Media Briefing: Publishers question whether personalization actually pays off

Execs spoke under Chatham House rules, so Digiday could share what was said while maintaining executives’ anonymity. 

For content personalization

One publishing exec said they were about to test individually-personalized, local, daily briefings for 20% of their registered users. The briefing is entirely automated, with no editorial curation, with content selected based on reading behavior data. Early tests showed a 20% increase in click-through with a non “voicey” top of the newsletter, the exec said. 

“We’ve tested personalized versus editorial curation, and we still see a pretty decent lift in the engagement rate,” the exec said, adding that the next step is selling against it. “One of the benefits of the personalization is not only the consumer revenue and the engagement, but ultimately you hope that your chief revenue officers can then sell that shit,” the exec said.

Another exec said they had recently automated a previously editorially curated newsletter, out of necessity after a staffer left. They used identity graphs to see what stories or sections individuals were reading, and then personalized the newsletters around that. Open and click rates remained unchanged — a positive outcome, they said, given the newsletter now requires fewer staff resources to produce.

“There was no difference in the click-through or open rate, but nobody’s curating it. Nobody’s touching it. It is providing the same level of referral traffic, which frankly, it’s kind of a win,” the exec noted. 

Against content personalization

However, the exec noted that the fact that engagement rates didn’t change after automating the newsletter raised a harder question: whether personalization is really a differentiator when it comes to newsletters if it doesn’t improve performance.

The exec worried that automation stripped away the value of the newsletter. “It doesn’t feel like a diversified product. It doesn’t feel like something that’s distinct and unique,” they said. “Frankly, a personalized newsletter, everybody’s kind of doing it.”

For some publishers, the risk is that personalization becomes yet another commodity feature, rather than a reason to choose their brand. 

Another publisher noted that their professional audience pushed back on heavy personalization, preferring a single shared briefing.

“We want to be reading everything our peers are reading, so we’re not missing anything,” they’ve heard repeatedly from their audience base. “So we are building products – launching very soon – that will have both of those features,” the exec added.

The bigger question: how to get more registered users

Underneath the debate over click-through rates is a bigger question that emerged during the town hall: can personalization actually move someone from a free, registered reader to a paying subscriber?

Instead of treating registration as a one-size-fits-all gateway, publishers are using newsletters to personalize the mix of free and paywalled content to move individual readers toward a subscription.

One publishing exec said their title’s daily automated briefing newsletter gives out free links to articles that would otherwise be behind a metered paywall. The publisher is considering using email as a personalized access and conversion channel, rather than giving every registered reader the same number of free articles.

The publisher can change up the newsletter experiences based on where a reader is in the funnel: free content drives engagement, and gradually introducing paywalled content can encourage conversions, they explained. 

Newsletters can offer free or “gift” links based on where someone is in the subscription funnel, and engagement data can determine how much free content a reader should receive before encountering a paywall, they said. The publisher can tailor which stories remain free based on what an individual reader is most likely to engage with or subscribe after reading.

“Maybe your first five digests are full of free links, and then the rest start dropping in more… paywalled content,” they said. “Understanding the threshold of content that needs to be consumed before you sell someone on paying you is… very key to the conversation.”

For now, few in the room claimed to have nailed that threshold, but most agreed that if personalization is going to matter at all, it will be here, in price and access, rather than in which headlines show up in an email. 

What we’ve heard

“I think where we end up is very unclear… It’s very hard to get these things going. It takes years, and so a marketplace that is valuing content in real time for use in AI training or inference is just going to take a long time.”

– Adam Greenberg, vp of strategic partnerships, speaking onstage at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Miami last week.

Numbers to know

83-93%: The drop in click-through rates to The New York Times and Daily News from Microsoft’s Copilot AI chatbot compared with traditional Bing Search, according to unsealed court filings in The New York Times v. OpenAI and Microsoft lawsuit.

46%: The year-over-year decline in Reach’s Google traffic. 

39.4%: The percentage of Google desktop searches measured by Comscore where AI Overviews appear.

50%: The decline in ChatGPT’s share of prompt volume from January to June 2026, falling from a 70% share in January, while Gemini and Claude’s share grew, according to a Comscore report. 

21%: The percentage of AI travel citations that come from Tripadvisor, despite the site accounting for 61% of AI platforms’ travel sourcing.

What we’ve covered

Publishers’ scorecard on Google’s ad tech remedies

• After years of waiting for the DOJ to finally curb Google’s ad tech power, publishers are finding that the devil in these new remedies is very much in the details.
• Publishers see the remedies as meaningful steps toward greater competition and control, but question whether they’ll materially loosen Google’s grip on the market or boost publisher revenue.

Read Digiday’s scorecard here.

What The New York Times looks for in AI licensing partnerships

• The AI content licensing ecosystem has improved for publishers in the past few years, with AI companies now increasingly expected to compensate publishers for their content, or at least give them the ability to opt out of its use.
• But Adam Greenberg, vp of strategic partnerships, said onstage at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Miami last week that the emerging AI marketplaces are “underdeveloped” and would take some time to mature.

Read more here.

How Semafor is redefining the head of video role

• Adam Banicki’s new role as head of video at Semafor spans the editorial and business sides of the company, keeping tabs on what’s going on in the newsroom to then bring programming ideas to the commercial side to drive revenue.
• Semafor will launch a new show focused on technology and hosted by its tech editor Reed Albergotti. That will bring Semafor’s portfolio to four shows, with plans to develop a daily news show “very soon,” Banicki said onstage at DPS.

Listen to the latest Digiday Podcast episode here.

Comscore data shows how AI discovery is splintering beyond ChatGPT

• AI chatbot usage is quickly fragmenting beyond ChatGPT, as overall usage grows this year, according to a new report from Comscore.
• The report also reveals an important distinction between brands and publishers being used as an AI source and actually being cited

Read more here.

Paywall violation ‘eviscerates’ fair use defense: What OpenAI-NYT twist means for publishers

• A tranche of internal emails and analysis in The New York Times’ lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft spells out what publishers have suspected for years: tech giants treated their journalism as free fuel for AI products that could ultimately wipe out the businesses that created it. 
• Digiday spoke to a range of lawyers and AI licensing experts about what the filings signal for publishers’ AI monetization strategies. 

Read more here. 

Axios preps new Axios Direct feeds for AI models, agents as revenue tops 2026 goal

• Axios reached its revenue goal for 2026. Now the news publisher is building a new revenue stream to keep up the pace in 2027 and beyond.
• This month Axios will take to market Axios Direct, a new product that will provide Axios’s reporting in the form of content feeds that effectively take the concepts of a Bloomberg terminal and an RSS feed and update them for the agentic AI era.

Read more here.

What we’re reading

AI Overview links take users to AI Mode

Google is placing links within AI Overviews that take users into AI Mode instead of directly to websites, Search Engine Roundtable reported. These links appear at the bottom of the AI Overview and prompt follow-up questions that take users into AI Mode.

CNN to get new owner and editorial board

CNN and CBS News are poised to live under the same corporate umbrella as Paramount’s Warner Bros. Discovery merger moves forward, and will get an independent editorial board, The New York Times reported.

CNN, MS NOW and Politico sue Trump administration over White House access

CNN, MS NOW and Politico have sued the Trump administration after being banned from access to the White House, arguing the ban violates their First Amendment rights and threatens broader press freedoms, CNN reported.

Forbes cuts staff

Forbes is cutting a “small percentage” of staff after falling short of revenue targets, citing advertising pressure, shifting audience behavior and broader challenges to traditional media business models, TheWrap reported.

Paid creators are producing a blizzard of political content videos ahead of the U.S. midterm elections

Political groups are increasingly using networks of small social media accounts to flood platforms with coordinated messaging ahead of the U.S. midterm elections, The New York Times reported.