The volatility of referral traffic is nothing new for publishers. Media executives had a lot to say about their frustration with declining traffic in a closed-door town hall session during the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, Colorado, this week — lamenting about everything from trying to make sense of Google’s Search and Discover platforms to the expansion of the tech giant’s AI Overviews feature.

In fact, referral traffic is a hot topic that was discussed at the previous Digiday Publishing Summit.

But this time around the referral traffic talk wasn’t all bad. There were glimmers of positive signs too. For example, some execs shared strategies to help boost referral traffic, such as content formatting. And, believe it or not, some said they were seeing increases in traffic from Meta platforms like Facebook and Threads. Some publishing execs are even daring to ask, is referral traffic coming back?

But the unpredictability of traffic from platforms like Facebook and Google over the years has meant even big upticks come with a healthy dose of skepticism. People weren’t exactly leaping out of their chairs in excitement about the return of Facebook referral traffic.

Here’s what publishing execs had to say at the Digiday Publishing Summit about their referral traffic woes — and wins:

For many, referral traffic is down

“We haven’t seen a big recovery [in social referral traffic] at all, or maybe … we had a tiny bit.”

“We invest a lot of time in fixing [SEO, site page speed, load times], and haven’t seen … the results I thought we were going to see. … We might have seen a 10, 20% bounce. Because my thought was, that means for 20 years we’ve sucked at doing [this]. … We thought that everything was so bad, and if we fix it, we’ll double our traffic back. [That] was naive and unfortunately a waste of time last year from this.”

“In the past two years, we’ve been seeing year-over-year traffic declines. But we’re actually growing revenue in spite of the traffic declines. And the way that we’ve been thinking about it is the top of the funnel is shrinking, but the bottom — we control everything there. So we’ve been working very hard on improving converting users.”

“Reddit has been dropping over the last couple months.”

“[Facebook] offered us a chance four or five months ago to start monetizing it. We’re like, oh, we’ll take that cash. We’re like 500 bucks a month and no traffic.”

But for some, referral traffic is up

“So this is a little tough to measure, because there’s so many variables in good traffic months, and we’ve had some really good SEO months. They seem to coincide with an effort to apply much better content formatting to our stories, [like bullet points, headlines and subheaders].”

“I think the one insight that we do have is adding bullets at the very top of the story does not seem to hurt engagement. I think there was a concern about that. Like, if you give away the whole story at the top, you’re going to lose that sort of scroll up. That doesn’t seem to have happened.”

Are Meta platforms improving?

“We had this automatic posting on Threads where our Instagram got connected and we weren’t even looking at it. Then in January … it just went bonkers. And since then, [our team has] been focusing [on it].”

“We were part of the [Facebook] partner program. But of course, we don’t have conversations with anybody about that. All of a sudden it just shows up. Hey, you’re monetizing this page well. … [Revenue and referral traffic] is actually up a little bit from the worst. The worst was actually last November-ish or so, and I would say it’s up about 30% from there. So there is some positive news on the Facebook front. But it’s still drastically different than it was two years ago, and certainly different than it was six years ago.”

AI’s impact on referral traffic remains to be seen

“I think there was this existential concern that you’re going to see a really big decline in search because of what’s happened with AI. We just haven’t seen that. … People aren’t [using AI tools to look] for local news stories.”

“All this time we’ve been building a product, the value for the product has been for users who have grown up with Google being ubiquitous. But now we’re building for a new audience, where ChatGPT is ubiquitous, and we’re going to change everything about our product for these new users. So that’s the mentality we’re approaching the loss of traffic with.”

“I’d argue that AI Overviews is not actually having an impact on all your traffic as much as search algorithm updates and the paid results — the changes to those themselves for [e-commerce] and various different features on the search results page. We’ve done the test on AI Overviews a number of times, talked to other tech SEOs in the industry, and it’s something like 3 to 8% of search traffic. So if you’re seeing 3 to 8% of your search traffic decline, then yeah, sure, AI Overviews. I don’t think you’re talking about that. I think you’re talking about something much more.”

Google Discover is still a mystery

“We were not in [Google Discover] for a long time. We couldn’t figure out why. We read all the articles on how to do it. We did a lot of different testing, and I think honestly, deleting a lot of old content that was out of date is probably what helped, because some of it might have had light aspects of NSFW around it, and Google wants Discover to be really, really clean.”

“One thing about [Google Discover] is it’s entirely topical based, at least from our understanding. … They have a taxonomy that you can almost figure out by looking sometimes at what they put next to the article. They’ll show you like five little tiles and what it is. So if you’re trying to tackle Discover, I would think use topics as a way to figure out what’s working.”

“What we get from Discover is always very spike-driven. … Those results look a lot different than our other referral sources. But over the course of a year, it’s definitely been like a nice, impactful source of traffic force over the last few years. I still don’t think we totally understand it, and we had to give it slightly different attribution.”

What we’ve heard

“If you ask [Perplexity] about meaningful revenue there, they really can’t answer on it right now. They’re very, very quiet on analytics. … We ultimately ended conversations with Perplexity because it just felt like there wasn’t enough there yet. … But I worry for us that we’re missing a window and I’m super conscious of that.”

— Publishing exec talking about deals with AI tech companies during the Digiday Publishing Summit town hall

Numbers to know

250,000: The number of digital subscribers to the Daily Mail, after expanding its paywall in the U.S. in February.

10: The number of staffers laid off at The Philadelphia Inquirer, eliminating a news desk created as part of the company’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.

473,000: The total social media interactions for The Atlantic’s story on its editor getting added to a chat group with Trump aides discussing a military strike, making it one of the top subscription-driving stories for the publisher.

25%: The salary increase at three North Jersey newspapers owned by Gannett, as part of a two-year contract with those papers’ union.

What we’ve covered

Fast Company and Inc. tighten up paywalls

• Fast Company and Inc. are putting four stories a day behind their paywalls instead of one, in an effort to grow consumer revenue amid traffic volatility, CEO Stephanie Mehta said during the Digiday Publishing Summit.
• Consumer revenue from subscriptions and memberships make up about a third of the publishers’ parent company’s overall revenue.

Read more about how Fast Company and Inc. are working to grow consumer revenue this year here.

Why 1440 prefers CPMs for its newsletter business over other pricing models

• 1440 is currently prioritizing the CPM model for its advertising inventory, charging advertisers a combined CPM of roughly $50, CEO and co-founder Tim Huelskamp said at DPS.
• The newsletter’s audience is currently growing at a rate of roughly one million subscribers per year.

Read more about 1440’s CPM pricing model here.

How AI-powered paywalls and the “Trump bump” are currently shaping the publishing business

• Digiday reporters and editors previewed the hot topics likely to dominate discussions with publishers during DPS.
• High on that list were AI, platform referral traffic and brand safety standards.

Listen to the latest Digiday Podcast episode here.

Traffic referrals from Threads surge for some publishers this year

• This month, social referral traffic has more than doubled as a percentage of Newsweek’s overall referral mix — and close to tripled over the past week. Threads referrals in particular have surged 20-fold since January.
• Publishers like Politico, Forbes and others are also seeing an uptick in Threads referral traffic.

Read more about where publishers are seeing referral traffic improve here.

What we’re reading

Google’s test removing news had no impact on its ad revenue

In a test, Google removed news content from more than 13,000 domains for 1% of users in eight European countries, and found it had “no measurable impact” on its advertising revenue, the Press Gazette reported. News content was removed from search results pages, Google Discover and Google News. Search and display ad revenue did not decline.

YouTube is developing a feature to allow dynamically-inserted, host-read podcast ads

YouTube is testing a feature that will let podcasters dynamically insert host-read ads into their podcast videos on the platform, Semafor reported. This would let podcasters monetize their podcasts on YouTube, which is already available to podcasters on platforms like Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Yahoo sells TechCrunch to investment firm Regent

Yahoo is selling its 20-year-old tech news site TechCrunch to private equity firm Regent, TechCrunch reported. The company had also bought PCWorld, Macworld and TechAdvisor earlier last week.

Ziff Davis buys TheSkimm

Ziff Davis bought newsletter focused company TheSkimm, Axios reported. It will sit under the company’s health and wellness arm Everyday Health Group, and co-CEOs Danielle Weisberg and Carly Zakin and their full-time employees will remain part of the company.

Bluesky makes it easier for publishers to track referrals

Bluesky, a competitor to X, has made it easier for publishers to track traffic coming from links on the platform to their sites, TechCrunch reported. Publishers can now see that referral traffic through Bluesky’s “go” subdomain.