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This week’s Media Briefing looks at what publishers attending the Digiday Publishing Summit Europe had to say about the existential threat of site traffic losses and AI search tools encroaching on their businesses.

• Publishers have lost hope that traffic will ever bounce back
• Google Discover promotes fake news articles, Boston Globe launches paywall, and more.

Publishers have lost hope that traffic will ever bounce back

Call it complaining, call it doom and gloom. Whatever you call it, publishers spent the majority of the  closed-door town hall session at the Digiday Publishing Summit Europe in Lisbon, Portugal on Monday (Oct. 27) griping about the impact of Google search volatility and AI summarization tools on their site traffic and businesses.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. This topic has been the focus of DPS town hall discussions for the past year. But this year, it got existential real fast.

This week’s Media Briefing will include the key comments that demonstrate where publishers are now as the threat of “zero-click” search looms. Next week’s edition will focus on the solutions – and, believe it or not, the optimism – that some publishers are adopting now as they face the music. 

Publishing execs spoke in a closed-door town hall session under Chatham House rules so Digiday could share what was said while maintaining executives’ anonymity. Here are the highlights:

On the state of Google referral traffic

“It’s disappeared. It’s not there. If you just look at the sheer amount of search queries on Google every day, and you open the window and you do it like a month or longer, the kind of volume we used to have from which we could benefit, has just disappeared. And so it’s impossible to capitalize on certain events in the same way you did before, because there’s just not enough people looking for it, for you to take a bite of that traffic. That’s just it.”

“It’s not the last twelve months, it’s the last two months. The last upgrade… the change Google made, has just decimated Google traffic. To my mind, permanently. It’s not coming back… You look at the screen when you search for Google, you don’t see the listings anymore. You see the snippet or the overview, or a couple of Wikipedia bits, even a couple of pictures.”

“I don’t want my content in an AI snippet. It doesn’t do me any good. My sites are ad driven. That’s where revenue comes from…. What benefit is that to me? Absolutely zero.”

“Some of our sites are through the floor. CPMs are just flattish. They’re coming back but they’re seasonal. It’s not getting any better because there’s less traffic out there. It’s just not brilliant. We’re lucky. We’ll still be around in 12 months, we know that, because we’ve got good direct traffic and good social traffic… We have 60% direct traffic. Can’t touch that… But a lot of people who rely purely on Google search for their traffic will not be here in probably six months, let alone 12.” 

“Google uses the same scraper that they use for search for AI right now, so we can’t close it off. It’s still 25% of our traffic versus 65% in previous years, so it’s gone down a lot. But we can’t cut off that source.”

More questions than answers

“We’ve seen massive decline in e-commerce… The era of free customers coming to our sites is obviously diminishing.”

“The only way for you to actually capture people is through news aggregators… Diversification strategies are the only way that you can go right now, because things that used to work for you don’t work anymore… It’s just squeezing publishers.”

“Its all based on interest. It’s not based on brands anymore. We all want to make subscription models. If you’re not The New York Times, it’s hard… The kind of content we have isn’t worth a subscription.”

“You’re asking us, who have been squeezed for decades from tech companies that have been taking everything they want and need from us without paying us, how to fix problems they’ve never helped us fix, that we don’t have the skills or the mindset to fix.”

“We need more former journalists to work in the commercial teams. The reality of the diminishing returns, diminishing audience – we have to tap people so much harder to be able to just continue to fund our business models, particularly if subscription is not an option for whatever reason. And what we were talking about in terms of a compelling user experience that’s going to help users habituate towards brands and gravitate to them, it gets just so hard. It gets so hard to balance those two objectives.” It’s almost like very commercial teams that have the sentiment that, oh, if you want our product, you’ve just got to suffer this. And that’s the cart before the horse.”

Smaller publishers at risk

“Over the next six or 18 months, I think there’s a real threat for a lot of smaller publishers. I don’t know how we resolve that… Big AI players will pay big publishers, but there’s a whole long tail of publishers.”

“We’re tiny compared to you guys. We’re not going to get any money direct, not in a million years. If we all group together, we possibly got a chance of getting a little bit.”

“This is fundamental, structural change that people are going to have to adapt to, and I’m not sure that many people are prepared to, or in many cases, can afford to. That’s the problem.”

AI search tools = no clicks?

“If you look at ChatGPT… they’re not going to click. They’re not going to come back to the site. That’s not what they’re there for and that’s not their behavior… You just can’t expect your business to survive and thrive solely on an expectation that you can show up in a ChatGPT and it all will be resolved. It won’t… You have to place your bets in numerous places.”

“The user behavior is going to change toward a world where traffic is not the thing. We still need to provide the information for these people to actually make their decisions or be informed… what’s our role in that? Just contributing with citations to models? For me, that’s the big question.”

“I think it’s definitely worth investing in GEO. We just don’t know the value of a citation yet in the same way that we are really well equipped to understand the value of a blue link referral.”

What we’ve heard

“I don’t think we should be relying on any of those browsers or those [large tech companies] to do anything other than look after themselves, first and foremost. We have to do the best that we can to ensure that we have a space to play on those browsers.”

– The Sun’s evp and publisher Dominic Carter onstage at DPS Europe, on the new AI browsers from OpenAI and Microsoft.

Numbers to know

$30 million: The revenue Condé Nast is expected to make from its Vogue World livestream event.

$6.99: The price of CNN’s latest streaming service, following the closure of a previous version in 2022.

45%: The percentage of AI responses that contained at least one significant error, in new research from the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and the BBC.

1,200: The number of games journalists that have left the media in the last two years.

What we’ve covered

The Financial Times’ AI paywall drove conversions up 290%

• After nearly a year of running its AI paywall, the FT’s focus is shifting to retention with a new model, due early next year.
• Since the paywall launched in January, the FT has seen conversion rates jump 290% and lifetime value rise between 7% and 10%.

Read the DPSE session recap here.

The Sun is building an AI agent for its programmatic business

• The News Corp-owned British tabloid newspaper is building an AI agent for its programmatic advertising business.
• Seeing new developments and demand for agentic media trading from Scope3 and WPP, The Sun’s evp and publisher Dominic Carter said he wants to develop an in-house AI agent that can communicate directly with a buy-side AI agent.

Read the DPSE session recap here.

Ringier’s editorial advisor: the next editors-in-chief might come from audience development

• As Ringier rethinks what its future newsrooms should look like, a provocative idea is on the table: future editors-in-chief might come from audience development, not traditional journalism. 
• The idea is being pushed by Dmitry Shishkin, the Swiss media group’s editorial advisor, who is helping the company figure out how to rebuild its editorial structure for the next era.

Read the DPSE session recap here.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince: Google must ‘play by the same rules’ as other AI companies

• In recent meetings with the U.K.’s regulator, Prince’s goal is to prove why Google must completely separate its AI and search crawlers.
• In a year when AI crawlers are reshaping distribution, Prince has become publishers’ most practical ally.

Read the Q&A with Prince here.

What we’re reading

Google promotes fake content on Discover news platform

Fake news stories from phoney news publishers have been viewed tens of millions of times this week on Google Discover, according to Press Gazette.

Boston Globe launches paywall

The Boston Globe has launched a metered paywall, offering a digital and print subscription that costs $5 a month.

Warner Bros. Discovery hangs up “for sale” sign

Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav has brought on bankers and lawyers in response to a wave of interest and offers to buy (all or part of) the media company, Bloomberg reported.

Times of London pulls story featuring quotes from someone impersonating former New York mayor

The Times of London pulled an article that featured quotes from someone who claimed to be former New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, The New York Times reported.

The New York Times launches TikTok-like short-form video tab

The New York Times unveiled a new tab in its app to serve as a mobile-native destination for vertical video, Adweek reported.