How U.K. news group Reach is diversifying traffic sources amid zero-click threat

“Evergreen pieces of content we used to write just don’t fly anymore. They’re really not worth the effort. However, tangential queries, interesting second-order queries, queries with more voice attached to them, reporting with more voice and opinion. These things can’t be replicated,” she added.

Reach is also earning new revenue from Meta’s content monetization program, which launched last year and pays creators based on engagement with photos and videos posted on the platform. Since May, Reach has made about five figures a day from this program, according to Ogier, who did not provide specifics.

“It’s not very often you get to find money down the back of the sofa, which is to say, an unexpected windfall that wasn’t even in your budget forecasting,” Ogier said. “They’re paying for likes, shares and saves on their platform. But that has actually made a profound difference to our business.”

Additionally, Reach is investing more in video and podcasts, as these content formats can’t be replicated by AI tools as easily as text-based content, according to Ogier. Reach has a deal with video marketplace Stringr to generate video from its articles.

“Video gets higher CPMs,” Ogier said. “We find that is a great thing to capitalize on. Depending on the subject matter, it can be exponentially more. MSN is roughly page for page value with us — but on scale, you get exponentially more. And it works itself out. Other platforms don’t pay so well. But again, on volume, you can make that up.”

Inside Reach’s MSN strategy

While MSN is hardly a new platform for publishers, it is helping to offset referral traffic losses from Google search, Ogier said.

“We get as many views a day on MSN as we do on our own sites, but the magic happens when you bolt on the other platforms,” she said. “Let’s say we have X amount of direct traffic on any given day, and we’ve got three to four times that coming in from distribution platforms. And that’s excluding Google and Facebook.”

Reach is making “good money” from these news aggregation platforms, Ogier said, though she declined to share specifics.

Content shared on MSN has to be very PG-rated (even a kiss between Prince William and Kate Middleton was considered “racy content,” Ogier said). But by tracking keyword authority and topic clusters on the MSG homepage, the platform can become a valuable channel for publishers’ audience strategies, she said.

“We’ve trained the newsroom to watch the platform throughout the day in order to optimize for real time and ultimately, from a revenue perspective, it’s not very different to what we make on our owned and operated, particularly in a market like the U.S., where we’re really still growing,” Ogier said.

Tweaking the Facebook strategy to bring in new revenue

To keep the Facebook money flowing, Reach has changed a few things about it approaches the platform.

Reach isn’t posting link posts anymore, because they aren’t getting monetized. Instead, it is sharing status posts with text on a color background for breaking news, as well as picture posts and photo galleries, which all monetize well, Ogier said. Reach posts every 15 minutes on Facebook.

“Breaking news on Facebook is just so critically important now,” Ogier said. 

Jury’s still out on AI optimization

Reach remains in the “courtship” phase of talking to third-party companies to figure out what tools are available to improve content visibility in AI tools.

“We do feel the cement is still pretty wet in this part of the business. AI itself is moving so quickly, trying to optimize for it we find is a dynamic business… We’re sort of in a slow roll,” Ogier said.

Meanwhile, Reach is using AI tools to edit stories to appeal to local markets, according to Ogier. Certain phrases and spelling “don’t translate” between the US and the UK, and in regional markets where Reach has local news sites, she said.

“We would never AI-write something, but we can use it as a basis from which to iterate, and then we localize, and that really enables us to be more efficient in that distribution,” Ogier said.