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This week’s Media Briefing looks at why publishers are adding vertical video feeds to their websites and apps in an effort to boost audience engagement and video advertising dollars.

• Another pivot to video
• Business Insider quietly lowers paywall, Politico management found to have violated union’s AI adoption safeguards, and more.

Another pivot to video

It may seem like publishers are “pivoting to video” all over again, with news outlets like Time, CNN, The New York Times adding more vertical video to their sites and apps in the last few months.

But it’s different this time around. The big push into video production 10 years ago was centered on distribution to social media platforms, following Facebook’s shift to prioritizing video content. Now, publishers are focused on adding more vertical video feeds to their own properties as a defensive play against two shifts they can’t ignore: audiences now spend much of their time inside Tik-Tok-style feeds and the creator economy increasingly dominates where people get news and information. 

In short: it’s both an audience engagement and an ad revenue play. Publishers are competing with social platforms for attention and combating traffic losses from AI tools. Many people prefer to get their news from creators and social platforms. A fifth (21%) of adults in the U.S. and more than a third of those under 30 years old (37%) regularly get news from creators or influencers, according to a Pew Research Center study. Adults under 35 who use social media are more likely to consume news from creators (48%) than from mainstream media (41%), according to a Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism report.

For some publishers like Time and Recurrent Ventures, video ad revenue will be one of – if not the – biggest growth driver of their businesses in 2026.

“Content is king, and the king of content is video,” said Brian Binder, senior director of TV, audio and display innovation at performance marketing agency Tinuiti.

By running more vertical video, publishers hope to attract more advertising dollars from marketers accustomed to buying ads in a vertical, short-form format on social. Ad spend in the creator economy has more than doubled since 2021, to $29.5 billion in 2024, according to the IAB. A recent report found creator economy ad spend is projected to reach $37 billion in 2025, a 26% increase year over year and about four times faster than the media industry overall.

Binder is seeing a lot of testing in vertical video ad formats from both publishers and advertisers on news sites right now. Vertical video is “not just [for] a social media platform, but it’s just how we’re consuming content and information in general. With that growing, you’re going to see more time spent on site, which then could open up more inventory for the publishers to help drive additional revenue down the line,” Binder said.

Publishers are investing heavily in vertical video because that’s where audiences already are – scrolling through short-form content feeds like Reels, TikToks and YouTube Shorts, Binder said. The data backs that up: Nearly three-quarters of Americans watch news videos online – (61%) use social media or YouTube to do so.

News publishers add vertical video feeds

Time is working with ad tech company Media.net to produce vertical videos on nearly every article page. It is among several publishers – including People Inc., TMB and Hearst – that have started testing these videos, called “Bytes,” on their pages this year, tweaking different formats, placements and designs.

“Media companies need to rise to the experience that consumers expect,” said Time chief operating officer Mark Howard. “The hope is that the more of us that are out there doing it, the advertising marketplace gets more comfortable with that and that it becomes more prevalent on more direct media buys.”

Howard told Digiday that Time’s video ad sales will be the “biggest growth driver” for the business next year. When asked how much ad revenue he expects from these videos, he said “a lot,” declining to give specifics. (In 2025, Time’s advertising revenue grew 22% year over year, according to a memo from Time CEO Jessica Sibley.)

The videos appear after the second paragraph on most of Time’s articles to get the most eyeballs, according to Howard. So far, “engagement time is far greater than people that were just consuming text-based content on a webpage,” he said, although he wouldn’t provide specific figures.

Media.net, a contextual ad network, also sells programmatic ads against the video inventory. Time will also sell ads directly. The video ads are sold at a premium CPM price, 25-40 percent more than standard display ads, Howard said. Ninety percent of U.S. consumers are open to watching TikTok-style vertical clips on publishers’ sites, and clips under 60 seconds deliver roughly 2.5 times higher engagement, according to a recent survey from Media.net.

Time sells vertical video ads as part of larger media sponsorships around its franchises (such as Person of the Year and Time 100), Howard added. “Each of those franchises already have offsite video, so now we can bolster the size of the program by also offering that same inventory but onsite.”

Meanwhile, on Nov. 10, CNN added a vertical video feed at the top of its mobile app. Users can toggle between the headlines of the day on the home screen and a swipeable, TikTok-like video experience called “Shorts,” which features breaking news coverage and on-the-ground reporting from top journalists and sources, as well as videos in other topics like lifestyle.

“We’ve lowered friction for users – there’s no need to rotate your screen or search,” said Alex MacCallum, evp of digital products and services of CNN Worldwide. Most of CNN’s audience consumes its content on mobile, she noted.

“In general, we have seen that users who watch video on our digital experiences spend far more time with us than those who do not,” MacCallum said. The goal is to reach audiences “who are drawn to short-form, mobile-friendly, video-first content,” she added. CNN plans to look into monetization opportunities for the vertical video feed, according to MacCallum.

The New York Times’ Watch tab for vertical video content, which debuted last month, is ripe for video advertising opportunities, Tusar Barik, New York Times Advertising’s svp of marketing, told Digiday back in October. While it remains unclear what this would look like, Barik said video ads were a key growth area for the Times next year, including in vertical video ad formats. 

Recurrent CEO Andrew Perlman said all of the company’s business growth is in video and experiential, and the company has doubled down on expanding video production and distribution both on its own platform and on social (particularly on YouTube, where most of its viewership comes from). Average watch time across its videos has doubled from 6.5 minutes two years ago to 13 minutes now, he said. 

Beefing up O&O platforms

The investment in video is also a way to insulate themselves from AI search tools putting pressure on web traffic, according to Perlman. But shifting Tik-Tok-native news consumers into a publisher’s own video feed won’t be easy, so these efforts aren’t likely to fix the referral traffic problem. What they can do is deepen engagement among existing audiences, deliver news in the format people increasingly prefer and create new inventory to sell ads against.

The latest video push is part of a larger strategic focus for publishers that are beefing up the user experience and utility on their own platforms. Newsweek, for example, is developing an AI-powered homepage modeled after Google’s AI Mode to personalize the page for users. Last year, The Verge redesigned its site around a new homepage that mirrors a social media platform’s feed of content.

Howard said the recent rollouts of Time’s AI agent toolbar (which lets people ask questions and generate text and audio summaries from its content archive) and the vertical videos across the site work together to create a more engaging experience for readers.

“We’re introducing these other experiences in the interest of when people come, how do we make sure that we are giving them what they expect? We will condition the audiences that those two form factors that they’re so deeply engaged with in other environments are available here – and that, to us, will be a main driver of not only consumer engagement… but creating more opportunity from an ad sales perspective,” Howard said.

What we’ve heard

“There’s some people that just won’t get back to us because we’re not big enough. The really big guys just don’t care… They talk a nice game, and then months go by before you hear back from them.”

– A head of business development at a publisher on why they haven’t signed a content licensing deal with an AI company yet.

Numbers to know

50-60%: The share of traffic coming from Google to Newsweek’s site.

2 million: The number of registered users on the People Inc’s MyRecipes website, six months after its launch.

$30 million: The total revenue The NPR Network brought in this year, which includes donations to the NPR Network and to stations via NPR’s digital platforms and NPR+ podcast subscriptions.

1,000: The number of people that inquired about jobs at California Post, the New York Post’s upcoming expansion out West.

What we’ve covered

Newsweek is building a new homepage modeled after Google’s AI-Mode

• The new homepage will be personalized to users with a more conversational, AI-driven experience to boost time spent on-site. It’s still in development and likely won’t be ready until next spring at the earliest
• The homepage is part of a broader partnership with Google Cloud, and one of many AI tools Newsweek is building for its audience.

Read more here.

How AI’s hit to publisher traffic is quietly rewiring media M&A

• Publishers’ traffic has dipped since AI tools arrived — and the fallout is now weighing on the media mergers and acquisitions (M&A) market, making deals harder to price during a time of disruption.
• The decline in publishers’ site traffic from AI summaries has made it harder for some companies to scale, leaving them less attractive to potential acquirers.

Read more here.

Where publisher revenue stands with ads, video, content licensing and subscriptions

• Publishers are gearing up for a new year by sorting out their revenue sources, from advertising to subscription and content licensing businesses.
• Direct-sold ads remain the top revenue source for publishers, while some struggled with the programmatic ad market, according to a recent Digiday+ Research survey.

Learn more from the survey here.

Reach gets proactive on AI-era referrals, starting with subscriptions

• The publisher of national U.K. titles Daily Mirror, Daily Express and Daily Star is rolling out its first paid digital subscriptions.
• It’s the first in a string of changes planned within the publisher, which includes reshaping its newsroom more acutely around video production — all changes designed to safeguard its presence in the AI era. 

Read more here.

More large digital publishers join RSL’s AI content licensing efforts

• Arena Group, BuzzFeed, USA Today Co and Vox Media have joined the growing list of publishers supporting the Really Simple Licensing (RSL) Collective’s AI licensing framework.
• RSL is working to standardize how publishers tell AI systems what content they can use, and how they must pay.

Read more here.

Inside The Atlantic’s AI bot blocking strategy

• The Atlantic has built a scorecard for AI crawlers, identifying which bots actually send readers back and which just strip content. Only those with value get through.
• Nick Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, walked Digiday through the process. He hopes that if the AI engines want access to its content to improve their LLMs’ outputs, then they’ll approach The Atlantic with a licensing deal.

Read more here.

What we’re reading

Business Insider lowers paywall across site

Business Insider has lifted its paywall across the vast majority of its website for the rest of 2025, in light of a 38% year-over-year traffic drop, to try to draw in more eyeballs and ad revenue in Q4, Status reported.

Politico management found to have violated AI adoption safeguards

An arbitrator found that Politico violated union rules by deploying AI-powered editorial tools without first alerting or bargaining over the initiative with its union, Nieman Lab reported.

NBC News planning to launch digital subscription

NBC News is rolling out a digital subscription product that offers an ad-free experience to its podcasts, video shows and web articles, as well as exclusive content, Axios reported.

iHeartMedia tells DJs to announce they are real people on-air

Radio and podcast company iHeartMedia has required DJs to announce they are a “Guaranteed Human” on-air, to distinguish them from AI personalities and audio hosts, according to The Los Angeles Times.