"Publishers' traffic has dipped since AI tools arrived - and the fallout isn't limited to audience or ad revenue. It's now weighing on the media mergers and acquisitions (M&A) market, making deals harder to price during a time of disruption, according to investors and analysts. Higher interest rates, economic tariffs, and a soft ad market haven't helped, either."
""You can't buy a business easily in this state of disruption, and you don't know who's going to be the winner versus the loser," said Amir Malik, managing director of advisory firm Alvarez and Marsal."
"U.S. venture capital deal activity started off slow this year, but has picked up. There were just seven deals in Q1 2025, but that increased to 14 in Q3 2025, according to data from capital market research firm PitchBook, which measured VC deal activity in "publishing" companies (defined as providers of print and internet publishing services, such as newspapers, magazines and books.) Overall, there were 32 VC deals in publishing from Q1 to Q3 2025, compared to 37 in the same time period in 2024."
AI-driven summaries and other AI tools have reduced publishers' site traffic, hurting audience metrics and advertising revenue and making valuations harder to set. Higher interest rates, economic tariffs and a soft ad market are additional headwinds for buyers and sellers. M&A advisors report paused or harder-to-price deals because of uncertainty about which companies will prevail. Venture-capital deal counts in publishing dipped overall but aggregate deal sizes increased year-over-year through Q3 2025. Q2 2025 was particularly quiet, and declining traffic from AI Overviews has made scaling and acquisition appeal more difficult for some publishers.
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