From New York Magazine's Intelligencer, July 7:
Last spring, the entertainment and lifestyle website Bustle saw huge spikes in traffic for a handful of stories — between 150,000 and 300,000 search views each, compared to the usual 1,000 or less. Bustle had long struggled to place high in SEO rankings or land on the Google News module, but recent months had been particularly brutal, and the spikes prompted emergency meetings to figure out how to keep them going. “Bryan Goldberg made it a top priority of the company to see if they could duplicate that success,” said a former staffer, referring to Bustle’s CEO. Goldberg made a few new hires and even pulled people from other teams to create a new team that would help crank out similar content.
But the traffic bonanza turned out to be a mirage. The new team was dissolved two months later.
Bustle’s desperate quest for traffic is an extreme version of the media’s attempts to boost readership in what news publishers are calling the post-Google era. “When a one-off article performed well, we’d zero in on that conceit and write ten more articles on it,” said one former staffer at Business Insider. “And despite that, nothing was hitting.” In May, CEO Barbara Peng announced that Business Insider would lay off 21 percent of its staff, citing the need to “endure extreme traffic drops outside of our control.”
Traffic headwinds are not exactly a new problem for media companies, but it has only gotten worse. The problem started with Facebook pivoting away from the news in 2022 and has accelerated in recent months as Google makes seemingly corrosive changes to its search algorithm while rolling out the innovation that will one day replace traditional search results: AI summaries. “Search engines now deliver answers instead of links, while social platforms aim to keep users within their walled gardens,” a senior New Yorker editor explained. The social-media platform formerly known as Twitter, once a modest traffic generator that nevertheless functioned as a network for journalists and media organizations to share their stories and seed wider dissemination, has become virtually useless for media companies since owner Elon Musk throttled news links. “We don’t get shit from Twitter anymore,” said Tom Ley, editor-in-chief and co-founder of Defector. “You tweet out a link to an article and it just disappears.”
It all amounts to a kind of traffic apocalypse in which it seems all spigots for traffic are being turned off, affecting news organizations big and small, new and old. It hurts outlets heavily reliant on digital advertising but also those that draw revenue from product recommendations and subscriptions. The whole premise of internet publishing — that you could reach audiences far and wide — is starting to crumble, forcing publishers to reevaluate what kind of stories they produce and what kind of readers they want — and, ultimately, to think smaller and more bespoke. “The good news for any digital publisher is that the new game we all have to play is also a sustainable one: You have to build a direct relationship with your core readers,” said GQ global editorial director Will Welch. “We talk pretty much every day about the idea of ‘Google Zero.’ Honestly I love the drama of that term — it gives you a jolt. Time to take action.”
Not everyone is so excited. “I’ve never seen so much disarray in a strategic capacity in terms of where we’re all pointing the boat. No one is in alignment,” said one top magazine editor. “Right now you’re seeing literally every strategy going to market.” If there is consensus, it’s around having a diversified strategy that avoids being reliant on any third-party platform to reach an audience. But “that’s hard to do if you’re a start-up brand and don’t have 20 years of consumer memory of who you are,” said Keith Bonnici, who became COO of the Daily Beast last fall.
It’s even a challenge for the legacy organizations with the most recognizable brands. “Frankly, some of the stuff that we’re doing right now — and we have been doing over the last year or so — around establishing a direct relationship, about building in tools that help our journalism reach more people without relying on platforms — we should have been doing years ago,” said a senior New York Times editor. “But it was sort of like we weren’t forced to really contend with it.”
Subscription-based publications are undoubtedly in a better position to weather this moment. “Outlets that really relied on a much more casual news reader who just sort of popped in and out, maybe because they saw something in their Facebook feed or on X or whatever — those are the outlets that might feel it much more acutely,” said the Times editor. Still, “for us to grow, we need to introduce ourselves to people who are interested in news,” they said, which is why search remains a “critical channel” for the Times. “What better way to introduce ourselves to those people than showing up when they’re searching for news? It’s why if we’re late to a story, that’s quite bad because it means they’ve chosen someone else when they were looking for it.”
“Our audience is already relatively small and engaged, so we haven’t had a problem keeping people who are interested in the site coming to it,” said Ley, who noted Defector has about 40,000 paying subscribers, around 90 percent of whom go directly to the homepage. “I do think we are running into an issue of just finding new people who have never heard of us before, and that’s usually where Twitter and Google Search are really helpful.”
Outlets are deploying various strategies to maintain a direct connection with readers. Having a good app has become paramount, and there’s a premium on squeezing more juice out of newsletter lists. Defector, for example, is making a more aggressive outreach to the list of nearly 250,000 people who’ve registered with their email. Email targets readers based on their interests and behavior and encourages them to either stay subscribed or make the jump to subscribe if they haven’t already. It also helps build a daily habit in readers’ inboxes, which is preferable to publishers that otherwise have to resort to finding readers on platforms they can’t control. Many columnists today have associated newsletters, including the entire slate at GQ. “AI is going to render a lot of types of stories redundant, but it can’t compete with a great columnist who has a strong voice and a loyal following of people who want to hear directly from their favorite writer,” said Welch....
....MUCH MORE
