Life after traffic

Editor’s note: as social platforms have deprioritised news and search traffic is in danger from AI, how can news publishers adapt? We are publishing a column by Andrey Boborykin, media analyst and executive director of Ukraine’s major digital news outlet Ukrayinska Pravda. A version of this article was previously published in Boborykin’s Ukrainian-language newsletter медіа3.

In May, I joined a panel at the Lviv Media Forum on audience segmentation. As usual, the discussion wandered a bit, touching on many topics. There, for the first time publicly, I shared my belief that the Ukrainian media need to prepare for a significant decrease in traffic.

Despite being a media optimist who believes in the enduring demand for quality news and entertainment content, the past year or two of global attention economy trends suggest that in this new era (Media 3.0 or is it Media 4.0?), the coordinates are shifting dramatically. To avoid sounding like a doomsaying media oddball masking personal mistakes with an “The end is nigh” sign, I’ll try to lay out my observations and thoughts below in more detail.

Normalisation vs fatigue

Lately there’s a noticeably growing buzz around news fatigue and news avoidance  – the phenomena of people getting tired of news and consciously stepping back from consuming them. These concepts have always struck me as odd, mainly because they mostly rely on self-reported data (imagine if porn consumption research was based on self-reporting, we’d be discussing “porn avoidance” too). Recently, Grzegorz Piechota, a media analyst and former editor of Gazeta Wyborcza, reinforced my view at the INMA conference:

The chart on the left shows global media consumption – not so much a decline as a return to pre-pandemic levels. In Ukraine, this chart would have two peaks, with the second one from February 2022 being much larger. Most Ukrainian news outlets, Ukrayinska Pravda included, still see audience levels significantly higher than before the full-scale invasion, but a correction or rollback is inevitable. Media professionals need to be ready for this and not view it as necessarily negative. It’s akin to Christmas tree sellers bringing another batch on January 1st and being upset about the lack of sales.

However, while normalisation might be viewed as a return to a more predictable state of audience engagement, Ukraine fatigue is a whole different thing. It’s not just the natural ebb and flow of interest; it’s the world moving on, shifting its gaze to the next big crisis. At Ukrayinska Pravda, we’ve been riding this rollercoaster firsthand. Launched in the first days of the full-scale invasion, the English language section was our safety jacket through 2022 and 2023 – it drew in significant website traffic from tier-1 geos [rich countries where advertising revenue is most lucrative] and made serious revenue through syndication deals with Yahoo News, MSN and several other aggregators. 

But then came the fall of 2023, and the wheels started to come off. Interest waned noticeably, and the numbers began to slide, accelerating even further after the conflict in Israel erupted in October, becoming the most discussed international news topic. This trend was mirrored in our syndication performance, where Ukraine-related content stopped attracting significant clicks. Yahoo News even dropped all Ukraine-produced English titles from active recommendation on its platform, with no clear explanation given to any of the partners.

The end of toxic relationships

By now, it should be a given that the media have lost the battle for attention and scale to major tech platforms. Yet, our field of audience development is still tied to trying to please the algorithms. In 2024, Ukrainian publications still rely on Google Search and Google Discover for 30-50+% of their traffic, while medium and small outlets depend on Facebook referrals.

These platforms have long passed the stage where they needed quality content from the media. Quality content is still necessary, but production technology has advanced so much that media organisations and ordinary users are almost on equal footing. Considering all the communication pitfalls with the media community, platform operators find it easier to focus on user-generated content and minimise interactions with the media industry. Mark Zuckerberg understood this first, pivoting to “time well spent” and content from friends and family back in early 2018.

Unlike Meta, Google tried to position itself as a friend to the media, spending hundreds of millions through Google News Initiative and Google News Lab. The algorithmic news feed Google Discover, integrated into the Chrome browser and Android OS on smartphones, became a decent replacement for the drop in Facebook traffic from 2017-18 and quietly hooked most publishers. Quietly – primarily because Discover traffic is poorly identified by Google Analytics, leading many outlets to mistakenly believe they had a huge share of direct traffic.

In recent years, it has become clear that Google is tightening the screws. There are more public and private updates affecting result outputs across all company products annually. Meanwhile, Discover and Google News algorithms largely remain a black box.

The AI revolution accelerates a new era of search and information retrieval online. Google’s new AI Overview block synthesises information from sources that would appear on the first page of traditional search. Though still in early stages (and capable of suggesting glue as a pizza topping), Gartner predicts search traffic will drop by 25% by 2026 as more specific queries are handled by AI applications. For publishers, this means a significant drop in traffic to lifestyle, advice, recipes, and other SEO content sections.

However, it’s wrong to position the media industry solely as a victim of the tech revolution. Platforms aim for user experiences that align with Zuckerberg’s “time well spent,” while media aim to expand and monetise their audience, often clashing with the former. Try searching Google for a specific answer, and you’ll likely drown in ads and SEO articles on dubious sites. There was also a war on clickbait, and guess what – clickbait didn’t decrease because the current distribution paradigm encourages high CTR content. 

Life after traffic

Traffic is declining, but the need for quality content remains. So let’s talk about strategies for thriving in this new paradigm:

• Brand matters more than ever: I used to think any product stood on the trichotomy of “audience-money-brand,” but now it seems “audience” is redundant because, without a brand, even a large audience is accidental. Media without a brand are entirely dependent on distribution circumstances (who remembers mid-2010s Facebook giants like ViralNova or Ofigenno.cc?). A change in distribution is an existential threat to such outlets.

• Audience-first media management: In the post-traffic world, those who type your site into their browser and visit the homepage become your most important audience. This doesn’t mean abandoning distribution – rather, repackaging and delivering content for key audiences becomes critically necessary. Active communication and listening are crucial. Form your core, your tribe, quoting Seth Godin.

• End of the tyranny of big numbers: In the current reality, earning from a mostly accidental audience requires maximising reach and constant growth. Without at least 10 million views per month, significant programmatic ad profits are hard to achieve. In the post-traffic reality, direct dialogue with the audience means success doesn’t require millions of views. Less than 1,800 UP Club subscribers now generate 5-7% of Ukrayinska Pravda’s profits, and scaling from 1,800 to 18,000 – a 10x growth – could transform the publication’s economics. Currently, 18,000 readers equate to one mediocre news piece on UP.

The future of media lies in “content for 1,000 people” – small to medium outlets with audiences in the thousands or tens of thousands, actively participating in the organization’s development with money, ideas, and actions. Transitioning to this paradigm will be tough (especially for million and ten-million-strong outlets) but, in my view, inevitable. We are certainly going there.

Source of the cover photo: generated by ChatGPT, DALL·E

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