Between AI taking over search functionality and social platforms turning away from news, it’s never been harder for publishers to secure referral traffic. In response, most have turned away from fly-by-night visitors to cultivate a loyal audience of returning readers, and have diversified their revenues with subscriptions, newsletters, and other value-adds to reduce reliance on display advertising alone.
To increase the “stickiness” of their audiences, publishers are turning into advertisers — of themselves. Content is intelligently recirculated, archives are surfaced, and audiences are funnelled through systems that take them from visitors to paying customers. Successfully executing this strategic transition will be key to surviving in a media ecosystem being plundered by Big Tech titans that work against publishers’ interests.
Expanding Omnichannel Reach Without Being Trapped in Walled Gardens
In pursuit of revenue diversification, publishers are diversifying their channels. Even publishers with centuries’ long print heritage are pursuing video content strategies to expand their reach. Within their owned and operated sites and apps, publishers typically turn to third-party video players, giving them control over how video advertising is packaged, targeted, and priced.
However, the near-total capture of the online video ecosystem by walled gardens means few publishers can rely entirely on their internal video offering, especially if they are using video content not just to generate advertising revenue but to expand their audience too, as on-page video content has very little discoverability. As a result, few publishers can afford not to disseminate their video content across YouTube, TikTok, and Meta.
While these platforms provide a share of advertising revenues with content creators, it is too meagre to solely justify the effort. Rather, publishers should use these platforms to drive viewers back to their owned and operated environments and products by retaining certain video content as on-site exclusives and promoting subscriptions and newsletters.
Video distributed on other platforms can also be monetised through in-content sponsorships, for which the walled garden doesn’t get a cut. By their nature, such advertising needs to be sold directly and planned in advance, but publishers with the suitable following can use it to establish an off-site revenue stream. All the above also applies to podcasts, which are a growing priority for publishers, and often also double as a video product.
Making the Most of an Ad Slot Might Mean No Ad at All
Having a subscription rarely means scrapping advertising entirely but instead developing a more adaptive and intelligent approach. Publishers with a hard paywall can develop a single advertising strategy, but those who have multiple tiers of content exclusivity or meter access often have multiple approaches depending on whether the visitor consents to targeting, whether the visitor is a subscriber, and where they are in the funnel towards becoming one.
Given the complexity of juggling multiple advertising strategies, it’s important that any advertising platforms that such publishers work with can offer a portfolio of targeting methods. For example, leveraging first-party data targeting visitors who consent while relying on purely contextual signals for those that don’t.
Advertising platforms should also be able to swap advertising out entirely if it aligns with the publishers’ commercial objectives. After all, advertising slots are valuable real estate on a page, and if an ad slot is unlikely to deliver a publisher’s target CPMs, it should be replaced with promotions for subscriptions or newsletters, or surface recommended content to keep the visitor within the domain. Publishing groups can go further still, recommending content from across their brands.
To make this level of flexibility possible, publishers are deploying decision engines that determine in real time what form of monetisation will yield the greatest long-term value, whether that’s an ad impression, a subscription prompt, or a piece of editorial content.
These automated systems, powered by machine learning, can analyse historical data to predict the likelihood of an ad click or a sign up, ensuring that every interaction is optimised for lifetime value rather than short-term gain.
Diverse Revenue Streams Require Unified Data, Technology, and Teams
What this creates, and depends upon, is a unified view of the reader. Cohesive consent management and user identity frameworks allow publishers to amalgamate signals from across devices and touchpoints. Publishers must be able to identify when a reader moves from an email to a website or an app to be able to deliver a relevant and consistent experience.
An audience-first model also demands a merging of advertising, consent, and subscription technologies. Many publishers are folding these into unified data environments, where behavioural signals can steer both ad targeting and subscription messaging. For example, a reader who has displayed interest in sustainability articles might see a promotion for a newsletter on green living.
While AI threatens referral traffic on one hand, it is a boon to audience engagement on the other. Many publishers are creating their own AI-powered discovery layers, using automated metadata tagging and recommendation algorithms to highlight evergreen content or personalised feeds based on browsing patterns. Others are integrating conversational interfaces through chatbots trained on their archives, which allow users to search in natural language queries while keeping them on-site.
None of this would be possible without technology partners who understand the full breadth of publisher needs. The ideal partner does not prioritise ad yield above all else but supports multiple monetisation paths without conflicts of interest.
They must also be neutral: the incentives of a partner with its own ad network or demand source may clash with the publisher’s. Instead, technology providers should offer infrastructure that gives publishers full control and transparency across their stack.
When a publisher’s revenue streams split, it must become more aligned internally. Editorial, ad operations, audience development, and commercial teams need to coordinate around shared KPIs and intelligence, testing and refining strategy with a common goal. The most durable publishers will be those that treat every audience interaction as a step towards a potential conversion, not one of a million impressions.
