Media Briefing: Overheard from publishers at Digiday London Media Strategies Town Hall

This week’s Media Briefing looks at what publisher execs discussed during Digiday’s Town Hall held in London this week, regarding new ways to measure audeince value, the risks of blocking AI crawlers and more.

• Publishing execs discuss the latest attempts to find the right engagement metrics for the AI era.
The New York Times and The Economist join publisher AI coalition SPUR.

As AI reshapes how audiences find and consume media, publishers are rethinking how to measure reach and make money, with no proven playbook yet. At Digiday’s Media Strategies London event on Tuesday, Oct. 13, executives weighed new ways to measure audience value, the risks of blocking AI crawlers, the uncertain economics of licensing content to LLMs, and whether agentic media trading is ready for the real world.

The event’s Town Hall was held under the Chatham House Rule: participants could share information, but speakers and their affiliations could not be identified. Here’s what was overheard.

Beyond page views: the search for an actionable measure of engagement

“Should we instead focus on visitors? If you think about it from first principles, you have human visitors and non-human visitors: agents, LLMs, bots, and so on. Should metrics therefore focus on the individual person as the fundamental unit? It’s something I think we’ve struggled with as an industry for a long time: defining what those unifying metrics should be.”

“We’re moving from page views towards engagement data. That includes unique users, the percentage of subscribers, dwell time, and conversions. It’s a combined metric rather than a single number. The challenge is how to distil that into something understandable for editorial teams. Page views were very simple: it was a big number or a small number, and people understood what that meant.”

“The challenge is the question: “So what? You’re telling me this, but what do I do now? Working out how to respond to a story’s performance and deciding what action to take as a result is really difficult, both to explain and to put into practice.”

“Tracking page hours over time is a very useful way to understand how a site is performing and to communicate that performance to editorial teams.”

“The difficulty for me is that if every publisher defines engagement differently, how easy will it be for agencies and clients to compare those definitions? My question is how we, as an industry, can establish a shared definition. Whether we call it attention or engagement, we need something that everyone can use as a common standard.”

“People might find a new metric interesting, but they’ll question whether it’s the right definition. They’ll ask how they can compare themselves with someone else using a slightly different formula.”

Blocking AI bots means weighing content control against future visibility

“We’re concerned about discoverability and what blocking might mean in the short term, but also the long-term implications for brand awareness over the next year or two. There’s some risk involved, but restricting access to information could also create scarcity and help establish a market for that content. The question is how big that market is today. If there’s a solid market, perhaps you’re willing to take more risks. Right now, I’m not sure we know whether there definitely is one.”

“One thing we’ve discovered is that the challenge isn’t just identifying bad actors. They keep changing and appearing under different names. The legitimate bots can also cause problems because they don’t always follow best practices. In some cases, we’ve potentially blocked legitimate bots accidentally because they haven’t identified themselves properly. For this to work, the legitimate bots need to be transparent and follow the right practices. That makes it easier for publishers to identify the bots they don’t want accessing their content.”

“We needed to establish that restricting LLM access to our entire website wouldn’t undermine our topical authority or prevent us from being cited when we wanted to be.”

“A lot may depend on what happens when the New York Times’ lawsuit against OpenAI finally goes through. That could help establish the value that needs to be exchanged for this content and create a significant shift in the market.”

“On the question of return on investment, publishers aren’t getting much traffic from LLMs at the moment. Click-through rates are minimal, and the traffic they do generate is limited. So, if you can secure a licensing deal, that’s potentially additional revenue. Of course, that depends on whether AI companies are still doing deals, because many of those discussions have slowed down.”

“My question wasn’t just about the traffic you receive. It was also about long-term discoverability. If people increasingly use AI to consume information, could you be undermining your long-term relevance by not being present in those systems?”

Publishers see a chance to reclaim programmatic ad value via agentic media trading, but need partners to test it

“We’ve started building a selling agent. It’s certainly not fully developed yet, but we’re working on it. The challenge is finding people on the other side to work with so we can test and develop it together.”

“These are difficult times, and publishers are under a lot of pressure. However, I see this as an opportunity to get ahead of the curve and potentially win back some of the value publishers have lost to the middlemen between them and advertisers, particularly DSPs and SSPs. I’m definitely seeing SSPs beginning to develop their capabilities in this area.”

“I think the market is approaching one of those moments when things could change significantly. If agentic trading develops as expected, being ahead of the curve could help us attract more advertising spend than competitors who arrive later. There’s also an internal benefit. If you’re fortunate enough to have people with the right technical skills, it gives them the opportunity to work on something exciting, new and cutting-edge rather than focusing exclusively on day-to-day operations. We have a small group of people working on it, and it’s a chance for them to build something genuinely innovative.”

“We’re trying to get it to a stage where we can bring in partners and start testing it properly.”

“Is agentic buying actually in the agencies’ interests? If agencies develop automated buying capabilities, they could potentially disintermediate other players, but they might also undermine a substantial part of their own existing business. Do we think this is genuinely going to come from agencies, or will it come from somewhere else?”

What we’ve heard

“Most recently, we had one trialist account try and access I think about a million different articles within about eight hours from 700,000 different IP addresses. So we are being scraped and our content taken all the time.”

– Fiona Spooner, managing director of consumer revenue at the Financial Times, speaking at Digiday’s Media Strategies event in London.

3 Qs with SPUR’s David Buttle on The New York Times, The Economist, and others joining the coalition

This week, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Economist, AFP joined the Standards for Publisher Usage Rights initiative, or SPUR, alongside newspaper associations in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. That takes its membership to more than 80 publishers representing 20 countries.

SPUR released a new standard for tracking how AI tools use publishers’ content earlier this month.

Digiday’s Sara Guaglione caught up with SPUR co-founder David Buttle to hear what’s next.

This conversation has been edited and condensed. 

Lots of major media companies have now joined the coalition. What spurred the momentum here, and what got them to join?

“You’d probably be surprised to hear that we haven’t been that active on that front before. We launched with an open letter calling on the industry to come behind the coalition, and then pretty much everything has been inbound. I think what that tells us is that SPUR is oriented around solving an acute problem that the whole industry is facing: content being taken and used without fair payment. The market – a sort of fair, liquid, vibrant market for content to fuel AI systems – doesn’t exist. But it urgently needs to exist. Consumer habits are beginning to change, and we need to create this market so that the economic foundations of journalism continue to support a vibrant media sector.”

Now that you have this additional support from new members, what’s next for SPUR?

“We’ve got a fairly detailed roadmap for the rest of this year and going into next year. On the telemetry standard side, we’re working with ecosystem partners to implement the standard. It will be live, working, delivering telemetry data in the wild very soon. So that’s hugely exciting. We’re doing quite a lot of work at the moment on this definition of machine use and the way that this kind of vector of IP loss from bots that choose not to respect publisher signals. And then further work on IP protection, where we’ve run extensive reviewing exercises. We’re aggregating the findings of those to paint a broader view of the cost to the publishing sector, where vulnerabilities may exist, to help members, non-members, everyone increase that cost.”

Are there any updates you can share on getting participation from the demand side, the tech platforms that were invited to join an advisory board? How are those conversations going?

“We’ll make an announcement when it’s fully formed. But [conversations] are really positive. We’re in conversations with all of the large platforms, and discussing with them the implementation of the telemetry standard, as well as other matters now as well. It’s moving in the right direction.”

– Sara Guaglione.

By the numbers

• 1,000: Number of jobs Netflix has cut globally, its biggest round of layoffs since 2022.
•  $250 million+: The damages USA Today Co. is seeking from OpenAI.
• 100: The number of editorial roles Axel Springer could cut from The Telegrph’s newsroom.
• 25%: Amount Skydance’s shares slid after it issued around 471 million warrants, giving Paramount Skydance’s shareholders the option to buy shares in the new company.
• 1%: of users generated between 60% and 81% of combined subscription and advertising revenue, according to data from five INMA member publishers.

What we’ve covered

Inside Wirecutter’s push to diversify beyond affiliate revenue as AI reshapes discovery

• Wirecutter wants to be more than a product review site built on affiliate links. The New York Times-owned brand is expanding into new verticals, story formats and editorial franchises that advertisers can sponsor to diversify its revenue and audience reach.
• The push is part of Wirecutter’s strategy to look for more ways to monetize and distribute its product recommendations, and reduce its dependence on search-driven affiliate commissions.

Read more here.

Ad industry tallies early losses from Apple’s Safari tracking block

• Its latest software update cut off some of the biggest companies that track people across the web to target them with ads, stopping them from working in Safari altogether.
• Aditude, which helps publishers sell their ad space, reported Safari on iPhones and iPads accounts for 11.7% of the ads its customers show and 11.4% of their ad revenue. 

Read more here. 

For some publishers, agentic advertising is still a question of ROI

• Many publishers execs say — despite the hype — agentic media buying remains a test-and-learn proposition, rather than a proven source of returns.
• That caution was clear in Digiday’s conversations with publishers at Advertising Week New York last week, where on-stage discussions dusted across the topic. But privately, publishers aren’t sold on its future. At least, not yet, according to heads of revenue and advertising at The Economist, Newsweek and The New York Times.

Read more here.

CNN takes All Access abroad to turn global reach into paying subscribers

• CNN is bringing its All Access subscription service to the U.K. and Canada as part of a broader push to turn its international audience into paying subscribers.
• The timing could also help attract subscribers ahead of the U.S. midterms.

Read more here. 

Media buys and mega partnerships: How the creator economy is splitting in two

• There’s a growing bifurcation in the creator economy. While the Alix Earle’s and Mr Beast’s of the world take on the role of agencies, nano and micro creators have become media buys.
• “Brands are increasingly approaching the space just like they would traditional channels with a media mix that reflects what they’ve done historically,” said Zach Blume, co-founder and president of Portal A content production company on a recent episode of the Digiday Podcast.

Read more here. 

What we’re reading

Washington Post hires Alex Wallace as COO in profitability push

After years of losses and layoffs the former NBC News and Yahoo executive has been brought in to steady the ship and push it toward profitability.

Inside USA Today’s AI-fueled Palantir deal

The publisher wants to use Panatir tech to consolidate years of fragmented reader data into a single system and use AI to personalize newsletters, target affiliate links, improve content discovery, and turn anonymous visitors into registered subscribers.

How journalists are using AI in investigative journalism. 

Journalists tackling the 3.5 million documents released as part of the Epstein investigation used AI tools to help sort through what would have taken months of manual work.

The next CEO at Condé Nast has their work cut out

Insiders at the publisher say that Anna Wintour’s rigid steering of the ship will make it tough for a new CEO to fit in with, while the current state of the financials may put some off, they believe.

NPR has promised no further job cuts after newsroom reorg

After 10 jobs were cut in Q2 and buyouts offered to 18 additional staff, NPR’s chief content officer Nadine Zylstra has assured staff there will be no more changes.