Media Briefing: European publishers sound off on site traffic struggles

Declining site traffic was the most commonly cited challenge listed by publishers attending the Digiday Publishing Summit Europe, which was held this week in Barcelona, Spain. And it was also a major point of conversation during the first of the event’s two town hall sessions, in which publishers were granted anonymity in exchange for candor.

Here’s a selection of what they had to say on the matter, including how time spent on page and ad refresh rates figure into their approaches to dealing with the site traffic declines.

The problem

“We’ve no longer got newsstand dominance. We’re not one of six or seven titles that someone gets to pick on a newsstand…. I think we’re still in the mindset that we do have that dominance, and I think maybe we need to explore how we become part of the bigger conversation…. Do we become part of the wider ecosystem, and is that how we grow our audience and increase that traffic?”

“Any sort of update that comes from Google is always a scary time for publishers out there. There might be a vast tag update on Facebook that impacts everyone’s revenue streams negatively.”

“We ultimately lack control in what Google and Meta does in terms of the updates in the algorithm or how they want to court publishers.”

Some solutions

“Publishers have to go back to marketing…. There is a lack of trust with news over the last five to 10 years. People are going towards TikTok and Instagram for their news information. So how do we get that audience back is really what I think we should do. So a bit more marketing.”

“We want people on our owned-and-operated sites, but I think we also need to realize that we wait and Google will change something and our [organic search] rankings drop, and we struggle there. And it’s like only ever planting potatoes, and the crop keeps failing. You need something else as well.”

“We keep doing the same thing…. If we think about how we use social differently or how we use e-commerce differently, that might be another way to drive users back to our site without relying on the big players to do it for us in a different way.”

“It’s protecting your brand…. Now that everything’s so atomized, your brand is fading away. If you want to get high traffic numbers, the way to get those traffic numbers is not always the best way to protect the brand because the audiences are really into soft content. So finding that balance, to me, that’s my true headache.”

“If you’re not investing in your core as something you own fully, a business and a strategy model that you’re running, and you’re leveraging all these platforms and these new ways — you’ve got to own something. If you’re just reliant on somewhere else, you’re always going to be challenged.”

“I don’t think it can just be: Let’s increase my site traffic. It’s: What elements of site traffic can you bring to market?”

The value of time on page

“It’s very clear that you can’t just judge on traffic. Just say, Well, that’s the amount of pages you get. What we do now is we have so-called page-hours. It’s basically the number of total page-hours that a site has in any one month, and it’s related purely to the number of articles they put out, the number of page views per articles and the amount of time that is spent on that page.”

“We certainly get duration regarding wanting our journalists to be aware of not just how many pageviews they generate but how much time they will generate that month. It’s not purely about time on page, but that’s part of the mix.”

The pros and cons of ad refresh rates

“Time has become increasingly important to the value of pageviews. You can go onto a page now, and if you spend 60 seconds as opposed to 30 seconds, there will be two or maybe three advertising slots inserted. So if you can extend that time on page, then you get a better opportunity to commercialize.”

“Google’s [ad] refresh rate [allowed by its ad server] now, I think the latest one on desktop is every 18 seconds and 14 seconds on mobile you are allowed to refresh the ad. That’s a big difference. Getting somebody to the next 20 seconds, it’s doubling. It’s hugely important, and it’s something that is rarely talked about.”

“Google requires [ads to be refreshed no more frequently than every] 30 seconds. But it’s up to the site how they want to approach it. It’s not Google deciding to refresh it.”

“We see a massive impact on viewability when we have ad refresh on. If we have to dial it up a little bit, viewability takes a huge knock. So then when you’re doing reporting, it’s actually what’s best: delivering the impressions at a cost to your viewability or having the viewability and then not having the ad refresh on?”

“The other thing is looking at certain ad slots rather than pages. Refreshing certain ad slots rather than doing the whole page. That helps with campaigns that you’re supposed to be delivering versus ones you’ve got not as much pressure on.”

“The best practice is doing 30 seconds on refresh, but many publishers are using 20 [seconds]. But you’re sacrificing viewability. And if Google catches you under 30 seconds, they probably will start to penalize you as well.”

What we’ve heard

“We had a really lightbulb moment in November where we realized that headline types were really important for journalists to think about when they came to Discover versus search headline types.”

— Reach plc’s Martin Little on Google Discover becoming a growing referral traffic source

Numbers to know

250,000: Number of The Washington Post subscribers that had canceled their subscriptions, as of Tuesday, after it decided not to endorse a candidate in the U.S. presidential election; the figure represents 10% of the newspaper’s overall subscriber base.

7,000: Number of Los Angeles Times subscribers that had canceled their subscriptions for “editorial reasons,” as of Tuesday, after it decided not to endorse a candidate in the U.S. presidential election; the figure represents 2% of the newspaper’s overall subscriber base.

$100 million: How much money Google must pay to Canadian news publishers within 60 days while being granted a 5-year exemption from having to abide Canada’s Online News Act.

100 million: Number of search queries that AI-powered search engine Perplexity is fielding each week.

443 million: Number of daily active users that Snapchat had at the end of the third quarter of 2024.

What we’ve covered

For Reach plc, Google Discover has offset search-driven traffic declines:

• The publisher’s referral traffic from Google Search was down 25% year over year last month.
• But an increase in traffic from Google Discover more than made up the difference, said Martin Little during Digiday Publishing Summit Europe.

Read more about Reach plc here.

Here’s how the Daily Mail intends to tackle election coverage on TikTok:

• The publisher has 20 million followers on TikTok across 12 accounts.
• It normally posts 120 videos to TikTok per day and will ramp that up to 180 in the 72 hours around next week’s U.S. presidential election.

Read more about Daily Mail here.

A Q&A with MSNBC’s Rashida Jones:

The TV news network noticed more than 2 billion video views across YouTube, Instagram and TikTok in the third quarter of 2023.

Volume has been the name of the game when it comes to MSNBC’s nonlinear election coverage strategy.

Read more about MSNBC here.

As The Players’ Tribune marks first decade, publisher Minute Media plots out its future:

• The sports site wants to sign deals to license its content for film, TV and publishing adaptations.
• It typically publishes four to five articles per month.

Read more about The Players’ Tribune here.

DPG Media will pull the plug on selling app ads in the open market:

• Beginning next month, advertisers will have to buy ads from the publisher directly to appear in its news and entertainment apps.
• While inventory will be available through some ad tech firms, DPG’s own ad manager will be the only source for its custom ad formats.

Read more about DPG Media here.

What we’re reading

Publishers look to poach Post subscribers:

With a quarter-million subscribers to The Washington Post canceling after its decision not to endorse a U.S. presidential candidate, other news outlets are seizing an opportunity to win over those subscribers and/or reassure existing subscribers of their publications’ endorsement stances, according to Semafor.

Los Angeles Times loses staffers over endorsement stance:

As with WaPo owner Jeff Bezos blocking that paper’s endorsement plan, the Los Angeles newspaper’s owner Patrick Soon-Shiong forbid LAT from publishing its own presidential endorsement and has seen a number of editors and writers resign in protest, according to CNN.

USA Today decides not to endorse a presidential candidate either:

The Gannett-owned newspaper has joined the Post and LAT in trying to avoid controversy by deciding not to make an endorsement in this year’s election, according to Daily Beast.

Meta starts signing AI deals with publishers:

Facebook’s and Instagram’s parent company has signed a deal with Reuters to license the newswire’s content for its AI chatbot, marking the first such deal that Meta has signed, according to Axios.

Perplexity prefers rev-shares to content payments:

After Dow Jones and New York Post filed a lawsuit against Perplexity for copyright infringement, the AI search engine’s CEO said that he’d rather share ad revenue with publishers than pay to license their content, according to The Wall Street Journal.