This Media Briefing covers the latest in media trends for Digiday+ members and is distributed over email every Thursday at 10 a.m. ET. More from the series →

This week’s Media Briefing looks at publishers spending more to win back readers as search referrals slip and AI eats clicks, leaning on ads, arbitrage and AI-boosted marketing to stay visible.

• Some publishers worry the free traffic era is diminishing, so they’re turning to paid audience acquisition tactics to keep audiences coming
• Axel Springer CEO looks for his next deal, The New York Times introduces a vertical video feed and more.

The era of readers coming to sites for ‘free’ is ‘diminishing’

It’s getting harder for publishers to get traffic from organic search. For some publishers, that means they have to spend more money to get people to come to their sites, through paid audience acquisition tactics – like ads to promote their content – and traffic arbitrage.

Publishers didn’t mince words when they described the pain of declining search referral traffic at the Digiday Publishing Summit Europe last month. Less traffic means fewer eyeballs to serve ads to – an existential threat to some publishers’ businesses. 

The solution for some is to buy traffic and lean more heavily on their marketing teams to find ways to crawl back some of the traffic they’ve lost from Google search volatility and AI tools chipping away at their organic search click-throughs. 

“I think the era of free customers coming to our sites is obviously diminishing. So it’s about how do we look at paid-for methods?” said one publisher in a closed-door town hall session at the DPSE event in Lisbon, Portugal.

Publishing execs spoke during that town hall under Chatham House rules so Digiday could share what was said while maintaining executives’ anonymity. 

Calling on marketing teams for help

Marketing teams are core to publishers’ subscription businesses, combining audience data, brand storytelling and performance campaigns to convert readers into subscribers. But now those teams are being looped into broader strategies to drive more eyeballs to content as it becomes increasingly difficult to get people to their sites.

“We’ve never had a marketing department that does customer acquisition because we’ve always relied on getting them for free. That’s the problem, that’s the change that is coming,” said one publishing exec during the town hall.

But it’s not an ideal scenario, the exec added. It means publishers have to weigh the costs of upping marketing budgets with the revenue they can make from more impressions that come from greater scale.

“We’re going to be forced down that road,” the exec said. “It feels like you’re going to need a war chest of budgets to be able to go out and compete… Obviously you don’t want all your customers that way, because it’s not going to be very profitable at all.”

Publishers are (begrudgingly) paying for traffic 

There’s nothing new about traffic arbitrage – or when publishers buy traffic from one source and redirect it to their website to earn more ad revenue than the cost of that traffic, usually through ad networks or paid social media ads. Even if publishers don’t like to openly admit they do it.

But now it may be an unavoidable way for some publishers to keep their audience numbers up, as organic traffic becomes a less reliable means to scale. 

“We all as publishers need to get good at buying traffic, because that’s going to be essentially one of the biggest ways of getting traffic,” said one publishing exec.

As traffic referrals dry up, arbitrage has “become kind of a tactical element to our audience acquisition mix,” another exec said in the town hall. “We’re trying to bridge the gap a little bit with arbitrage.”

But execs in the town hall worried that traffic arbitrage may just be a band-aid for the bigger problem: that user behavior is going to change with AI search tools, and that at some point people may no longer need to click through to a site at all to get the information they need, if they’re getting it all from an AI-generated summary.

“We’re finding new sources of referrals, but it’s not super sustainable. I don’t know within a year or two, how that’s going to work out,” one exec said.

Paid ads are helping offset traffic losses

One aspect of traffic arbitrage is paying for ads to promote content on social and other platforms. Publishing execs said they are spending more money on paid ads – but it’s a careful calculation.

Ironically, what’s partly to blame for publishers’ referral traffic declines is also helping to improve the performance of paid ads: AI.

“From a paid perspective, where you’re trying to get visibility by your ads, we’ve seen huge growth because the ad products are just getting better with AI… It can get you better, cheaper visibility than you could [get] setting up these ads manually five years ago,” one publishing exec said.

AI tools that help make it easier to create and optimize ads can also help smaller publishers, which are arguably more at risk of losing out from the referral traffic crisis and don’t have large marketing budgets to test performance marketing campaigns, the exec said.

“If you are a small publisher, [you think], ‘I can’t hire a performance marketing expert, or I cannot dedicate or carve out some of the art teams to do performance marketing assets.’ They don’t have the time to generate animations, static images, 50 different cut downs… to test across all these different platforms,” they said.

The exec said their company has been able to test campaigns with a “really, really low, always-on” approach (£20 – or $26 – a day, for example, they said). When they design an ad that really resonates, with the help of AI tools, the cost per click for that “hero creative” is “incredible,” they added.

“It’s never going to be as cheap as Google Ads, but the intent is far higher. So even if that person they drive through to the site [doesn’t] subscribe that time, that doesn’t mean that’s a lost piece of value. That’s the first time they’re exposed to that brand,” the exec said.

What we’ve heard

“The decision to engage advisors at this point was really in response to the level of inbound interest… We’re going to consider all opportunities, so that could be sales, that could be investments, that could be spin offs.”

– Ziff Davis CEO Vivek Shah on hiring advisors to look at selling assets, in the company’s third-quarter earnings call.

Numbers to know

11%: The decline in BuzzFeed’s advertising revenue in Q3 2025, compared to the same quarter last year.

11%: The growth in The Wall Street Journal’s digital-only subscriptions, to over 4.2 million average subscriptions.

$67.3 million: The amount Ziff Davis has spent on seven acquisitions this year.

$1 billion: The amount President Trump threatened to sue the BBC for if it didn’t pull a documentary that he claims contains disingenuous edits of a speech he delivered on January 6, 2021.

What we’ve covered

Publishers swap traffic angst for strategy in Q3 earnings

• The tone has flipped: instead of lamenting lost clicks, publishers are outlining where and how they’re building sustainable growth.
• Execs from five different publishers (including People Inc., News Corp, The New York Times, USA Today Co. and Ziff Davis) detailed how they’re future-proofing against traffic erosion – investing in video, direct-to-audience strategies, and AI licensing plays – in their recent earnings calls.

Read more here.

Daily Mail says Google AI Overviews have killed click-throughs

• When a Google AI Overview is triggered, the Daily Mail is seeing almost no clickthroughs from that search keyword.
• The average clickthrough rate is 80-90% lower when an AI Overview is triggered  compared to when no AI Overview is present – a sharp drop from the 56% lower CTR in May 2025.

Read the DPSE recap here.

AP makes its archive AI-ready to tap the enterprise RAG boom

• The Associated Press is structuring its archive so enterprise LLMs can reliably ground, cite and pay for decades of reporting. 
• It’s a strategy that should secure AP’s future as an information data repository for the AI era, and widen its customer base to include more enterprise clients by meeting their AI needs.

Read more here.

Inside Reuters’ agentic AI video experiment 

• Reuters is experimenting with using an AI agent to speed up its video production process. The publisher has hired its first AI video producer.
• The idea is the AI agent would help with the more basic and time-consuming video edits.

Read the DPSE recap here.

News Corp explores multi-LLM licensing playbook

• News Corp is scoping out the potential for a multi-licensing LLM portfolio strategy.
• CEO Robert Thomson described the media group’s strategy as a “woo and sue” approach, and was understood to be directly negotiating with the LLM players.

Read more here.

What we’re reading

As AI sweeps through newsrooms, what (or who) will it replace?

As AI transforms newsrooms, journalists and media execs have to figure out how this technology can help the reporting process, while balancing ethical, legal and labor issues, The New York Times reported.

Axel Springer CEO is chasing his next deal

Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner is on the hunt for more media deals, and has said the company would be open to selling some of its media brands for the right offer, Semafor reported.

The New York Times introduces vertical video tab

The New York Times has introduced a new “Watch” tab in its app with a vertical video feed, as the publisher pushes to make video a core part of its product and deepen user engagement on its own platforms, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Time launches new AI agent

Time has launched an AI agent that lets people ask questions and generate text summaries and audio briefs from its archive of content, a product designed to deepen reader engagement, Axios reported.

Entrepreneur magazine sues Meta over AI training

Entrepreneur Media has sued Meta for allegedly misusing its work to train the tech company’s AI systems, joining the growing list of publishers that are pursuing legal action to protect their content from being used by AI without their permission.