Mitigating ‘Google risk’: The Independent maps four-pillar growth plan for the AI era

“All of the growth strategies that we’ve got for this year, we’ve been very mindful of the ‘blue links risk’ as we put it together,” The Independent’s CEO Christian Broughton told Digiday. 

The publisher recently announced annual revenues of £53.2 million ($71.6 million) for the financial year ending 2024, a 15 percent year-over-year increase. U.S. revenue grew 50 percent YoY to £12.7 million ($17 million) and now accounts for a quarter of all revenue, per the publisher. And Independent TV saw a 47% increase in revenue as views exceeded 1 billion, not counting platforms like TikTok or YouTube, though the publisher didn’t reveal the specific revenue breakout. Part of the £3.2 million ($4.3 million) operating profit made in 2024 has been invested in areas like Independent Studios and its AI product Bulletin, which both launched in April. 

For all the latest AI hype (this week around OpenAI’s Sora 2 — the latest leap in text-to-video technology that can generate photorealistic clips from simple prompts) publisher execs like Broughton are staying cool-headed. They’re clear that no AI fad will extinguish the value of journalism created by talented humans. But, like many of their publisher peers, he’s equally intent on putting AI tools to work inside the business, using them to compete more aggressively with AI-driven shifts rather than sitting back and waiting to see how things shake out. 

Using generative AI tools to drive audience engagement 

The Independent deepened its use of AI-generated tools in April with the launch of Bulletin, its generative AI-driven product that delivers personalized story summaries and news digests to readers. What began as an experiment has now become an effective audience engagement tool for driving users back to other areas of its site, per Broughton. 

He described the audience engagement results as “phenomenal,” though he declined to reveal specific figures, adding that he wanted to share them with the board before releasing them publicly. But he said the publisher will launch an app version of Bulletin in the next few months. 

“This is a human-run team using our AI tools. It’s not just AI set loose,” said Broughton. “There are many things that could possibly happen out of AI and journalism, but if you put the journalists in charge of it, and let them dictate the terms of how they want the tech to work, and you get great engineers to build into that brief, there’s a great future,” he said.

Six people were hired in April to work on Bulletin, and the publisher is hiring a further six to work on future AI-driven projects, with those roles to be based in the U.K. and the U.S., according to Broughton. 

The publisher has just had its second major generative AI product greenlit, though Broughton wouldn’t reveal further details.

The decline of digital display and the erosion of the addressable open web have already weakened the case for publishers to chase reach. Now, Google’s AI-led search changes – along with the fast pace of developments from other AI engines like OpenAI, are pushing publishers to focus more on alternative areas of their business models, namely e-commerce, direct reader relationships, subscriptions, video and talent-led IP. “We have stopped measuring our audience success as reach. I think that’s what publishers have got to do, because so much of that reach is coming from what has, in the past couple of years, come from Google,” said Broughton. 

While he admitted no publisher likes to see the kinds of drops that have been occurring in Google referral traffic over the last six months, it’s the kind of “one-and-done” traffic that’s falling out for publishers, not the highly engaged readers. “It’s your least lucrative audience that you’re losing,” he said. 

Capitalizing on the U.S. creator economy 

The Independent has come a long way since its tentative early days in the U.S. in 2018, where it was largely testing the waters and had a modest staff of a few people based out of an Airbnb in New York City. Today it has 50 U.S.-based reporters and revenue from this market now accounts for 25 percent of its total revenue.

The Independent has historically positioned itself as politically neutral, or at least non-partisan, which has been part of its brand identity since its founding in 1986. Broughton believes that’s what’s helped it differentiate in the U.S. market, and which has played a large part in its recent growth spurt. “A year ago, it was an incredibly febrile atmosphere [in the U.S.]: all the news brands were going either left or right,” said Broughton. 

In the past, U.K. publishers typically entered the U.S. with skeleton editorial teams and a strategy built on scale, chasing programmatic ad dollars through SEO and viral content. Today, the playbook looks different — with more investment in brand, subscriptions and direct revenue streams. The Independent is no exception. It has a local sales team and revenue growth is similar to its U.K. offering, coming from a mix of brand partnerships, direct sales, and video. 

“It’s not just a newsroom, it’s a business commitment in the U.S.,” said Broughton, who said there are plans to staff up in the U.S. in the coming year and expand its e-commerce business, IndyBest with more social commerce — letting readers buy products inside a social platform like TikTok Shop, Instagram Checkout, or YouTube Shopping. “Social commerce doesn’t have that Google risk,” he added. 

The publisher will also expand Independent Studios in the U.S., potentially tapping well-known or popular talent to learn new verticals, mirroring the approach it has taken in the U.K. Charismatic humans, not AI bots, create trusted, authoritative IP, said Broughton. These verticals can help it build in areas where it can drive audience growth and a mix of revenue streams around its studio: brand partnerships, memberships, merchandise, and events, he added. 

In April, the publisher hired Adam Clery, a charismatic content creator known for his popular YouTube channel, the Adam Cleary Football Channel as creative director. Since then, he has continued creating his own content, but using the resources of Independent Studios. His YouTube channel, which since April has had “From the Independent” branding, has grown to 164,000 subscribers. That’s a model it wants to tap into more in the U.S., using local talent, said Broughton.

“The creator economy is huge and we’re going to exploit that opportunity to the maximum in the U.S.,” he said. 

Still, The Independent’s play on the creator economy is less about cutting revenue-share deals with superstar influencers and more about building a hybrid model — elevating charismatic internal journalists and bringing in familiar talent to front new verticals, all under its own brand and IP. 

This is a smart play for publishers, particularly as developments like OpenAI’s Sora 2 risk a new flood of AI-generated just-about-credible video to flood feeds with disinformation in the near future, according to Alan Wolk, co-founder and lead analyst at TV and media analysis group TVREV. 

“The more actual journalists we can have reading the news on platforms like TikTok, the better, because a lot of these news influencers have zero journalistic training,” said Wolk.

A lot of TikTok creators share content without realizing it’s inaccurate or poorly sourced, and eventually, there is likely to be a backlash as audiences grow overwhelmed by misinformation, especially when it comes to politics, he added. “We need to train the next generation of journalists to use these platforms, as that’s where people are going,” he said.