Ask Our Editors About: Publisher Revenue Strategies

Ask Our Editors is a monthly installment for Digiday+ members to ask editors their most pressing questions on the industry’s most complex topics, share feedback and perspective on our coverage, hear what we’re tracking behind the scenes and get an early look at what’s coming next. This month our editors will be diving into revenue strategies for publishers in the zero-click era.

A future without traffic. A zero-click reality. Answer machines instead of blue links. As we head past the heart of summer, the attention paid to how AI is eroding the foundation of how digital publishers, and to a lesser extent brand marketers, make money – monetizing against search-derived audiences – is heating up. Join Jim Cooper, editor-in-chief, Seb Joseph, executive editor for news, Sara Guaglione, senior media reporter and special guest Ed Hyatt, director of newsroom SEO at The Wall Street Journal for an opening dialogue on this hot and fast moving topic.

While certainty rattled by this industry sea change (this time last year it wasn’t even a talking point) publishers haven’t thrown in the revenue towel just yet. We’ve reported on The New York Times, Hearst and Condé Nast striking AI licensing deals with Amazon – all that hard-won journalism and first-party data is hugely valuable for any AI platform looking for an anecdote to hallucination and an engine for sophistication and scale.

And Newsweek is leaning into non-SEO revenue streams that involve more events, subscription experiments and more editorial rankings and data-driven co-branded lists. For sure the rise of the machines is upon us. But content, now reimagined, remains king.