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'A robot stole my byline' | Traffic down at 90% of top 50 US newsbrands in June
Plus publishers told it would be a "travesty" if they don't experiment with Google AI opt-out controls
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Welcome to the Press Gazette Future of Media US newsletter on Friday, 10 July.
🤖 “It was a real slap in the face.”
We’ve run several reports about Clickout Media, an SEO company buying digital media brands to fill them with AI content and links to gambling sites - ultimately killing them off and moving onto the next.
But what about the people working at those media brands before their new owners move in?
We’ve spoken to a journalist who saw AI-generated stories appear under his byline after he had been made redundant. It’s a reporter’s nightmare to have embarrassing content appear under your name like that.
📉 The traffic picture continues to be difficult for many major newsbrands.
In our Similarweb ranking of the 50 biggest newsbrands in the US in June, just five sites reported year-on-year traffic growth: Substack, Al Jazeera, Yahoo Finance, Fortune and NBC News. The Daily Beast stayed roughly steady.
The biggest drop over the past year has been at Newsweek, down 77% to 22.5 million. Adweek reported there have been layoffs in multiple Newsweek teams this year as a result.
Publishers across the board are building new strategies that rely less on traffic numbers for revenue. But a business can’t change overnight and we’re still in the difficult part for many.
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👮And finally, you may recall that last month the UK’s competition watchdog told Google it must let publishers opt out of AI Overviews without impacting how their websites appear in the main search index.
Google said in response that it is now testing and rolling out a control allowing publishers to do just that, meaning this is likely to become more than a UK benefit.
The impact of the CMA ruling and what publishers should do next was discussed at Press Gazette’s AI Summit in London last week.
News leaders were told “it will be a travesty if none of you decide that opting out is an action that you want to take”.
And in the context of the traffic numbers above, they were warned against leaving it too late into the much-debated precipice of Google Zero.
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