What seemed especially significant was not simply the scale of the change media leaders face. It was the degree to which they recognize what this moment requires. They must move from reacting to disruption to setting terms for it by defending the value of their content, deepening direct audience relationships, investing in unmistakably human differentiation, and applying AI where it creates real business advantage.

This became clear from the four big themes that stood out this year:

1. AI is redrawing the value chain around content

Unsurprisingly, AI was a nearly constant topic across sessions. One idea that cut across the event with unusual clarity, however, was that AI is not just another technology wave. It is forcing a fundamental reset in how media leaders think about the value of content, the economics of publishing, and the terms by which others get to access journalism and other professionally created content.

In his opening remarks, DCN CEO Jason Kint described AI as “the latest and most consequential event of an ongoing story” saying that it is disrupting “the value chain on the Web.”

That sense of responsibility and urgency echoed across many sessions. Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, talked in no uncertain terms about the fact that media leaders must work to shape the model so that publishers “will get the compensation they should,” even as he acknowledged the larger risks around scrapers, declining search, and disintermediation in an “agentic future.” Guardian CEO Anna Bateson emphasized the need to establish “the value of our IP” and protect the investment behind centuries of journalism.

Scott Havens, Chief Growth Officer and Global Head of Consumer of Dow Jones was even more direct about the value media companies bring to LLMs. In describing the way in which agentic AI is reliant on current, quality information, he said, “AI companies need our content and that’s not going to change.” The implication was unmistakable, however. If the industry does not actively assert the value of its work, someone else will define that value.

Perhaps the starkest articulation came from Jon Roberts, Chief Innovation Officer at People Inc. “Index for discovery is fine. Stealing our content is absolutely not.”

2. Audience strategy is replacing reach strategy

For decades, the industry’s growth logic was built around distribution at scale. Reach was the organizing principle. However, AI answers fundamentally change the math. Therefore, search strategies will no longer be reliable or sufficient to drive traffic or revenue.

Axel Springer’s Supervisory Board Chairman Jan Bayer noted that Business Insider has become “more focused on engagement and time spent now, less on reach.” That shift was emblematic of a broader theme. Again and again, leaders returned to the audience as the center of gravity: not traffic, not sheer distribution, but the depth and durability of the audience relationship.

COO Alex MacCallum described CNN as a “consumer first organization” focused on “delivering the most value to their audience.” That language resounded in other conversations about consumption habits, format flexibility, and the need to build around how audiences actually want to consume and engage with information.

At the Guardian, Bateson described a shift from being reader-funded to “audience-funded,” a semantic shift which recognizes that people are consuming journalism in many forms across video, audio, and visual formats. Award winning investigative journalist Julie K. Brown talked about the way her Substack and work for the Miami Herald reach different readers and create a bridge to new audiences. This approach is complementary, she said, rather than competitive. It allows her to use different tones, formats, and distribution models to grow the audience for her reporting.

As discovery is becoming less reliable, the business value of a direct relationship with the audience has risen sharply. This impacts product development and higher-level strategy. Media companies that know the audience, serve focused and meaningful needs, and create value across multiple formats are better positioned than those optimizing for reach. As Ankler CEO and Editor-in-chief Janice Min pointed out, the opportunity is not merely to serve narrow audiences, but to “broaden the total addressable audience” through sharper value and stronger relevance.

3. Human connection, talent, and voice may be the moat

Much of the AI conversation has been understandably dominated by automation, efficiency, and scale. But one of the most interesting through-lines of the event was the opposite idea: that the more abundant and synthetic content becomes, the more valuable human connection, recognizable talent, and editorial voice will be.

That point surfaced when COO Jen Wong described the agentic Reddit search experience as one designed not to replace conversation, but to drive people toward “human communication.” That framing stood out because it runs counter to the grain of so much AI hype. Wong says they must “never disintermediate human communication.” And, as CNN’s MacCallum pointed out: “AI can’t do the human-to-human connection,” which makes it a defensible moat.

That same logic extends to creators and talent. If human connection is becoming more valuable, then the people who embody that connection matter more, not less. In a market flooded with interchangeable output, audiences gravitate toward individuals they recognize, trust, and want to spend time with. That gives journalists, creators, and other distinctive voices a different kind of strategic value: They are not just contributors to the product. They are increasingly central to how media brands build authority, loyalty, and differentiation.

As Christine Cook, Chief Commercial Officer at Bloomberg Media put it: “Aren’t journalists the original creators?” Thus, surfacing their authority, authenticity and lived experience will build loyalty. Carlos King, Founder & CEO, Kingdom Reign Entertainment spoke about the strategic importance of “recognizable talent” and the “creator perspective” in an increasingly fragmented consumption landscape. And Min argued for “the value of voice.”

That connection between humanity and distinctiveness may be one of the most important takeaways from the event. In a noisy world with too much content, what stands out is not generic output but rather trust, perspective, and personality. As others pointed out, what matters is offering information people “can’t get anywhere else” and face-to-face experiences that create “genuine connection.” As King put it, we must harness the power of “human advantage.” Havens talked about the futility of ignoring creators and other talent ecosystems and encouraged his peers to find “ways to work with them.”

For leaders, this means the industry has to stop thinking about talent, journalists, creators, and experiences as nice-to-have complements to the brand. Particularly in an AI-dominated landscape, the people who create our content and human to human connection will define the brand.

4. Operational change is no longer optional

Many of the most grounded comments across the event were not about AI-generated content or media products. They were about AI’s impact behind the scenes to improve workflow, efficiency, product development, emphasizing the practical ways AI can help companies move faster and operate smarter.

Thompson from The Atlantic warned that too many companies are focused on AI in the “front of house” when it is “really useful in the back office.” Min drew a similar line for the deployment of AI in media companies: “On the backend: opportunity. On the front end: not so interesting.”

CNN’s MacCallum categorizes AI as something that can help create “better consumer experiences” and help media companies “be more efficient.” And Bayer from Axel Springer described the need to create experiences that are “personalized and relevant,” while still arguing that content creation itself should remain “a human area.”

These comments point to a meaningful leadership test: It is no longer whether or not to use AI, but rather where, how and to what end. Leaders who approach AI strictly as a shiny consumer-facing feature, or as a way to replace journalists risk missing the deeper opportunity to rethink internal systems, reduce friction, improve decision-making, and better align product, editorial, and business teams. For example, Havens from Dow Jones made a clear case for how AI can help business leaders accelerate the “speed to approval” to enable growth and innovation.

Guiding the future of media

Overall, the tone from the speakers and attendees at this year’s DCN Summit was one of leadership. Of stepping up and owning the challenges they face in order to shape the future.

They recognize that the old search and platform dynamics are weakening, that AI is reshaping the economics of content and that audiences want relevance, flexibility, and value on their terms. They also see that human connection, distinctive voice, and trusted talent are not being diminished by this moment. If anything, they are becoming more valuable.

Media leaders know the value of content and need to set equitable terms around access and compensation. They need to double down on business models that center on audience value rather than reach. A human-differentiated media market requires investing in journalists, creator partnerships, experiences, and products that offer unique value. But that doesn’t mean ignoring the value of AI. Rather, it requires understanding how to use AI where it strengthens the business — behind the scenes, in operations, in product intelligence, in speed and efficiency.

As ever, the future will be neither predictable nor easy. But, as the conversations at the DCN Summit made clear, it can and will be shaped by informed leadership.

The post Four forces shaping digital media and the leadership this moment demands appeared first on Digital Content Next.

But TIME is not just relying on AI companies citing their work. They have also developed and rolled out their own tool, TIMEAI. This is an interactive agent that has been trained on its 103 year archive in order to enrich the user experience on-site.

Time to train

TIMEAI, which appears on the site as a toolbar overlay, was initially tested at the end of 2024 with the annual reveal of TIME’s Person of the Year, Donald Trump. The toolbar was also put live on the three prior Person of the Year honorees; Taylor Swift, Volodymyr Zelensky and Elon Musk.

“There were several hundred articles about all four of them that we trained [the AI] on,” explained Mark Howard, Chief Operating Officer at TIME. “Person of the Year is our single biggest editorial event of the year. So it’s not like we put it on some back catalogue just to see if we could get some basic data. We put it on our most prominent release.”

The tech used was a small language model rather than a large one (LLM), so it was more straightforward to deploy. But it still needed training on TIME’s editorial styles, and guardrails added. TIME’s Editor in Chief Sam Jacobs and some of the newsroom team were brought in to help train TIMEAI in terms of style and tone.

“We had to, given the personalities involved, make some decisions about how it was going to handle questions that had nothing to do with anything we had written about,” Howard said. Even though there is a lot of publicly available information on these public figures, they decided they didn’t want the AI to use content outside of TIME. “It’s not a complete picture when somebody wants to converse, but we made a lot of those trade-offs in a very contained way,” he added.

The version deployed in December 2024 enabled users to translate the article, summarize it in various lengths, chat with it, and even speak to it using voice and audio in 13 different languages. Rather than just having one type of function, Howard said that being able to mix and match requests – for example, to ask for an audio summary then go into detail via text – sets this AI tool apart from many others on the market.

A wider rollout of TIME AI agent

The initial launch was a success. Howard said that the original toolbar was kept live while the team worked on bringing more TIME content into the AI. This wasn’t a straightforward task.

“Because of the way media companies operated over the decades, we had [content] in five different databases going back to the 1920’s, some of them were just PDFs of magazines that needed indexing and digitizing,” he explained. “Now it’s trained on well over three-quarters of a million pieces of content.”

Since November 2025, the TIMEAI agent has been visible on almost every piece of TIME content. Newly published pieces are also indexed in near real-time, ensuring that the answers given are up-to-date.

The team have also been experimenting with ways to get users to interact. The agent has a number of preset prompts to show how sophisticated queries can be. These can range from, ‘Try reading this article out loud’ to ‘Debate AI’s impact on humanity’ using TIME’s reporting and opinion archives.

The results so far have been encouraging. Users who engage with TIMEAI are 139% more likely to return to TIME when compared to those who don’t. Those using the AI agent also double their time spent on the TIME website.

Now, the focus is on encouraging those who may not be as familiar with AI tools to engage. Howard said that this may include putting more instructional overlays in, or feeding more preset prompts into the toolbar. But they are cautious about the extent to which people are routed into the full AI experience, rather than the standard web page. 

For now, Howard sees TIMEAI as an opportunity to increase engagement, rather than a revenue generator. “If we can get people to engage, every surface represents a monetization opportunity,” he added. “But the focus has been on the product itself in the beginning.”

A trusted agentic AI source

Given TIME’s licensing deals with other AI engines, there is a question about why users would come to TIME, rather than ask an AI which pulls in a wider range of sources, including TIME itself.

Howard was emphatic that trust is something the other AI tools don’t yet have, but TIME does. “A lot of people grew up with TIME, knowing and trusting that the red border stood for something, and there was a level of quality that is behind it,” he explained. “We want to carry that forward.”

ChatGPT and other answer engines do cite TIME content, but alongside a wide range of other sources, including sites like Reddit. These answers aren’t always trustworthy, and Howard said that there is a high burden on the consumer to deconstruct what is accurate and what isn’t.

“We think [TIMEAI] can be a trusted source of information to try and help explain the world in a way that TIME can, because of this vast archive,” he said, pointing out that users will only encounter TIMEAI if they’re already on the TIME site. This already signals a level of intent and interest in TIME’s reporting.

“It’s a way for us to pull our archives, our history, our heritage and our brand equity forward in a way that we can present more through an AI-based interface and experience.”

Howard is also clear on the role AI has to play in TIME journalism going forward. “Our journalists get information that only humans could by speaking to their sources and doing the work,” he emphasised. “AI can never do anything like that. It’s not intended to do anything like that. 

“Its purpose is to take the great journalism and then be able to make it accessible to those who want audio briefings, roundups and other formats to be able to better understand everything that we’re publishing.”

Walking the tightrope between using AI tools to help reporting, and letting them take over is something a number of publishers have fallen down on in the past months, with potential long-term implications for audience trust. 

Interactive agents present an opportunity for quality publishers to surface decades of reporting to add context and enrich the user experience. TIME’s approach is cautious, and they are wary of detracting from a carefully-designed web experience. But as similar tools roll out rapidly, readers will become more familiar with what they can do and how to interact with them. TIMEAI’s multi-feature functionality will set it apart as a leader.

The post Inside TIME’s rollout of its TIMEAI interactive agent appeared first on Digital Content Next.

As a result, notes AdExchanger editor Anthony Vargas, “Publishers, typically a tight-lipped crowd, have been surprisingly candid about losing 20%, 30% and in some cases even as much as 90% of their traffic and revenue over the past year.”

A survey of media leaders featured in the Reuters Institute’s latest annual predictions report revealed that publishers anticipate a further decline in traffic from search engines of more than 40% over the next three years. “Not quite ‘Google Zero’, contends author Nic Newman, “but a substantial impact none the less.”

In response, companies need to focus on how to address this challenge. And how to do so quickly, as traditional sources of referral traffic continue to hemorrhage. 

Five core factors to address Google Zero

Here are the five core factors that publishers should incorporate into their strategy and workflows.

1. Grasp the size of the problem

The term Google Zero stems from a question posed by The Verge’s Editor-in-Chief Nilay Patel who asked what would happen to businesses if their Google traffic were to go to zero?

Changes to social media and search algorithms have reduced referral traffic for some publishers. In the AI era, these dynamics are becoming even more pronounced. The impact of AI-snippets at the top of Google search results means that when users ask a question, they find answers at the top of the page and many don’t click through for more detail or scroll down for more options. 

Data from the Pew Research demonstrates the impact of this: when an AI summary appears, users click traditional search results only 8% of the time, compared to 15% without one. 

Meanwhile, for publishers pinning their hopes on Google Discover, it’s worth remembering that most of the growth in this space comes from breaking news, content which is often excluded from Google AI summaries. 

“Google Discover traffic is mostly a mirage,” contends the media analyst Simon Owens, recommending that media companies “avoid optimizing their content operations around it.” “Publishers never owned those audiences and therefore should never have counted on them,” he added.

Lastly, the situation is further exacerbated by content in replacing carefully crafted headlines from publishers with those generated by AI. Initially confined to content in Discover, this is now happening in Search too. As Sean Hollister, senior editor at The Verge, put it, “This is like a bookstore ripping the covers off the books it puts on display and changing their titles.” 

All of this is to say that if you’re still heavily reliant on Google as an engine for traffic, it’s time to think again. 

2. Understand that this is part of a wider shift in user behavior

Much of the coverage to date has focused on the supply side, centering on publishers and platform dynamics. Far less attention has been paid to the demand side and evolving user needs.

Traditional search feels increasingly outdated. In its place, users are turning not just to AI-generated summaries within Google, but to AI tools like Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity as they begin their information journey.

A recent study from Eight Oh Two Marketing, surveying 500 active AI users, found that 37% of those sampled now begin their search with these types of AI tools rather than traditional search engines. “Consumers are not choosing AI because it is trendy. They are choosing it [AI] because search has become too noisy, too effortful, and too slow.” 

At the same time, 85% of respondents said they still double-check AI-generated answers using traditional search, using these platforms for verification and deeper exploration.

Publishers need to recognize the implications of these behaviors. Those absent from the first phase, AI-driven discovery, may never be found in the second. Equally, those only visible in the verification phase are absent from the critical entry point of this new information funnel. If they’re not present in both of these environments, then they risk being overlooked and left behind. 

3. Recognize that visibility is increasingly binary

AI environments are far more winner-takes-most than traditional search. Previously, a publisher that ranked fifth on a search query would still earn traffic, as might those even lower. AI-mediated discovery cites a couple sources and if you’re not on the shortlist, you’re unlikely to be discovered.

For media companies, understanding how AI-generated answers are created is critical for ensuring that your content is featured in the places and spaces that LLM’s crawl. The foundations of good SEO, such as authority, clarity, credibility, still matter. Build on your SEO foundation; you don’t need to fully reinvent the wheel. 

Research on AI citation patterns shows that AI systems – like search engines before them – tend to favor sources with strong off-page authority. So, media companies will want to ensure that their content demonstrates the E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust) principles. 

That means having a presence on high-authority external platforms, citations in credible databases, earned media in leading publications, as well as content across the information ecosystem. This includes your own website, to thought leadership demonstrated by execs on LinkedIn and in publications like Forbes, through to engagement on Reddit forums, and material produced for other platforms such as company podcasts, YouTube videos, and so on.

A recent SEMrush analysis of 325,000 prompts across AI platforms found LinkedIn ranking second only to Reddit as a source for AI chatbot responses, particularly for professional queries. 

4. Build content that AI can’t replicate

Not all content is equally vulnerable to AI summarization. Sites that prioritize original storytelling, exclusive imagery, and strong visuals, can still thrive. 

According to The Digital Bloom, People.com saw a 27.52% year-over-year traffic increase through September 2025 by adopting this approach. Similarly, Substack witnessed a 40% year-over-year growth in July 2025. “This growth reflects users seeking authentic voices and first-hand perspectives,” they wrote. These are “content types that Google’s Liz Reid [VP, Search] specifically identified as gaining traffic in the AI era,” they added, referencing a discussion on wider online behavioral shifts that she had with The Wall Street Journal last year.

Conversely, if your content can be summarized in three bullet points by an AI, it is a commodity. That’s one of the reasons why a lot of evergreen content has been cannibalized and its traffic for many publishers has tanked. 

In response, many media companies need to simply produce less content and ensure that what they are doing is better. Content needs to be more meaningful. More impactful. More distinctive. Can it help to drive a conversion – in the form of a registration, a newsletter signup, or a subscription – so that audiences come to you first, and not their AI platform of choice? (And if not, should you be doing it at all?)

Similarly, media companies need to continue to invest in products that reduce dependency on external discovery channels. The New York Times is perhaps the best known proponents of this. Nearly half of Times digital subscribers now pay for more than one Times product, attracted by a mix of games, cooking, audio, news, opinion, product reviews and sport. Each of these are elements that can help to create habits and drive engagement that is independent of search.

5. Rethink what success looks like

The narrative is not so much that “AI is killing search,” but that AI should force us to rethink what search looks like. Search is no longer just a driver of traffic, it’s a multi-faceted arena covering discovery (AI chat), synthesis (AI chat and snippets), and verification (actually going to your content to dig deeper). 

As a result, publishers have to look more broadly at metrics they measure and value. In the AI-era, software company ClickRank, for example, points to areas such as citation frequency, brand mention rate, share of voice within AI answers, AI-driven referral traffic and sentiment of brand references.

And all of this sits alongside core metrics such as subscriber lifetime value, churn rates, and time on site. Chartbeat’s data shows us that “your most valuable traffic source might already be on your site,” reminding us that while addressing shift in search matters, engagement with existing visitors remains a key area of focus. 

As part of this conversation, at an industry level, we also need to move beyond discussing a reduction in referrals to better understand its impact on revenue. We know that clicks are down, but we know much less about what that means for subscriptions and ad yields. Hopefully publishers are already joining up these dots internally, but a wider industry conversation about this would also be beneficial. 

The bottom line

Worries about Google Zero are well founded, although its impact is uneven. Publishers that are most exposed to this shift are typically those with the heaviest dependence on evergreen, easily summarized content and platform-dependent traffic. Meanwhile, those that are best positioned to navigate these changes, are those who produce content that needs to be seen onsite or in-app, and who already have strong direct and habitual relationships with audiences. Off-platform discovery is part of their playbook, but they are not reliant on it.

There’s no point asking whether AI-powered search will disrupt the traditional referral model. We know the answer. Subsequently, Google Zero encourages us to think about distribution and engagement strategies at a time when search traffic is less predictable and the economics are increasingly hard to quantify.

As Press Gazette describes it, search is not dead, it is fragmenting. What the most successful publishers understand is that Google Zero doesn’t require a single response. It requires a range of them. That includes potential partnerships with tech companies and AI providers, optimizing distinctive content for generative engine optimization (GEO), as well as doubling down on user experience within your properties.  

These media companies recognize that we have moved beyond clicks to a more fragmented and distributed media ecosystem, one where value is defined not just by traffic, but by presence, influence, and direct relationships with audiences.

The post The publisher’s playbook for the Google Zero era appeared first on Digital Content Next.

But, across conversations with media leaders at Axios, Hearst Newspapers, Consumer Reports and Forbes, the prevailing approach is measured rather than panicked. What’s happening is less about SEO replacement than an evolution of existing best practices. SEO still delivers traffic, but with an added GEO layer.

While this last year has introduced a new set of acronyms like AEO, GEO, and AIO (see glossary), search teams are pushing past the alphabet soup and finding that the fundamentals of SEO haven’t changed as much as the hype may suggest. AI answer engines still rely on traditional search databases, making authority and clarity advantages for publishers.

“SEO equals GEO. GEO transcends SEO,” says Gideon Grudo, executive managing editor at Consumer Reports, who oversees the SEO and GEO/AIO team. “All the work that we’ve been doing, that we will be doing for search, we will continue to do, because it will benefit us in the answer engines. Study after study, data point after data point continues to prove that if you’re ranking well in search, you are ranking well in the answer engines.”

“There’s news every day about what matters, and what doesn’t matter, and what might be important, and what’s important in this year, and in the next five years,” says Grudo. “And, there are mainstay SEO search foundational realities that have not changed an inch.”

Re-structuring content for machine-readability

Andy Crestodina, co-founder of Orbit Media Studios, frames it in structural terms. In the traditional search model, a user query goes to a search engine, which returns results. Now, he says user prompts go to AI, which queries search, summarizes results, and surfaces an answer. The abstraction layer, which sits on top of the visual internet and allows us to talk to it, is new. The underlying mechanics are not.

“Traditional SEO still matters,” he says. “If you have a page that’s not discoverable in search, it’s usually for one of three reasons: a technical problem, the page isn’t relevant, or you don’t have any links and you’re not a credible website.”

For publishers, the practical implication is that content needs to be more rigorously structured. Bridget Williams, chief product and strategy officer at Hearst Newspapers, is tracking which content is being scraped, what is most frequently retrieved by AI systems using RAG, and how that retrieval correlates with actual clicks.

“These topics, these URLs are scraped the most by OpenAI. These topics are getting surfaced the most. And then these topics are getting the most people clicking through. What does that all mean?” she asks. “It’s very nascent for us.”

Binti Pawa, VP of audience growth and development at Forbes, says AI optimization means making sure that both search engines and AI engines can retrieve Forbes’ content. She notes that the best practices for traditional SEO and for answer engine optimization overlap. “Your content should be well-organized and clear. Content should be for people and not AI agents or bots. That’s not going to change with any of the strategies.”

Pawa believes that SEO and answer engine optimization are complementary, not competing, and that ignoring either one means leaving visibility on the table. “It’s becoming more important to think about your brand and your brand mentions and the citations, which will return a link, which will return a referral, and track it back to your site,” she says.  

Original reporting is a competitive advantage

Structural SEO work only goes so far without editorial to back it up. As information becomes increasingly commoditized by AI, the most successful publishers are doubling down on original reporting and subject-matter expertise, content that is harder for AI to replicate.

Ben Berkowitz, head of news at Axios, says the Axios strategy is to double down on exclusive reporting and analysis from subject-matter experts. “AI prizes original information, so the depth and quality of reporting really is the optimization.”

One of the strategies that can be effective in the AI era is to publish original content and research, Crestodina says. He has noticed that in the traffic from AI sources to websites, the URLs that get the most traffic are the ones that have data points, statistics, or research studies, he explains.

“Most people don’t fully trust AI, for good reasons. And when they look for something backed by data, they’re likely to want to click through and see it,” he says. “They might want to cite the original source. So, when a prompt indicates the visitor wants hard numbers, and the AI response summarizes those numbers, the reader will click through. Because they want to see: is this legit?”

Expanding beyond clicks to visibility and reputation

Publishers say that standard SEO metrics are still tracked, but they are no longer telling the whole story. For media executives, the focus has shifted to holistic KPIs like brand visibility, citation tracking and conversion metrics.

Where traditional SEO focused on what lived on a publisher’s own site, GEO and AIO requires thinking about the brand’s presence across the entire web: third-party mentions, Reddit comments, social signals, and anywhere else a large language model might go looking for evidence of credibility.

“It’s not just what’s on your site, it’s what exists on all these other platforms. So, we’re starting to think about all these other platforms as well,” Grudo says. “That means I want to think about how we exist outside of our site, and what that means.”

Grudo says his team is also looking at where traffic originates. While bot traffic might be minimal right now, as it continues to grow, will it become important, he wonders. “What is intention like from traffic from bots? What’s crawl like from bots? Is that important? How do we keep an eye on that to determine optimization for it?”

SEO teams are now working more closely with social and audience teams. AI models draw on signals from across the web, including platforms like Reddit and YouTube, to assess a brand’s authority and determine how to describe it to users.

Williams notes that Hearst Newspapers subscription base gives it an advantage, with those direct relationships providing a stable foundation. “We are focusing more and more on direct relationships,” she says. “We have this amazing subscription base of people that really care about local news and we are very differentiated in the market.”

According to Pawa, standard SEO KPIs continue to be important to Forbes. But, Forbes has learned it ranks among the top cited sources within certain AI search environments, intelligence that is now feeding into how the team thinks about audience engagement. “Our KPIs are evolving with that,” she says, adding, “Our strategy is shifting to quality and how do we engage loyal users? Do we know enough about our users? How do we engage better with them to actually move them down the funnel?”

In a recent Digiday article, Karl Wells, The Washington Post’s chief revenue officer, said that users coming from AI platforms show 4-5 times higher subscription conversion rates than those from traditional search and tend to spend more time on site.

Wells’ insight may reflect something broader about how AI is changing discovery. Preliminary research from Stanford and Cornell researchers tentatively suggests that LLM adoption may complement rather than replace traditional search, as using AIs lead to a sustained increase in the number of unique websites people visit. The study found users increasingly integrate LLMs and search engines into multi-step, exploratory workflows for tasks, who visit significantly more distinct domains than those using search alone. While preliminary and awaiting peer review, the study hints LLMs disperse attention across a wider, more diverse range of websites.

Same SEO work, new AI search vocabulary

Publishers navigating this transition most effectively aren’t the ones who pivoted quickest to GEO frameworks or overhauled their content operations quickest. They are the ones treating the new environment as an extension of existing discipline: maintaining a strong SEO foundation, structuring content more rigorously, building original reporting that AI cannot easily replicate, and paying closer attention to how their brands are understood and cited across the web.

Berkowitz says, “It’s funny how many times the industry has pivoted content formats to chase whatever algorithm was most rewarding that year. And always, every time, it comes back to ‘just do good original reporting and write it well.’ The publishers that are doing the best these days are the ones embracing Journalism-with-a-capital-J. Nothing’s going to eat your lunch if you have the information and insight no one else has!”

Grudo believes there’s an overemphasis on GEO as a replacement for SEO. “The data keeps showing that that’s a great mistake,” he says. “We keep seeing the LLM companies themselves say that they are mining search databases for responding to queries. They don’t have their own, so they’re relying on what Google and Bing and Yahoo have.”

For other publishers, Pawa cautions that there is a lot of AI advice out there with little to no proof. She suggests they rely on their own data and let best practices guide their strategies.

Practical priorities for AI-driven discovery

Across discussions with executives actively shaping SEO and audience strategy, several consistent priorities are coming into focus:

• Structure content for machine readability
• Clear organization and strong SEO fundamentals still determine whether content is retrieved and surfaced by AI systems.
• Track retrieval and citations, not just clicks
• Teams are beginning to measure what content is scraped, retrieved, and cited by AI, and how that connects to traffic and conversion.
• Treat SEO and AI optimization as complementary
• Answer engines still rely on traditional search infrastructure, so strong search performance carries over into AI visibility.
• Invest in original reporting and data
• Exclusive content, research, and proprietary insights are more likely to be surfaced and drive engagement.
• Build authority beyond your own site
• Brand signals across platforms like social, forums, and third-party mentions influence how AI systems assess and describe credibility.

The post How media leaders are rethinking SEO in the age of AI appeared first on Digital Content Next.

The main goal of our social media team is to bring people into The Wall Street Journal universe. And when we consider that 1 in 5 adults are now getting their news on TikTok according to a recent Pew Research survey, it’s a platform of significant importance.

For current subscribers, these videos reinforce the value of their subscription. For non-subscribers, we’re giving them a reason to build a relationship with us and, hopefully, a reason to subscribe.

By focusing on exclusivity, authenticity, and trust—principles that matter more than ever amid today’s ocean of AI-generated content—we sharpened and refined our editorial output. As a result, our audiences responded with sustained attention and deeper engagement. Here is the strategic playbook we used to achieve those results.

Each video has a purpose

Since 2022, we’ve experimented with a variety of styles, topics and formats. But the biggest lesson from our first 1,700 videos is that every piece of content must have a specific intent.

Some will be conversation starters, like our piece about how Italian pasta could be decimated by tariffs, or Billie Eilish’s message to billionaires at our WSJ. Magazine Innovator Awards. 

Some will add to an existing conversation. This might be joining sports reporter Laine Higgins in a curling rink when the Winter Olympics made us all obsessed with curling, or explaining how Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance inspired fans to learn Spanish.

Others showcase our exclusive reporting or distinctive storytelling. This demonstrates our value by showing audiences something they can’t get anywhere else. For example, we asked why Americans traveling abroad love visiting Costco, and looked inside the Titan submersible with an interactive graphic. 

By laying out a purpose from the outset, we were able to focus our storytelling and publish each piece with a clear ‘why’, telling the viewer what’s in it for them.

Promote individuals, not just the brand

By launching the Talent Lab, a new team in our newsroom that trains and upskills journalists in audience-building, we’ve been able to expand our focus on the reporters themselves. On social media, audiences want to know the people behind the reporting, and we want our reporters’ expertise to help build the credibility and trust that people crave. 

In the ultimate example, Ryan Knutson, co-host of our daily podcast The Journal, went to a party for people named Ryan and took behind-the-scenes footage for our team to tell the story from the inside. It was a great case of lowering the barrier between the host and the audience, allowing us to connect them in a way that might be more difficult for a straightforward article.

We’ve seen similar success on LinkedIn. Ben Cohen’s video about the Ford engineer who created the dashboard arrow to show which side your gas tank is on was a simple idea expertly executed. We helped produce a piece for Ben that performed exceptionally well on his personal LinkedIn account, which we then amplified across our TikTok and Instagram pages.

The goal here is to move beyond relying solely on our institutional voice. By encouraging reporters to promote their journalism on their individual pages we bring the audience closer to the people who make the Journal what it is. In a media environment where audiences increasingly gravitate toward individual voices over institutional brands, investing in reporter-led audience development positions us to build trust and loyalty in ways that align with how people connect with journalism today.

Social video producers are key

Our social video producers act as strategic bridge-builders. Sometimes they are the faces on screen, such as Julia Munslow, and other times they are coaches, guiding reporters through the technical nitty-gritty of lighting, mic placement and self-filming. On complex pieces, their role shifts to translator—working one-on-one with reporters to turn their stories into a format that feels native to the platform.

While some reporters gravitate toward the camera naturally, some may prefer to keep their focus on reporting and writing. Our social producers are the “village” that ensures their expertise gets the visual treatment it deserves.

Looking toward the next million

Surpassing 1 million followers is a milestone, but the real work is maintaining momentum. We are currently honing our short-form video strategy on LinkedIn, X and Instagram Reels, as well as our own WSJ app. Design updates to our platforms allow us to showcase this format in a way that matches how audiences consume content in 2026.

The goal of our social team is to share our journalism with the widest possible audience by meeting people exactly where they are. We’ve proven that a legacy media organization can be authentic in its social presence: by showing the world the reporters behind our stories, we aren’t just gaining followers, we’re building the next generation of The Wall Street Journal’s audience.

The post How The Wall Street Journal is reaching the next generation on TikTok appeared first on Digital Content Next.

These stories are increasingly common. They are the reason dozens of lawsuits, investigations, and public health warnings have converged on a troubling conclusion: social media companies have built platforms deliberately designed to capture and hold the attention of young users at any cost, to maximize profit.

Engineered for attention, but at what cost?

Features such as likes, notifications, and algorithmic feeds create feedback loops that keep users coming back. They deliver small bursts of social validation that can make it difficult, especially for younger users, to step away. As Sean Parker, Facebook co-founder, famously acknowledged, these platforms were engineered to provide users with “a little dopamine hit every once in a while” so they keep coming back.

For teenagers whose brains and social identities are still developing, these design choices can have profound consequences. Studies increasingly link heavy social media use among adolescents to anxiety, depression, and body image concerns. Filters, curated images, and constant comparisons can intensify feelings of inadequacy, while endless scrolling and late-night notifications disrupt sleep and emotional well-being. Many of these lawsuits allege Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, had the most knowledge of these impacts but chose to suppress it. That’s one of the reasons it’s why courtroom arguments create a compelling comparison to big tobacco.

Lawmakers need to act, and to get social media regulation right

It’s no surprise lawmakers are looking for ways to respond. Across the country, proposals in California, Texas, Utah and Alabama like the Age Appropriate Design Code and the App Store Accountability Act aim to address harms to children online. While the motivation is understandable, many of these bills cast too wide a net and as a result, risk creating new problems while trying to solve existing ones.

Instead of narrowly targeting the design features and business models driving these harms, they often sweep in the broader digital ecosystem. Thus the regulation doesn’t just impact social media platforms, but also news organizations, educational services, and nonprofits. That raises serious First Amendment concerns. Laws that affect speech must be narrowly tailored, and courts have already shown skepticism toward broad, vague attempts to regulate online content.

Measures that require broad content restrictions or impose vague compliance obligations on publishers are also particularly vulnerable to legal challenges. And, if struck down, these efforts could further delay meaningful progress in addressing the real harms associated with social media.

A complex ecosystem requires precise solutions

There’s a better path: Instead of regulating the entire internet, lawmakers should focus their attention on large social media platforms whose business models depend heavily on algorithmic amplification of user-generated content. These companies derive enormous revenue from engagement-driven advertising models that reward keeping users on their platforms for as long as possible.

Policies aimed at limiting manipulative design features for minors, increasing transparency around algorithms, and establishing reasonable duties of care could address these issues without sweeping in good faith actors.

Congress has already begun exploring this more targeted approach. The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which has attracted overwhelming bipartisan support, focuses specifically on platforms that rely predominantly on user-generated content and algorithmic recommendation systems. By concentrating on the companies whose products create the greatest risks for young users, KOSA offers a more precise model for addressing online safety concerns.

Overbroad regulation and unintended consequences

That narrower focus is critical not only for constitutional durability but also for avoiding unintended consequences.

If new legislation imposes sweeping compliance obligations—such as complex age verification systems, extensive data governance requirements, or new liability frameworks—many news organizations could struggle to meet them. Smaller publishers in particular lack the legal and technical resources required to implement costly regulatory regimes designed with massive social media companies in mind.

Possibly even more troubling, some proposals could inadvertently restrict teenagers’ access to credible, fact-checked journalism. If platforms respond to regulatory risk by broadly limiting content for minors, young people could find themselves cut off from some of the most reliable sources of information available online. Teenagers (and everyone else) need more access to reliable journalism from publishers who take responsibility for it. Policies designed to protect young people should not inadvertently make it harder for them to find credible reporting.

Mounting evidence of social media’s impact on youth mental health demands a serious policy response. But effective regulation must be precise. Broad, legislation may seem decisive, but it risks violating constitutional protections, burdening responsible publishers, and limiting access to reliable information.

A more focused approach that targets the design practices and business incentives of the largest platforms offers a better path forward. It should hold the most powerful platforms accountable for the environment they create and the choices they make about how young users interact with their services. If policymakers maintain that focus, they can address a generational public health challenge while preserving an open and diverse online ecosystem.

The post Social media laws should focus on social media appeared first on Digital Content Next.

That makes sense: the platform has grown over the last two decades into a service that’s  too big to ignore. Last year it reportedly generated $60bn in revenue, indicative of its might. Even the most reticent broadcaster has experimented with dropping short highlights onto the service. It has also proven to be an excellent place to host video podcasts, with the visual element acting as a multiplying factor in terms of views.

Most importantly, however, YouTube has been consistent in delivering views to its biggest channels.

That consistency will be a welcome respite for publishers. With AI-powered search results reportedly cutting traffic to news sites’ by up to 79%, it’s understandable that they would look to increase their presence on a platform that is, at least, reliable in at least one way. 

To that end we have seen a number of news sites recruiting for YouTube-specialist video producers, suggesting that the platform is climbing publishers’ priority lists in 2026. The Reuters Institute’s ‘Journalism, media, and technology trends and predictions 2026’ found that “in terms of off-platform strategies, YouTube will be the main focus for publishers this year with a net score of +74, up substantially on last year”.

In the UK, for example, Reach Plc’s CFO Darren Fisher noted that Facebook and YouTube “are increasingly rewarding, engaging content”, in the face of falling digital revenue elsewhere. 

Where before the platform might have been seen as a source of supplementary ad revenue, it is now being factored into audience acquisition strategies more directly, as legacy media seeks ways to turn off-platform engagement into a viable audience development strategy.

In the UK the platform is the second most-watched service in the UK, behind the BBC and ahead of the commercial-powered ITV. That provides media businesses with a reliable opportunity to scoop up new fans, who can either be monetized through ads on the platform or converted to paying subscribers on the business’ own site.

YouTube personalities

Typically, the channels that succeed on YouTube have a recurring team of creators and on-camera talent, which is consistent with video consumption trends and preferences. This format, aping the traditional television content alongside which YouTube increasingly competes on CTV, is increasingly personality-driven. There are YouTube news stars whose fame eclipses that of traditional television.

That presents a big shift for some media businesses who typically put the brand front and center over individual journalists.

Chris Gallipeau, director of video and audio strategy at Canada-based Postmedia notes that, indeed, the team has found personality-led content – or at least videos with consistent hosts – has worked especially well across its brands/ “We’ve also found that having a consistent host or voice makes a big impact on engagement, he said. “Videos with a familiar, regular personality often see viewership double compared to those without. 

“The best performing voices or faces are often well-known contributors and popular names from our opinion and commentary sections of the newspapers where audiences already have a strong connection to their perspectives.”

Similarly, The Sun’s Director of Video Jon Lloyd explains that works well on YouTube, with its reliance on thumbnails that prominently feature the hosts:

“We have found through hosts, shows are more likely to become appointment viewing  with viewers. Our viewers for Tactics Exposed love Dean Scoggins and Will Pugh’s football expertise – and let us know in the comments. They come back to it weekly as they know they’re going to have a clearer understanding of the game. They might stay through any dips if they recognize and trust the person speaking, which leads to longer listening sessions and higher completion rates.”

As an example, the group’s Vancouver Sun editor-in-chief Harold Munro is a frequent face on the paper’s channel, speaking with various members of the team in explainer style shortform videos. Some publications have a leg up on that approach, having monetized their personality-led podcasts on the platform for years. 

Chris Stone, executive producer of podcasts and video at the New Statesman, says: “That video extends our audience reach on YouTube but also on social platforms. The purpose of that is to grow the top of our funnel. Having video helps to expand your reach on socials, that’s certainly what’s happening with us… and the easiest way to produce that is from our podcasts.”

Consistency and growth

Gallipeau explains that, even if the form of the journalism has necessarily changed, the group’s editorial strategy is an extension of its coverage elsewhere: “Postmedia has found success in both long and short-form video content on YouTube especially for our major news brands. 

“What seems to really drive success is the topic. For brands like National Post and The Toronto Sun, there is a big appetite for federal and provincial political content. When we produce videos on those subjects, regardless of length, it generally outperforms the average video.”

That lines up with research about the news consumption habits of US adults. Per a Pew Research Center study, 35% of US adults self-report that they ‘regularly’ get news from YouTube channels.

The big question is the extent to which YouTube will remain consistent and prioritize that sort of news-led content within its algorithm. Writing for Nieman Lab, Joon Lee argues that, as it gets squeezed by Netflix, YouTube has recognized the need for legitimacy of the sort that legacy media can confer. 

As Lee puts it, “YouTube doesn’t need journalism to boost ad revenue. It needs journalism to anchor its reputational power in the same way newspapers once anchored civic life.”

Shorts and resources

While YouTube might want legacy content to increase its legitimacy, publishers do have to tailor their content to each platform if they want to succeed. 

Charlie Carmichael, Head of Audience at talkSPORT, states that the brand has seen some significant uptick in subscribers as a result of taking advantage of the subchannel option on YouTube. “This platform-first mindset helped us grow our YouTube revenue by 30% YoY in 2025,” he said. “In addition to diversifying our audience and reducing the talkSPORT main channel’s share of views from 81% to 67%. It’s also unlocked new partnership opportunities, and we’ve increasingly experimented with live-streaming non-traditional rights.”

However, despite a media brand’s popularity on shelves or screens, there is plenty more competition on the video site. As a result there are examples of best practice that even the biggest news brands have to adhere to, particularly with regards to recurring personalities and recognizable series.

Gallipeau explains: “On some of our larger brands, we work to apply YouTube best practices to help our video content stand out. We’ve also found great success in using formats like YouTube Shorts to raise awareness and drive traffic to our channels. This has a significant impact on subscriber and viewership growth.”

The benefit of committing to the Shorts format is that – while tweaking is still required – it allows media business’ YouTube efforts to bear fruit elsewhere. 

At the New York Times, for example, the video team is investing heavily in vertical video of the sort that can sit on YouTube Shorts in addition to TikTok and Instagram. The paper’s video director Solana Pyne told The Hollywood Reporter that “our videos live both on our own platform and on a whole range of social platforms, Instagram, TikTok, also YouTube. We don’t make video that would live only or thrive only on one platform.”

Unsurprisingly, many other newspapers are making their video content work harder on the platform. 

The Guardian, for example, repurposes sections of its longform explainers for the Shorts section. It acts as both a trailer for the ‘main’ video and an antennae that reaches the subsection of the YouTube audience that primarily consumes Shorts.

As YouTube climbs publisher and broadcasters’ priority lists in the face of uncertainty elsewhere, they are to some extent dancing to the platform’s tune in terms of video format Personality-led videos and the parasocial relationships they create with an audience are the order of the day, and Shorts are practically mandatory for discovery.

Alex Rothwell, Head of Video for The Times and The Sunday Times, notes that the team has identified that different forms of video on the platform work towards different ends. He said, “We have different approaches to our multiple YouTube channels to serve specific goals; revenue, audience growth, or a combination of the two.”

He does note, though, that maintaining a consistent identity across those channels is key: “Across all of our YouTube output, we maintain a consistent visual identity by using The Times thumbnail branding. We’ve also developed repeatable formats – such as Explains, Investigates, and Documentaries – which help build a loyal audience over time by establishing a clear and recognisable editorial identity.”

YouTube, then, presents legacy publishers with an opportunity to widen the top of the funnel when it comes to acquiring audiences. It is, though, still a platform over which publishers and broadcasters have next to no control; the trick is in gaming its ability to concentrate audiences around a news channel while increasing investment with the brand itself.

The post Publishers rethink YouTube strategy as search traffic erodes appeared first on Digital Content Next.

Despite progress, there remains cultural challenges that could stymie their growth outside of the Far East. As Tom Harrington, Head of TV at Enders Analysis points out, “People have been trying to make drama more snackable in the West for a long time and it has never really taken.” 

Jen Cooper, a vertical drama critic and journalist, sees a change though, with experimentation and interest growing. “America is beginning to tip … people are aware of them and willing to kind of talk about it now. I know from friends in New York that [say they] see people on the subway watching vertical dramas.” However, “America is nine to 12 months ahead of both Europe and the UK,” she says. 

The primary audience is “women aged about 25 to 65 who were looking for romance,” according to Cooper. Henry Soong, founder of US-based microdrama company, Watch Club, notes that many in this category have disposable income to be spent on those microtransactions. 

While several apps have sprung up, there are currently two major players in the field – China-backed Reel Short and Singapore-based Dramabox. According to Sensor Tower’s State of Mobile 2026 report, downloads of Reel Short increased 115% year-on-year in 2025, with the researchers finding there were 2.3 billion downloads of Short Drama apps over the 12-month period.  

Unsurprisingly, the global media industry has started to take notice.  

Making mega money from Microdramas 

Microdramas are generally monetized via microtransactions; viewers are lured in with free episodes before being asked to cough up cash. Big name brands such as Shein and Crocs are starting to take interest though and back projects, according to Cooper 

Research from Omdia back in October estimated that microdramas would bringing n $11billion globally last year. They said: “60% of global microdrama revenue comes from subscription or transactional payments, often following a free introductory model.” At that time, China accounted for 83% of total revenue. 

The basic monetization model involves making the first seven to 10 episodes of a show available for free. The companies producing the shows then ask for “about 50 cents per minute long episode, or they charge you a weekly subscription, which could bring in $17 USD per week,” explains Soong. Some also provide the option to purchase digital coins or watch an advert in-app.  

The audience hook 

The shows find their audience through heavy marketing on social media, drawing viewers back to the platform on which the show is based. That is how Cooper, a bookseller before becoming an expert in the medium, discovered them.  

Marketing spend is around nine times the production costs. “It’s all about really aggressive customer acquisition, working around the clock with social media ads, pushing them out, seeing what takes off, experimenting,” she says. 

“Spreading on social media is the key. “You want the show to go viral,” says Dan Lowenstein, a director on a many vertical dramas 

Crucial to turning people from casual viewers brought in by social media into paying customers is the hook – the episode at which people are required to pay. This is not just a responsibility of the business team, but the creatives too. Lowenstein says it is “part of…my job to make that hook a reality. So, you can play with that a lot. And that’s the that’s the kind of good part of this format is that there’s room to play and room to experiment.” 

Cooper outlines that a show has production costs of $100,000 to $200,000. That number is ridiculously low compared to traditional film budgets. 

Costs are kept down by very quick shoot times. “The whole thing is that you have these six, seven days to shoot basically a feature film,” explains Lowenstein. “The business plan is about smaller budgets, less risk… you’re shooting on average 12 to 13 pages a day.” That is considerably more than on traditional TVs or movies. The vertical nature of the output helps with this. “You’re not seeing as much you can shoot faster, says Lowenstein. 

Another key element of the revenue strategy is making a huge amount of content, possible due to those low shoot costs. “There’s been a race to just put out more and more,” says Cooper. There is an element of throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. Cooper believes that “it does feel with some of the apps it’s kind of quantity over quality.” 

Niche content ripe for growth

The truth is, many of these shows are schlocky and low grade, with an emphasis on romance. Some even veer towards the pornographic. (There is a BDSM tag on Reel Short, for instance.) The acting and story lines are basic and hammy. The range of subject matter and quality may need to mature for the format to gain wider traction.

“I would categorize all of these shows on Reel Short and Drama Box as romance” says Soong. “And the reason why people are willing to pay per episode is because it fills a similar emotional need as OnlyFans does.” I’m sure various show creators and actors would dispute this, but the comment is largely a fair one.  

Platforms like Reel Short and Drama Box have a huge amount of power and, to access their particular shows, you must have their app. Of course, these firms, which, as Cooper explained, are essentially media ventures back by massive tech companies, can further exploit the IP they create. At a smaller scale, Soong is hoping his firm can build a social network around the vertical dramas, again keeping viewers on the platform. 

The content is certainly addictive. I began watching one show when researching this piece and found myself increasingly intrigued as to what would happen next. I later realized I’d watch 26 episodes of a certain show over a couple of different sittings, including navigating adverts to keep going. It wasn’t exactly HBO-style prestige TV, but I had been reeled in.  

While the recent growth of microdrama’s is certainly exciting, one high-profile failure looms large in media memory: Quibi. The app, launched by Jeffrey Katzenberg and led by Meg Whitman, which garnered $1.75B and folded six months after launch, was meant to bring shortform streaming to the US.   

Maybe it was just bad timing, as we headed into the pandemic and people were at home on big TVs, not swiping on the go on their phones.  Maybe the West was not yet ready to consume content in this way, before audiences became acclimated to TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube shorts.  

Vertical dramas have been popular in China for a while now. Though it’s not yet clear whether their growth elsewhere will be a fad or a genuine shift in consumption habits, however the future plays out, there is currently enough interest in microdramas that the format is worth a look. There is a real sense that this is an area for creativity and a way to capitalize on the audience appeal of social vertical video.

The post How microdramas hook viewers and drive revenue appeared first on Digital Content Next.

In Canada, the Act now delivers roughly $100 million annually from Google to support journalism. This isn’t theoretical.  All of the arguments on why news bargaining would fail are out the window now that it’s working.  The cash is flowing directly into newsrooms across the nation.  

Financial support that matters  

An independent, family-owned publisher in Alberta calls the roughly $28K per year her newsroom receives a “gamechanger.” A mid-sized outlet in Quebec reports hundreds of thousands annually. Both also lead associations representing hundreds of publishers in their respective provinces. All confirm the same: this support matters. It is stabilizing local journalism at a moment when democracy cannot afford further erosion. 

As an industry (notably in the tech and trade press), we are guilty of paying way too much attention to the political food fight while legislation is debated, then losing interest once implementation begins. We saw this play out when a similar law was passed earlier in Australia; the U.S. tech press and influential reporters made it a global story how Facebook was blocking the news neutralizing the efforts of parliaments but then failed to follow up when funds began to be distributed from Google and Facebook. 

The rationale behind Canada’s Online News Act – and its inspiring big sister law, Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code – was straightforward. Policymakers recognized a structural imbalance in bargaining power between dominant digital gatekeepers, primarily Google and Facebook, and news publishers. Antitrust enforcement was moving too slowly to address the harm in real time. Journalism, however, could not wait for multi-year litigation to conclude. These laws were designed as targeted, interim interventions to push platforms to negotiate and get money flowing while broader competition cases played out. 

Balance benefits from flexibility  

Yes, in the United States, antitrust enforcement is finally catching up. Google has been found to have violated antitrust laws in four different district courts. However, only one of these decisions has made its way through the appellate process and will bear fruit this year. In Canada, their Department of Justice is actively suing Google. Meta had an early win in its defense against the FTC but that too is now under appeal. Most importantly, recent court decisions validate the imbalance these news bargaining codes were designed to address. The premise was never radical. It was a bridge to restore a bit of balance while competition law ran its course. 

What makes these laws smart – something DCN and I have emphasized repeatedly in public filings and testimony – is their simplicity and flexibility. They do not attempt to set a fixed price on journalism, attention or (heaven forbid) clicks. They are not overly prescriptive about the value of content. Instead, they require platforms to negotiate in good faith with individual publishers. Sophisticated publishers are free to negotiate based on the strength of their brands, the distinctiveness of their journalism, and their broader strategic goals. Others can opt into models that distribute funds based on easily measured metrics such as the number of journalists employed, a structure Canada has broadly adopted. This hybrid approach respects market dynamics while ensuring broad support for newsroom employment. 

Equally important, these frameworks keep the government out of the business of picking the winners and losers in the press. Funds flow through negotiated bilateral platform and publisher agreements or structured industry mechanisms, not through political discretion.  

That safeguard is not theoretical. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom curtailed funding for a similar measure after it passed into law. At the federal level, under a President Trump — who has repeatedly attacked news organizations and sought to use governmental power against perceived critics — the danger would be obvious. Allowing the executive branch to influence which publishers receive support would be a profound threat to press independence. The Canadian and Australian models wisely avoided that trap. 

Question the Meta narrative 

The one aspect of these new bargaining laws that did not unfold as intended was Meta’s response in Australia or Canada. Rather than negotiating under a democratically enacted framework, Meta chose to block news entirely and leverage its platform to blame the government. That decision eliminated referral traffic for publishers who had relied on Facebook distribution. But despite Meta’s narrative, it was never evidence that the law failed. It is evidence that a platform, often labeled as hostile to journalism and hostile to democracy, chose retaliation over participation under the rules developed through a deliberated parliamentary process. Are we surprised? 

And Meta now argues the law should be dismantled because it supposedly inhibits their AI licensing deals. That claim also collapses under scrutiny. In the U.S. – where there is no such Online News Act, nothing close to it – there has been no surge in voluntary licensing deals for journalism out of Menlo Park. The absence of regulation has not unlocked a growth market of dealmaking here. The deals simply are not happening.  

Instead, both Meta and Google have entangled content licensing within the tentacles of their sprawling platform businesses, blurring any clear precedent for paying directly for journalism. Why? Because direct licensing creates precedent. And precedent matters, particularly as these companies fight consequential copyright litigation over AI training. In fact, internal emails disclosed in discovery of Kadrey v Meta, an early AI copyright case, showed employee concern that even licensing one copyrighted work could undermine the company’s sweeping fair use arguments; the claim that anything publicly accessible on the web can be used to train AI models without permission or payment. Let that sink in. That expansive interpretation of fair use is, at best, aggressive. It has already faced skepticism in court and in the U.S. Copyright Office’s report.  

But the facts remain stubborn for Meta. The Online News Act is delivering real dollars to real newsrooms. It was designed as a measured mitigation to a proven imbalance in market power. It pushes dominant platforms to the negotiating table without dictating deal terms. It protects against government interference in distribution decisions. And it serves as a bridge while antitrust enforcement addresses the deeper structural problems. 

An act to defend democracy 

Journalism is essential infrastructure for democracy. When market distortions threaten it, policymakers have a responsibility to act. Australia acted. Canada acted. And the results show that carefully constructed news bargaining frameworks can work. 

The answer is not to dismantle what is working. It is to refine it, strengthen it against retaliation, and ensure that dominant platforms cannot use their gatekeeping power to avoid accountability – whether in news distribution, competition law, or AI. 

Democracy cannot wait for perfect solutions. It depends on practical ones. And Canada should be applauded for this one.  

Even if America puts the final puck in the net ; )  

The post Goals scored: Canada proved news bargaining works appeared first on Digital Content Next.

One problem many newsrooms face centers on how they bring new users into content products and what they invite those users to do first. Propensity modeling often uses signals such as repeat visits, time on site or article depth to estimate future action or value and to surface prompts like newsletter sign-ups or subscription offers. These signals work well for timing and targeting. However, they rarely point to actions that help a person express interest, claim a preference or begin personalizing the experience. As a result, first interactions often involve reading a story, scrolling and leaving with no clear path to in shaping what they see next or necessitate a repeat visit.

Why early user choices shape retention

This matters because people naturally look for ways to organize information around their own needs. Across digital products, consumers consistently choose tools that let them save, follow, collect or personalize content in small ways that feel useful and self-directed. When those options are missing or delayed, audiences move through content as passive visitors rather than active participants. They consume what is in front of them, but they do not signal what matters most or establish a reason to return.

Designing the first action that makes news feel personal

Audience retention improves when content products give people an early chance to make a deliberate, personal choice that reflects interest, identity and preference. When a person follows a topic or builds a reading list tied to a personal interest, they have something they want to come back to. A single action turns a visit into a relationship because the product now reflects what the person cares about, not just what they read. When newsrooms design for these moments, something personal begins to live inside the experience.

To better engage and retain audiences, focus on creating a first interaction that feels personal and meaningful. These early, identity-driven choices lead to more return visits and stronger retention. This helps grow a larger and more loyal audience that is more likely to subscribe or become members. Rather than prompting new visitors to read more or subscribe right away, guide them toward a small action that anchors interest, such as saving a story, joining a focused newsletter, or engaging with a local beat or community space.

The New York Times has reported that visitors who sign up for a newsletter are twice as likely to become paid subscribers, and that newsletter readers show higher retention over time. This supports the value of offering a simple and intentional first step that deepens the relationship early. I have previously outlined how content organizations that focus on self-directed engagement tend to create products that are more relevant, easier to return to, and more closely aligned with the daily interests of their audience.

Some publishers already design these first actions into the earliest moments of the experience. Axios developed an “Add Axios on Google,” option as a simple step that lets someone designate the outlet as a preferred source. That one action helps ensure Axios appears more often in Google Discover and search results for that reader, while giving the user a steady stream of stories without having to seek them out. It is a small choice, but it creates continuity, reinforces preference, increases likelihood of repeat exposure and helps turn an anonymous visit into an ongoing relationship. 

Each of these examples invites an early, voluntary action that lets a user claim preference before the product tries to convert them. Other first actions include simple reflection prompts that help users connect a story to their own lives. For example, asking “Why did this story matter to you?” and offering quick, selectable responses such as:

• It affects my community
• It affects my family
• It affects my vote
• I had not seen this reported before

You can also invite small, self-directed steps like selecting a topic tag or choosing areas of interest that reflect how they think about local or national issues. Each of these actions is fast, personal, and intentional, helping users see themselves in the experience from the very beginning.

These fit neatly into existing propensity models as a deeper layer of signal. Rather than relying only on baseline behaviors, the model now incorporates choices users actively make to shape what they see next. That balance between prediction and participation produces stronger signals, supports healthier personalization and contributes to better outcomes over time, including higher retention and more durable long-term engagement.

Where audience retention really comes from

People come back to a news site when they do something that makes it feel like it belongs to them. The encouraging reality is that many organizations already do this well, especially as cookies have faded and familiar personalization tools have lost strength. Retention now grows from the choices people willingly make inside a content product, where identity, personalization and a sense of ownership align with everyday relevance and usefulness.

Across audience development, subscriptions, membership and retention, the same pattern shows up again and again. Products perform better when they invite one clear, personal action early on, rather than relying only on recommendation loops that surface similar stories. Discovery still matters, but relevance deepens when users can signal what they care about and see that choice reflected back to them in practical ways.

This moment matters more than ever. Audiences navigate an endless stream of content across platforms, formats and devices, and attention follows experiences that feel purposeful and personal. The next phase of audience and product development depends on designing for these single-step moments that turn passive visits into active relationships. Over time, this reduces one-and-done visits and increases how often people return within a given week. When teams do this well, they create better experiences, generate clearer signals and build stronger connections without compromising trust.

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