#publisher-revenue

#publisher-revenue

Affiliate programs are often sold as "partnerships," but for most publishers, they function more like a long-shot gamble. You generate traffic, clicks, and conversions, and then wait to see if the brand's tracking system recognizes your contribution. Spoiler alert: it often doesn't. Ad blockers, private browsing, cookie restrictions, and platform bias all eat away at affiliate tracking. Even when a publisher does everything right - driving legitimate traffic to a partner brand - many clicks go unrecorded or uncredited.

Media companies have filed so many lawsuits against AI companies over the past two years that the act has become routine. When I report on these in The Media Copilot newsletter, they're often digest items, adding to the pile of publishers who want fair compensation for the content AI labs have ingested to create large language models (LLMs). There are so many that elaborate infographics are required to keep track of them all.

Advertising tech publishers are striving to maximise their revenue, as the economic climate continues on a precarious trajectory. A large portion of advertisers are tightening their belts, seeking to activate campaigns with reduced budgets, and as a result, directing less spend to publishers. Smaller advertisers particularly are likely to feel the financial pressure, as they attempt to make budgets go as far as possible.

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.