Major publishers worldwide report plunging traffic and revenue, fueling fears that their traditional business models are under existential threat, The Guardian reports in a deep dive into how the industry is reacting. It posits that Google's rapid rollout of AI-driven search features has ignited an industry-wide crisis, upending traditional publishing models and raising urgent questions about the future of journalism.
I don't think we've necessarily seen a material change in the cadence of budget flow ... There's definitely shifts and changes - tariffs impact auto, tariffs impact everything. So as macro changes happen, that definitely has an impact on individual marketing plans. But I don't think it's materially - year-over-year - vastly different from where it was before.
Answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity are replacing traditional search traffic with direct answers, depriving publishers of the revenue they would generate from attracting those visitors to their websites. The shift mirrors the decoupling that occurred with Google News two decades ago, when aggregators began to sever the direct publisher-reader relationship, reshaping the economics of digital media, according to Felix Danczak, head of AI and growth at the venture capital firm Pembroke VCT.