Ironically, that desperation creates a set of self-reinforcing problems. If publishers with overlapping audiences and keywords are bidding for the same paid search inventory at once, they are likely driving up the cost of the very traffic they are trying to buy, according to Gupta.
And of course, every dollar spent on Google Search ads flows back to the company whose AI-driven search products are shrinking publishers’ organic traffic in the first place.
“The other obvious implication is they are feeding the thing that is killing them, because Google is spending that money to improve zero-click,” Gupta said.
A narrower explanation
The increase in paid traffic spending is more complex than a general response to traffic loss, according to Scott Messer, founder of the media consultancy Messer Media.
Publishers are directing their spend toward content with a clear, calculable payoff, such as commerce and product pages, per Messer, rather than low-yield programmatic display ads.
Commerce content is far more commercially efficient. A single click that converts into a sale from an affiliate partner like Nike or Maybelline can be worth around $20, much more than a standard display ad, which is why publishers are willing to pay far more to acquire that kind of traffic than readers bound for a standard news article.
The distinction is also evident in the keyword data. The publishers spending most aggressively on paid search skew toward commerce and product terms, including high-yield savings accounts, pet insurance, and GLP-1 medications, rather than general news queries, according to the Similarweb data.
While most of the paid keywords cost between $1 to $3, publishers are willing to pay as much as $50 to appear alongside certain commerce terms, such as “consolidate credit debt” or “pet insurance,” according to Similarweb.
Publishers are not buying back a generalized decline in traffic, according to Messer, but replacing “a very specific type of traffic going to a specific place,” such as highly performant commerce content or engaging products, like Wordle or Yahoo Fantasy Football.
“This is not a bad thing,” said Messer. “If these publishers have figured out something that’s working, they should put as many resources behind it as they can.”
Talking Heds
Executive Shuffle (EXCLUSIVE): A number of notable media executives have found new homes in the past week. On Tuesday, the multicultural media company My Code announced a new executive leadership team, bringing in Ying Miao as its chief financial officer, Dave LiCalzi as its chief operating officer, and Luis Romero, who previously led sales at The Guardian U.S., as its chief revenue officer. On Wednesday, the podcasting firm Acast named Liv Sandberg, who previously led Nordic and Central European sales at TikTok, as its new executive vice president of the European market. And on Thursday, the Ad Council is set to announce that it has hired Axios’ CFO Jenny Darling as its new chief financial and operations officer, the company shared with me exclusively.
Post Note: The Washington Post joined in on the broader executive hiring spree, although in its case the appointment was closer to a formalization. On Wednesday, the D.C. outlet named interim chief executive Jeff D’Onofrio as its new CEO and publisher. D’Onofrio had assumed the role following Will Lewis’ departure, but will now be the latest looking to staunch the bleeding at the pedigreed publisher. In tandem with the news, the publisher shared a few success metrics to suggest that D’Onofrio has proved capable thus far. According to the firm, The Post is on track to break even financially, an achievement after five years of losses; has sold more than 300,000 individual subscriptions year to date; and has seen its programmatic advertising revenue increase by 53% year over year. There are likely asterisks to these achievements—The Post is pioneering micro-subscriptions, after all, so those paid sign-ups are not perfect comparisons against traditional packages—but they are green shoots nonetheless.
