What publishers can be thankful for this year

But it’s not all bad. Here’s what media executives can be grateful for this Thanksgiving:

Another Trump bump

The U.S. presidential election brought a healthy boost of traffic and new subscribers to publishers this fall. And while for some publishers it was not the huge surge they experienced during past presidential elections, another “Trump bump” was welcomed to help alleviate referral traffic challenges.

For example, the day after Election Day was Vox’s “strongest day” for new member sign-ups since the publisher launched its program in May, according to Vox editor-in-chief and publisher Swati Sharma.

That day also marked an all-time record for traffic to The Economist’s site and app, a spokesperson told Digiday. (For what it’s worth, The Economist saw 50% more overall traffic in 2024 than 2020 over the 48 hour period around the U.S. election.) The publisher also the “strongest growth” in total subscribers that day since Black Friday last year, the spokesperson added.

And The Wall Street Journal saw four times its monthly average of on-site registrations on Election Day, according to a company spokesperson.

Google Discover, the enigmatic traffic source

Updates to Google’s search algorithm this year — and the rollout of AI Overviews — have challenged publishers’ search traffic, but Google Discover has proven to be a bright spot by continuing to send spikes of traffic to publishers’ sites. For companies like Reach plc, traffic from Google Discover even helped to offset declines from Google Search.

But figuring out Google Discover’s algorithm — or any tech company’s algorithm, for that matter — is a game of trial and error. At least it’s working sometimes, especially given the fact that referral traffic from social platforms has been declining for years.

AI companies pay out

I know what you’re thinking: Why should media execs be thankful for startup tech companies eating up their content for free?

Because those companies have started paying up. OpenAI signed its first deal with a publisher last December, and since then, media companies from Dotdash Meredith to News Corp have signed deals worth millions of dollars with the AI tech company. Microsoft and Perplexity AI have also started cutting deals with publishers to pay them for their content.

As many execs have told me, money coming in from AI companies is helpful at a time when other platforms like Meta have stopped paying publishers like they once did.

Interest rate cuts

In September, The Federal Reserve cut interest rates for the first time in four years, which could help kick up merger and acquisition activity and open the doors to more media consolidation. Now that it’s more affordable for companies to finance deals, media companies hoping to offload some properties (BuzzFeed’s First We Feast and Graydon Carter’s Air Mail, for example) could field interest from more potential buyers. The market was understandably quieter when interest rates had reached their highest level in nearly two dozen years.

Perhaps in 2025, media companies could start to mirror the M&A pipeline happening on the ad tech side of things.

A shift to smaller social platforms

Smaller, less mainstream social platforms like Bluesky have seen waves of new users in recent weeks, and publishers are following their audiences to these platforms to see if they can serve as useful distribution channels for their content. It’s a repudiation of the toxicity growing on X as much as it is a search for new opportunities (especially as publishers like The Guardian, The Dodo and Polygon have joined NPR in vowing to no longer post content on X).

Publishers are continuing to test potential X alternatives to see if they can serve as spaces to grow audience engagement outside the major social media platforms. And while Bluesky and Threads haven’t proven to be worthy of too much of publishers’ strained resources just yet, social media managers have told Digiday it can’t hurt to see what those platforms have to offer for now.

A pretty good Q3 buoys hopes for Q4

Some publishers have seen advertising revenue improve this year. The industry saw strong ad spending over the summer, and companies including Dotdash Meredith, Gannett and The New York Times reported year-over-year digital ad revenue growth in the third quarter — despite the fact that executives blamed the lead-up to the U.S. presidential election for a pullback from some advertisers, which resulted in a softer ad market.

While execs at public media companies told shareholders and analysts on earnings calls that they were confident ad spend would pick up in Q4, some media executives have told Digiday that the health of their programmatic ad businesses remains in limbo — an unusual level of uncertainty this far into the year.

It’s just another reason why it’s important to count our blessings while we have them.