Historically, organic search has been a major driver of traffic to digital publishers. It’s often the largest single source, particularly for those that produce SEO-optimized content like news sites, blogs, and how-to guides.”
Search can account for 30%-to-50% of total traffic for digital publishers, according to some estimates, while referrals from social media can make up another 10% to 20%.
As the head of product at a leading magazine company said in a recent call, “One and gone” visitors are his biggest headache. “I need to drive engagement, not maximize audience reach.” Other publishing executives echoed that sentiment, saying they need to shift their business models to lessen the dependency on referral traffic.
Publishers Get Engaged
It’s stunning that some of the most well-known brands in publishing took this long to realize the damage they were doing to the reputation of franchises that were painstakingly built and nurtured over decades to win reader (and advertiser) loyalty.
Imagine publishing a cooking magazine that once sold millions of newsstand copies and annual subscriptions to an audience that valued the brand’s point of view and trusted its voice. Today, that same magazine brand relies on random searchers to click a link before stopping by to grab a recipe then disappearing back into the digital ether.
The good news is, publishers are awake to the challenge now, and taking action. For many, engagement has replaced audience growth as the top priority. They’re looking to increase time spent on site and repeat visits. They’re developing premium subscription models, community memberships and experiential offerings to diversify their revenue streams.
Having seen the success of The New York Times, many are also turning to games to create daily habits (with mixed results to date—there’s only one Wordle). The New Yorker and The Los Angeles Times are among those that have introduced or beefed up their games offerings, while Netflix, Buzzfeed and YouTube have all created dedicated hubs filled with casual games.
Publishers are also launching newsletters, podcasts and live events to get audiences to spend more time with them and come back more often. And new players are entering the market with business models that eschew reliance on building large audiences to attract advertising.
Vox Media, parent to such sites as Curbed and Eater, has become a Top 10 podcast publisher. The New York Times reported earlier this year that startups such as Puck, Ankler and Semafor “exemplify a shift in the conventional wisdom about how to make money in digital publishing.” Each targets specific audiences and relies on subscriptions, sponsorships, podcasts and events to diversify their revenue sources.
Whether these tactics will succeed remains to be seen, and of course what works for some will not work for all. But after years of warnings to publishers that growth at all costs actually came at a steep cost, there’s a renewed focus on brand health and audience engagement, retention and loyalty.
Source: As Audiences Decline, Publishers Turn To Games, Podcasts & Events
