As the way news is consumed changes, so does the manner in which publishers reach their audiences. During this week’s Webinar, Where is my traffic: Navigating audience development in the AI era, Greg Piechota, lead of INMA’s Readers First Initiative, moderated a panel discussion to look at what’s effective in attracting audiences and how the landscape continues evolving.

Joined by Nick Moar, audience development lead at DMG Media in the U.K., Nic Newman, senior research associate at Reuters Institute, and Santiago Nasra, content analytics supervisor at La Nación in Argentina, Piechota began by setting the stage for the current situation.

Although 2024 holds the promise of engaging customers with major news stories including elections that will impact some 4 billion people, the Summer Olympics, and other major sporting events, Piechota noted there are still some “worrisome” findings for news media organisations:

• According to Chartbeat, traffic referred to news sites by social media has collapsed by -48% in pageviews.
• While search referrals are “relatively stable,” they face disruption from companies such as Google AI, Bing, and Perplexity, which use AI to answer questions. However, at this time, Piechota said less than 15% of top keywords to the top news brands are being affected by this. “Of course it may change in the future,” he said.
• Many countries are facing a long-term decline in interest in the news.
• Consuming news via social media or content aggregators is becoming more common.

The question, of course, becomes what news companies should do about it.

Attracting audiences

The U.K. recently held elections and the country is engrossed in the European football championships, which means there’s a greater interest in the news cycle. But Moar noted that doesn’t guarantee traffic.

“Yes, there’s massively heightened audience interest and big rise in traffic as a result, but also much, much heavier competition,” he said. DMG Media, which publishes the Daily Mail, leveraged that interest by focusing on its strength: original and exclusive content.

“In terms of originality on our site, where we did see an increase in traffic was on our data journalism and visual storytelling,” Moar explained. “So, formatting content in different ways, better ways that our rivals can’t do or aren’t doing, that will set us apart compared to our audience.”

Exclusive content and live blogs, such as behind-the-scenes coverage and live coverage of events, are also effective traffic drivers.

Similarly, Argentina recently had major events, including a presidential election, inauguration, and the Copa America football championship. Like DMG Media, Nasra said, La Nación saw dramatic spikes in traffic, both from direct traffic and from Google products. The company also benefitted from live blog coverage.

“On coverage nights we [used] a hybrid business model,” Nasra said. “We go in on our advertisement strategy and digital subscription strategy. So we do live blogs, which are very, very successful. We do specific search queries, we do articles with a title that people are searching for, and then we do the premium articles that maybe our competitors or smaller sites can’t do as well.”

The changing landscape of news

Newman weighed in on the increasingly more fragmented landscape and how it affects companies.

“Ten years ago, it was primarily about search and Facebook and, to some extent, YouTube around news,” he said. “What we see now is this incredibly fragmented landscape where we have many more social networks and video networks that are attracting people’s attention.

“It’s become much more complicated in terms of audience development.”

Each network has different characteristics and attracts different users, which creates greater barriers for news companies — particularly because the social platforms are now trying to keep users on their sites instead of referring them to the original news site:

“The challenge is that you have to create more bespoke content for these platforms, but it’s really hard to monetise that and you don’t really get the referral traffic back. So this shift really I think is very consequential.”

How publishers should respond to that depends on their individual business model, Newman said.

“If you’re a subscription publisher, you’re really trying to drive loyalty with your existing customersn, so it’s about direct channels and building that loyalty over time,” he said, adding that such a business model also needs an acquisition strategy.

That differs from a reach-based or advertising-based publisher, who will need to find alternative ways of doing connecting with customers. And a company with little direct traffic may be trying to reach people wherever they are, so the approach becomes about “creating lots of different formats and pushing it into different platforms and getting attribution. So the challenges are very different depending where you’re coming from.”

According to a Reuters Institute survey conducted earlier this year, about 70% of industry leaders are focusing on direct traffic — something that can be difficult in the current attention economy: “How do you get people to come to you directly when everyone else is trying to do the same, including the platforms?”

What about search? 

An online poll of attendees found the current No. 1 source of online traffic is search, which earned a 93% response, followed by direct site visits (73%) and social media (40%).

Moar said that aligned with DMG Media’s experience, but Nasra said La Nación gets its primary traffic from search, followed by direct traffic, with e-mail newsletters following in “a very distant third.” Piechota pointed out the difference between being subscription-driven, like La Nación, compared to being advertising-driven, like DMG-owned Daily Mail.

However, the source of traffic is changing, and when asked about their three fastest-growing sources of online traffic, INMA members indicated that search and aggregators tied (64%), followed by e-mail newsletters (45%).

With the impending disruption from AI’s driven search — where it answers a question instead of referring traffic to Web sites containing that information — Piechota questioned what that means to news media companies: “If search is actually one of the most important sources of traffic and potentially growing, aren’t you afraid that you are relying too much on something that might just go away one day?”

But Newman said that while the threat is real in the long-term, for the short-term, it’s not cause for immediate alarm.

“Google obviously needs to be extremely careful about its relationship with publishers and the link economy because that’s how it makes a lot of its money,” he observed. “And Google itself is going to be disrupted in search. We’re already seeing it; there’s going to be so many more ways to ask questions. We could really see significant shifts over the next five years.

“So I think search is going to be very disruptive, but it’s going to be slower than we think.”

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