Overheard at DPS
At the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, Colo., this week, publishing execs couldn’t help but lament about search traffic declines, and how this was leading them to try to find new ways to connect with readers and make money.
One difference about this year’s discussions was that execs stressed how urgently they were trying to grow or build subscription and membership businesses for direct revenue amid those traffic declines – but even converting readers remains difficult as audiences shrink and business models struggle to adapt.
They also talked about looking for audiences off-platform and trying to monetize engagement through either social ads or paid followers.
Publishing execs spoke under Chatham House rules so Digiday could share what was said while maintaining the executives’ anonymity. Stay tuned in the coming days for more analysis on what was said at DPS Vail 2026 (spoiler: AI was a big topic).
Here’s what publishing execs had to say at the Digiday Publishing Summit about how they’re coping with less traffic:
Traffic declines and their impact on subscription and membership growth
“From search, we get traffic and we get memberships, registrations, and that’s how we get revenue… So if that’s declining and we’re not fixing that, then we’re losing revenue.”
“We want to engage the users more and have them stay on the site. If they can go elsewhere, get information faster, then why are they going to stay on our site? So we’ve got to solve that.”
“The trouble is that every instinct that we have and every person that we’ve hired over the last five years is tuned towards Google, is tuned towards RPM and SEO and getting traffic off of Google. And they’re the wrong instincts for building a subscription business.”
“The need to kind of shift and change pace and become a subscription business is much, much more urgent, and there’s no quick win… It’s a two or three year project.”
“Trying to understand how much [people are] willing to pay to be part of a membership program or have that affinity, and also getting them used to the idea that they will have to pay for something now – and we’ve been giving it to them for free for 20 years – is really tough.”
“Retraining the newsroom to understand that the things that worked before and were seen as successful before are not the same kinds of content that’s going to work for people who are willing to pay to be a member. So that’s our big challenge.”
“I think this is less about what are the audience techniques – because there’s no like for like replacement there – and more about focusing on, what is it that these machines are going to be creating? And how does that make us think about the actual product that we’re serving?”
“There’s two leaders, there’s The Wall Street Journal, there’s The New York Times. And the cost of living and everything else is tightening the wallet for a lot of consumers. So what are you doing to compete with those two to steal from them? Because that’s the reality. Because a lot of us medium publishers and people in the subscriber space, we’re all eating each other.”
“Anytime you’re doing something with a subscription or membership, and there’s a direct correlation to a loss of ad revenue, it’s going to be a hard battle, and everyone faces that.”
“Let’s be honest, there are just a few brands that really are differentiated enough to provide something to a consumer where they’re going to pay on a monthly basis. So for the majority of us, subscription is probably not a realistic answer on P&L that makes sense.”
“We were competing for attention with social and Netflix. And now… a lot of people have multiple pro AI subscriptions. Speaking for myself, I’m spending way more time with AI tools in the evening than I am with my old fallbacks like HBO Max and Netflix.”
Growing audiences and revenue on social
“We’re seeing [YouTube] channels with a couple 100,000 subscribers have 1,000 or so paid members each month… If we had that level of conversion on platform, on the news website, we would think that was incredible.”
“We did not build good brands. We bought them… so we have now switched to a world where we treat the brand as a primary thing… and the brand is now bigger than the website.”
“The algorithm changes on Facebook even faster than on Google… We saw some real growth in content monetization and then also just a sea change where overnight it got cut in half, and then it started to grow back up.”
“I get a deal today and have it up, and there’s no limit to the amount of inventory. So I post 40, 50 times a day, 2 to 4 million views per post. It solves a lot of problems that we’ve seen with traditional digital publishing company.”
“Facebook will ding you if you do any user-generated content, resurfacing somebody else’s content… Since back in the fall, they wanted us to stop doing that.”
“In the age of the world we’re living in, offsite revenue in general has been a big focus for our platforms and our brands… Everywhere we can find new eyeballs on platforms, so Meta monetization, YouTube monetization has gone up. FAST channels.”
What we’ve heard
“We had an occasion where OpenAI came to one of our sites 1.6 million times in one day, bypassing our robots.txt. And it took the site down five times throughout the day….that’s a hard cost to the business, both in terms of the site being down and also monetizing anything while the site was down….It’s like someone coming to burgle your house, then sending you the bill for their rental van outside.”
— Chris Dicker CEO, Candr Media Group on why the independent publisher now blocks all bots, at Prebid Ascent Summit in London
Numbers to know
10s of millions: The number of unauthorized AI bot crawl attempts People Inc. blocks every day.
82%: The adoption of AI among journalists, according to new Muck Rack data, with ChatGPT usage climbing to 47% and Gemini rising to 22%.
42,000 square feet: The size of the office space Daily Mail now leases in Manhattan, New York, doubling its footprint.
15: The number of people Spotify has laid off in its podcast group, affecting The Ringer and Spotify Studios.
What we’ve covered
People Inc.’s Jon Roberts on the AI licensing boom – and the revenue lag
- The surge in AI content licensing marketplaces has created a new wave of opportunities for publishers — just not much money yet.
- Jon Roberts, chief innovation officer at People Inc., was the keynote speaker at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, Colorado this week, and onstage he broke down the opportunities that could generate real revenue for People Inc. and publishers at scale.
Read more here.
YouTube is building infrastructure for the full creator-brand partnership life cycle
- YouTube is releasing a Gemini-powered Creator Partnerships suite of tools designed to help brands more easily find the right creators to work with.
- It will automate parts of the process like matching and campaign management. The tools signal a push by YouTube to scale creator partnerships by automating much of the manual work involved.
Read more here.
News/Media Alliance signs AI licensing deal to unlock recurring RAG revenue for small and mid-sized publishers
- The News/Media Alliance is testing a new path to AI revenue, signing a licensing deal that lets its 2,200 publisher members opt in to monetizing RAG-driven enterprise demand.
- The deal is with AI startup company Bria, which has enterprise clients that want access to vetted, factual, specialist data to fulfill any internal agent queries. Publishers will get paid based on how often their content is used by Bria’s enterprise clients.
Read more here.
Cloudflare’s compliant crawler highlights tension – and opportunity – in the emerging AI content market
- Cloudflare is pushing to create a market for licensed AI content, offering a compliant crawler aimed at giving publishers more control and reducing inefficient site crawls.
- But some question the irony of the company that once blocked scrapers now building one itself.
Read more here.
What we’re reading
Can Jonah Peretti save BuzzFeed?
Facing mounting financial pressure, BuzzFeed’s CEO Jonah Peretti is betting its future on AI-driven products, though it’s unclear if they can generate sustainable revenue, The New York Times reported.
The Economist Group restructures enterprise business
The Economist Group is bringing its enterprise products under one brand, combining its B2B teams and units – including divisions that oversee research and analysis, partnerships, and corporate subscriptions, Axios reported.
Vox Media tried to sell its podcast business – and itself
Last year, bankers for Vox Media approached media companies and investors with different offers: buy Vox’s podcast business, New York Magazine, or the whole company – though now it looks like the company has walked those offers back, Semafor reported.
Email newsletter platform Beehiiv adds MPC integration
Beehiiv launched a Model Context Protocol integration, making it the first newsletter platform that publishers can operate directly from inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, PPC Land reported. This means Beehiiv users could use AI tools to analyze subscriber data to SEO strategies.
Business Insider adds AI-generated Q&A feature to articles
Business Insider has added an AI-generated question and answer feature to its articles, Talking Biz News reported. They appear below the summary bullets and give readers more context and angles, according to a memo from Business Insider chief product officer Jeff Rabb.