Media Briefing: This year’s search referral traffic shifts are giving publishers whiplash

2024 has been a bit of a watershed year for digital publishers’ original traffic driver search. And not necessarily in a good way.

There was the March 2024 update to Google’s core search algorithm that has thrown publishers’ referral traffic in flux. Then the official rollout of AI Overviews in Google’s search engine results pages in May. Meanwhile, publishers had been seeing a boost in traffic from Reddit that coincided with the platform’s deal with Google to make Reddit content available to Google’s AI models. But an August 2024 update to Google’s search algorithm seems to be lessening that boost.

No surprise then that publishers listed a litany of search-related challenges on the Challenge Board during September’s Digiday Publishing Summit in Key Biscayne, Florida. And they detailed those challenges during behind-closed-doors town hall sessions in which publishing executives were granted anonymity in exchange for their candor.

Search engine optimization “is the classic bad relationship cycle: You’re trying to please somebody while they’re telling you they don’t want to date you anymore, and you’re going all the way now — as long as that person’s going to keep returning your texts until it’s over,” said one publisher.

Case in point: the Google-Reddit situation. 

While Google seemed to have boosted Reddit links in its search results — creating a downstream positive effect on publishers’ referral traffic from Reddit — that boost did not benefit all publishers. “That took a lot of traffic away from commerce publishers, and this recent algorithm update [by Google in August 2024] is supposed to help bring some of that traffic back to the independent product review sites,” said a publisher during one of the town hall sessions.

Reddit isn’t the only search-adjacent referral platform that’s been a bit in flux. So too has been Google Discover. Google’s content discovery platform has become a growing traffic source for publishers, but it can be as slippery for publishers to get a grasp on as any (every?) other algorithm-based platform.

“Last year I was working on health content at the time, and in February or March, they tweaked [the algorithm], and suddenly every health publisher dropped by 30% or 40%,” a publisher said.

“Being able to nail down what are the categories that seem to work consistently [on Google Discover], there’s no formula that will say this article will do well each time you publish something about it,” said another publisher.

The shifting search situation for publishers has hit a point where one publishing executive found themselves singing the (relative) praises of Microsoft’s Bing search engine. 

“We see Bing as being — it’s still so small, but it’s actually acted a lot more consistent over the last six, eight months. So you can actually figure out what’s going to work there, the way you could Google previously but you can’t right now,” this publisher said.

If that doesn’t sum up the search situation for publishers…well, maybe Google’s AI Overviews can.

What we’ve heard

“It’s the end of September, and we’re talking about Perplexity’s publishing program and how we’re incorporating them on the site. If we were having this conversation in June, we’d be talking about four or five major plagiarism cases of theirs. It’s amazing how quickly that changes.”

— Publishing executive during one of the Digiday Publishing Summit’s town hall sessions

Numbers to know

$4.5 million: How much revenue Morning Brew’s B2B products and events have generated so far in 2024.

4 million: Number of free subscribers that email news publisher 1440 has signed up.

$24 million: How much money AI platform-publisher intermediary TollBit raised in its latest funding round.

$20 million: How much money Press Forward will pay, in grants, to 205 small local newsrooms in the U.S.

What we’ve covered

Inside The Wall Street Journal’s video-based approach to this year’s election coverage:

• YouTube is WSJ’s largest video platform, though its TikTok audience has also been growing.
• The Journal has experimented with putting videos behind the publication’s own paywall.

Read more about WSJ’s video strategy here.

How to manage an actual online community platform, with Oprah Daily’s Pilar Guzmán:

• In September, the Hearst-owned publication debuted a platform for paying subscribers that combines elements of YouTube, Facebook, Slack and Reddit.
• On the Digiday Podcast, Guzmán discussed how Oprah Daily is thinking about moderating content on the platform.

Listen to the latest Digiday Podcast episode here.

How publishing execs are incorporating generative AI tools into their workflows:

• Publishers are using gen AI tools for assisting in writing emails and transcribing meeting notes.
• But not all media companies have policies allowing employees to use gen AI tools for work.

See how publishers are using gen AI tools for work here.

Publishers tweak subscription, pricing strategies while shifting subscriber benefits:

• Digiday’s second annual Subscription Index examines and measures publishers’ subscriptions strategies.
• One hundred percent of the professional publications included in the report have some level of metered paywall.

Read the Digiday+ Research Professional Subscription Index 2024 here.

What we’re reading

News Corp pubs vs. Perplexity:

Dow Jones and New York Post have filed a lawsuit against Perplexity, alleging that the AI-based search engine has violated the publishers’ copyrights by redistributing their content, according to Variety.

How’s the media business doing?:

The media industry is by no means a monolith, but New York Magazine has published a monstrous story surveyed the media landscape from the perspective of major players like Apple News’s Lauren Kern, CBS News’s Wendy McMahon, Semafor’s Ben Smith and YouTube’s Neal Mohan that could be considered a digest on the state of the media business if it weren’t so long.

LinkedIn’s video rev-share program with publishers:

Since rolling out earlier this year, the Microsoft-own platform’s video advertising rev-share program will generate more than $2 million apiece for Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal, according to The Information.

Future plc needs a new CEO again:

Less than two years after filling the void left by Zillah Byng-Thorne, Future plc CEO Jon Steinberg plans to step down from the British publisher in order to relocate back to the U.S., according to Press Gazette.