Whether you call it as I do - the Platform Era - or what Brian Morrissey calls it the Traffic Era, the era of building a media business on a high volume of referrals from search and social is over. The sooner we come to grips with it and adjust our priorities and business models, the sooner we return to growth and stability - as many publishers already have.
If we need more proof of the precarity of relying on rented traffic, look at the latest Reuters Institute trends and predictions report. Traffic from Facebook to news publishers has plummeted by 67% in the last two years, according to data from Chartbeat
Search has been much more reliable, but algorithm changes routinely cause audience teams to scramble and adjust to the business imperatives of other companies rather than their own.
Smart minds in the industry predict this year will be even more challenging. “Although this is hardly revelatory, my prediction for 2025 is that the big topic on everybody’s mind is going to be traffic,” Lisa MacLeod, Director of FT Strategies, wrote in the consultancy’s 2025 predictions. Thomas Baekdal added to the voices warning about reliance on “other sources” for traffic. “The first thing to talk about is traffic, because in 2025, we have reached the point where the old strategies and tactics around traffic are no more.”
End the reliance on rented audiences
Since the rise of social media, audience development editors have agilely adjusted their tactics to changes in the platforms’ algorithms. They have become expert in using data and experiments to intuit these changes to re-establish traffic. They have been early adopters of new platforms, and they have quickly got up to speed with new formats and understood the community dynamics. The logic was that we went to platforms because that is where “the audience” is. But as my friend Damon Kiesow asks journalists: Is Twitter actually your community? For most news organisations, the answer is no, unless they are focused on politics or sports. Facebook has been deprioritising news for years now. Google can still drive traffic to journalism sites, but it’s quite a dance. We have spent endless amounts of time and energy chasing the trends on platforms.
You can see this in discussions about whether Bluesky would be a good place to shift to after the changes at Facebook and whether to follow other publications in leaving X. Should we shift to TikTok or RedNote or WhatsApp? I agree with Thomas Baekdal that this is the wrong way to look at things.
The conversation shouldn’t be about what platform publishers should focus on for the next source of free traffic. Not only is that era over, but the last decade has shown us the dangers of an over-reliance on rented audiences. Many publishers have already shifted to a focus on converting rented audiences on platforms to known, owned audiences.
Diversify products, revenue and marketing channels
The traffic era was predicated on the idea that digital advertising was a low-margin business, so we needed to attract as many people to our sites as possible to monetise them effectively. This isn’t working, and it hasn’t been working for years. Diversifying revenue and accepting that smaller, paying audiences are a more stable basis for a journalism or media business than trying to rely on platforms for traffic.
The playbook on how to transition is becoming relatively well established, although even with a clearer path, execution is still critical.
Develop and execute an A2K strategy - The strategic shift is acknowledging that known audiences are much more valuable than unknown, lightly engaged ones, and the UK’s independent has the data to prove it. Registered users are 11x more engaged and subscribers are 62x more engaged than unknown users. Even if the Indy was only monetising audiences using advertising, that is a huge delta. Even if the registered users don’t subscribe, they still have more data about them, lifting their ad yields, and they can market other products such as events or e-commerce offerings. However, registration is an important step in their conversion journey, and half of new subscribers are registered users.
Diversify products and revenue - Expanding the pool of known users offers new revenue opportunities. I have seen publishers like the Baltimore Banner use their email lists for partner marketing. Publishers market events, wine clubs, puzzle apps and recipe offerings. In India, HT Media has even launched an OTT video service aggregator. The more you know about your audience, the more relevant and effective these advertising messages can be and the more revenue they can generate.
It’s time to stop putting so much energy into staring into the black boxes of platforms and put more energy, effort and money into our marketing our own work.
Invest in marketing your own work - It’s time to stop putting so much energy into staring into the black boxes of platforms and put more energy, effort and money into marketing our work. We need to diversify our marketing channels and work to connect with audiences. Some of this will be on platforms, such as marketing our podcasts, newsletters and subscription offerings via social channels. But there are so many other marketing channels.
This doesn’t mean that this is easy. B2C media leaders all talk about the challenging media market. But by seizing our own destiny, at least we can have a sense of agency.
Of course, Mark Zuckerberg has made a raft of changes across Meta’s properties at the start of 2025. He ended fact-checking and took a poke at “legacy media”. Flagging posts with fact-check details isn’t censorship. It’s context. Alexios Mantzarlis is the director of the Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech and was the founding director of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN). He provided this fact-check of Zuck, and it’s an important read.
As Exhibit A of the challenges facing media, Vox Media continued with its layoffs and made changes to its leadership in an effort to right the ship.
Well, credit the Washington Post for ambition, but a goal of 200m paying readers seems a little unrealistic. And I’m not sure by trying to appeal to a wider range of the political spectrum and to blue-collar readers that they’ll achieve their “big hairy audacious goal'“. Of course, paying readers doesn’t necessarily mean full-fat subscribers, and it depends on the range of products they develop.
Reuters has been trying to develop its subscription product, and Gannett has been loosening its connection to the Associated Press. They started 2025 by announcing a bundled subscription.
If you want a good example of the type of diversification strategy I’m talking about, you only have to look to Zetland in Denmark. Their deep content model works and deeply engages their audience. Moreover, their mix of text and audio content connects with young audiences. Half of their members are in their 20s and 30s.
I practiced data journalism for a long time, and in the current industry research and content marketing that I do, I still try to include data visualisations. Here are some tools to start using this year.
Creators and influencers are one of the major themes this year.
