To beat the AI squeeze, Newsweek is building revenue beyond traffic

Newsweek generated $90 million in revenue in the last financial year, with a 20 percent profit margin. Of that, 63 percent ($57 million) came from digital advertising (70 percent of which was programmatic advertising and 30 percent direct). Naturally, search-driven traffic is a big part of that monetization model for the publisher, which had approximately 43 million monthly users on desktop and mobile in May 2025, up 8.8 percent year-over-year, according to Comscore. Events and subscriptions accounted for less than 1 percent of revenue last year. 

Newsweek CEO Dev Pragad stressed that Google AI Overviews and AI platforms generally haven’t caused significant traffic erosion yet, but that the publisher wants to reduce its reliance on digital advertising, taking the split from 63 percent of its overall revenue to 55 percent over the next year. 

The goal for the next year is to still aim for 10-15 percent growth, rather than last year’s 43 percent year-over-year revenue hike, given the AI headwinds and macroeconomic uncertainty, he noted. But it wants to get there with a more diversified revenue mix – one which he believes will insulate the company from the encroachment of AI referral traffic erosion. 

This involves building out its verticals strategy with more events, subscription experiments and more editorial rankings – data-driven co-branded lists produced in partnership with research firms like Statista, that evaluate and spotlight top-performing organizations, institutions and services across a wide range of sectors, including healthcare and retail. Pragad hasn’t ruled out applying a more advanced subscriptions strategy more broadly across general news either, but the publisher is in the very early stages of testing. 

Newsweek already runs digital and print subscriptions for its magazine, priced at $4.99 per month, or $49.00 per year. Pragad said these drive a “reasonable amount of revenue,” but that the company doesn’t push or market them hard.

Direct and programmatic advertising will remain priorities, with the publisher having recently acquired Adprime, a healthcare-focused advertising platform, specifically to target pharmaceutical and healthcare brands, to complement its existing healthcare vertical.   

Like many publishers, focus has been on driving more direct and PMP buys, vs. open-web programmatic, with those accounting for around 40% of total digital advertising this year, per Pragad. “This year, our focus is to really stabilize the growth we experienced last year, and then build on top of it. So Newsweek alone would be [a] $100 million business [with the 10 percent predicted growth] and Adprime on top of it, that would take us substantially north of that,” said Pagrad. 

Preparing for ‘zero-click’ search 

Most publishers are preoccupied with planning for a “zero-click” future, and Newsweek, and its strong search-driven traffic, is no exception. With programmatic ad revenue so reliant on page views, many of which come via Google search, Newsweek is also pressing to reduce its reliance on open-web programmatic advertising and shore up more direct ad deals.

“What’s driving the diversification is partly how AI will impact or affect the way consumers engage with information,” Pragad said. “So a big part of our diversification [strategy] is looking at revenue streams that could potentially be disrupted by AI and then trying to invest and grow revenue streams that won’t be disrupted by how people engage and consume information through AI.”

Many publishers — including the Washington Post and even The New York Times — have now signed AI licensing deals to ensure they’re compensated for AI engines scraping their content, but Newsweek hasn’t been met with terms that have made that worth its while, yet. 

The publisher has turned down what it deemed low-ball offers in the “low seven figures,” said Pragad, though he didn’t say from which companies. “For the amount of money that they were willing to pay for all our historic content, and on a yearly basis… and of course, a deal would mean giving them general release to everything…the money that was on the table just didn’t make sense for us to do a deal. That [seven-figure deal] would have had no material impact at all,” he added. 

However, Pragad is more optimistic about the potential for future syndication deals with AI companies being a more lucrative revenue model for publishers like Newsweek. The publisher uses TollBit to track how often its content is scraped, which is pretty often. Bot traffic directed to the TollBit bot paywall increased by 732 percent between the fourth quarter of 2024 and the first quarter of 2025, according to TollBit. When an AI bot needs access to articles on Newsweek, it must pay a per-use fee as set by the publisher. So far, publishers — Newsweek included — are tight-lipped on what they earn from these setups. 

“My hope is there will be a sustained industry effort to bring them [LLMs] to the table and negotiate a fair deal. And that there will be some sort of a standard through which publishers also make money because we are the ones who are producing the content,” added Pragad. 

Two media buyers, who requested anonymity so they could speak candidly, said that Newsweek hasn’t quite sustained the clout it once had as the print giant of its heyday, but that continued investment in its investigative journalism will be a crucial part of its future differentiation, as publishers come under even more pressure to be visible in the new era of AI-generated summaries. 

“It’s [Newsweek] a name brand, no doubt about it, but it’s not yet apparent whether the rest of it lives up to what the name once was,” said one senior agency executive at a holding group agency. 

Subscriptions will take a larger cut of revenue 

Subscriptions will take a larger slice of Newsweek’s strategic revenue pie. The publisher is upgrading its subscription software through the summer with plans to begin experimenting with pricing models for subscriptions for both consumer-facing and B2B vertical-focused subscriptions this fall, per Pragad. It will then test and learn over a set period to understand what the right pricing models will be, and what kind of editorial products and services people will be willing to pay for. This will be tested in the fall in the U.S.

It will start with healthcare vertical, putting its most popular healthcare newsletters for example, behind a paywall. The plan is to hire more healthcare editors and journalists before the rest of the year, though he didn’t reveal headcount numbers. Newsweek has 250 editorial staff in total, according to the publisher. 

Subscriptions revenue will be modest at first, unlikely to top 10% in revenue by the end of next year, according to Pragad, and yet the expectation is for that to “compound over time,” he added.