How The Arena Group is rewriting its commercial playbook for the zero-click era

By moving the average number of pages a visitor reads from 1.1 to 2 — the goal it has set for the end of 2026 — the publisher expects to add seven figures to its bottom line, according to Stephanie Mazzamaro, head of programmatic, addressability, and operations at The Arena Group, who didn’t provide exact figures. Early results show the tools have boosted dwell time to 1.2 pages per visitor equated to several million dollars, per Mazzamaro. 

Naturally, publishers have always cared about dwell time. But they’ve never had to replace lost page views with it. The Arena Group’s push comes as traffic has become harder to predict, thanks to the cocktail of zero-click AI summaries and general search traffic volatility, making the economics of every visit matter more than ever.

The publisher was severely affected by the rise of AI summaries and the same search-traffic volatility other publishers have seen this year. Referral traffic dropped between 30 and 50 percent across its sites, according to Similarweb data. Traffic was 67.5 million this April for Parade, up from 30.4 million in the same month in 2024. But that dropped approximately 47 percent to 35.7 million in November 2025, per Similarweb. For other sites like The Street, the drop was closer to 25 percent between June and November 2025.

For now, it’s stabilized, according to Mazzamaro. But rather than expect it to return, the publisher is instead focused on improving its sites’ user experience to keep people for longer.

The publisher’s current revenue split is 90 percent programmatic advertising, though it launched a commerce arm in September as part of major plans to diversify beyond that. 

“Our three pillars for combating zero-click are content recommendation, revenue decisioning and messaging,” said Mazzamaro. The publisher is using its first-party data platform, Encore, as the brain behind its strategy. Encore launched in October as an in-house partly as an alternative to avoid fee structures with third-party curation vendors.

Encore pulls together audience data from across its portfolio and uses AI and large language models to turn that data into detailed audience segments. Those segments then fuel the ad curation, as well as its internal systems for recommending content, deciding which revenue opportunities to show and tailoring messages. The more the publisher learns about a user, the more it can adapt the on-site experience for different audience groups. And ultimately make that visit more valuable. 

Answer engines are changing the nature of websites, but they’re not necessarily killing them because LLMs need websites to provide the answers (OK — it may kill some types of sites) and for that reason, display advertising isn’t going anywhere, stressed Tom Bowman, independent publishing consultant and former BBC Worldwide and Yahoo executive. 

“This is not a tsunami, it’s rapid change. And it forces media owners to have a look at what their actual value proposition is. Really, they’ve rented a lot of distribution from Google,” he said.

Therefore, publishers should focus on readers loyal to the brand. “Programmatic was never a great solution for publishers,” he said. “The irony is, publishers used to moan like mad that the advertising campaigns they run shouldn’t be judged on clicks, and now they’re moaning like mad because they’re not getting any clicks.”

Building an in-house curation desk 

Arena Group is now focusing on curating the ads themselves — stripping out slow, noisy or irrelevant placements and replacing them with dynamic “smart slot” ad formats designed and delivered at times that make sense for individual users based on their behavioral data. So that could mean one person is served an in-house ad for subscriptions or a newsletter while another is served a more personally relevant ad. The experience is built around Encore.

“Depending on which SPP or curation house you talk to, the fee structure is really not transparent,” said Mazzamaro. Around 15 percent of its open-market deals have moved to curation and CPMs are 1.5 times higher than open market, said Mazamarro. Encore is only a month old, so it’s early to put hard numbers to it, but she said that they expect curation to hit the six-figure range next year. 

In the second quarter of 2025, revenue was $36.2 million, up 8 percent year over year. “Q2 was the best quarter Arena has ever had in its history,” said Mazamarro. “We’re still profitable,” she added. Revenue in the third quarter looked less certain at $29.8 million, down 11.2 percent from $33.6 million year over year.

But Mazaramo is confident that curation and content recommendations, along with e-commerce revenue, will put the publisher in a very strong commercial position in the coming years. It’s really just about finding the right formula,” Mazaramo said.

Programmatic once rewarded raw volume — more pages, more ads, more impressions. But as referral traffic shrinks, it’s positive that publishers are course-correcting toward curation, stressed Bowman. It means fewer but better ad experiences designed to lift dwell time, value and revenue. “If your traffic is more precious because it’s rarer, it also means that the audience that comes to the site is a less casual, more dedicated audience, therefore you should be working that inventory harder to make sure it gets the right answer for the advertiser.”

For all publishers, the rise of AI answer pages and the corresponding slowdown in so-called traditional click-through rates for publishers is spotlighting user experience, again. “User experience is a phrase media owners need to care an awful lot more about, because if it’s terrible, people aren’t coming back,” he said.