The decline of social media as a source of traffic and the advancement of generative AI has had publishers worried about their traffic. Recently, we’ve had two news stories that confirm and accelerate these fears.

First, a new report from Axios based on Similarweb data illustrates just how much traffic referrals to the top global news sites from Facebook and X (Twitter) has fallen over the past year. The decline of Facebook has been particularly significant, partly because the platform had been a more important source of traffic to begin with.

As Axios’ Sara Fischer summarises the situation, “regulatory pressure and free speech concerns have pushed tech giants to abandon efforts to elevate quality information”. In America, this leaves news consumers more susceptible to misinformation ahead of the next year’s elections, Fischer writes. Publishers, in the meanwhile, are forced to cut expenses and lay off employees to keep costs down.

The second major story is the impact of generative AI tools on news outlets’ search traffic. Publishers have been concerned about chatbots syphoning traffic since the launch of ChatGPT and similar tools a year ago. In recent days, though, the fears got accelerated as ChatGPT received an update that enables the tool to browse content on the internet in real time, as opposed to having a knowledge cutoff for everything published after September 2021.

“Now that ChatGPT users can use the tool to surf the internet for information, some publishers — who had previously not seen a decline in search referral traffic as a result of ChatGPT, possibly because the chatbot wasn’t using real-time data — are reconsidering the weight of the issue”, Digiday reports.

To safeguard themselves, major news publishers are racing to block ChatGPT and other AI tools from accessing their data. In the UK, Independent Publishers Alliance urged its members to block access for bot crawlers by ChatGPT and Google Bard. The organisation “believes there is more negotiating power for publishers to potentially get paid for their content if they opt out – and that allowing use for free could be used against them in any future legal action or licensing negotiations”, Press Gazette notes.

News UK and DMG Media, two of the biggest news publishers in the UK, are considering a plan to combine their print operations, Press Gazette reports.

As print sales have declined by 60% in the past decade, the two organisations believe creating a new entity to merge their print operations would help optimise their businesses. The proposal is yet to be finalised and would need to be approved by the regulator.

“The new company would print, on average, more than three million newspapers each night and almost 22 million per week”, Press Gazette notes.

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