This article examines the changing landscape for traditional publishers, emphasizing a shift from focusing on traffic volume to prioritizing audience quality and first-party data monetization. In 2024, 78 percent of marketers saw first-party data as crucial for product discovery. A downturn in the digital publishing industry is predicted for 2025 due to decreased programmatic monetization and new privacy regulations, despite Google’s adjustments to its Privacy Sandbox.
Emerging trends highlighted include:
- Traffic Shifts: A temporary rise in digital subscriptions post-2024 elections (“Trump Bump 2.0”) won’t counteract long-term declines in traffic as audiences turn to podcasts and video amid falling trust in news.
- Zero-Click Web: Rising “zero-click” behavior and AI-driven search decrease website traffic and ad revenue. Publishers should optimize for search and diversify beyond advertising, focusing on direct user engagement.
- Real-Time Data: Investing in streaming data pipelines offers real-time insights into audience behavior, enhanced personalization, and ad monetization, as seen with companies like Spotify.
- First-Party Data: With third-party cookies declining, publishers are shifting to first-party data strategies. Composable Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) are gaining traction for their modular and adaptable data management capabilities.
Publishers are encouraged to reconsider their data infrastructure, evaluate versatile vendor offerings, and ensure robust governance to effectively capitalize on these trends in 2025.
Introduction
As traditional publishers navigate the evolving digital landscape, the focus is shifting from pure traffic volume and content engagement metrics to audience quality and first-party data monetization. According to eMarketer’s analyst findings from early 2024, 78 percent of marketers consider “behavior intelligence data” (first-party data) impactful or extremely impactful to product discovery.
Earlier in 2024, media consultant Matthew Scott Goldstein, writing for Press Gazette, predicted a significant decline in the digital publisher industry in the first quarter of 2025. In Goldstein’s own words, “this conclusion was reached after engaging in extensive conversations with industry experts over the last few months. This downturn is anticipated to continue for a minimum of three to six months, possibly extending throughout the entirety of 2025.” Contributing factors to the predicted downturn include a “lower level of programmatic monetisation” due to the reduction in third-party cookies as well as initiatives like the launch of Google’s Privacy Sandbox. Later that year, Google pulled back on its commitment to deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome in favor of users’ “informed choice.” However, we believe that the impact of new privacy regulations and changes in the advertising technology industry will still affect the digital publishing industry.
Here are some of the emerging industry trends we expect to see in 2025 among traditional media and publishing industries, which can help address the impact of the predicted downturn:
Shifting Traffic Patterns
At the time of writing this article, the results of the 2024 U.S. elections have been announced, and some of the major news outlets have already predicted what the digital publishing industry may experience as the “Trump Bump 2.0.” According to The New York Times, it will be a temporary phenomenon when ”cable news ratings and subscriptions to digital news organizations will probably increase … as audiences sort through a news-intensive post-election period.” Many newspapers saw a sudden increase in subscriptions in 2016 following Trump’s initial victory. It is likely that monetary donations will also see a short-term increase. However, these short-term gains are very unlikely to outweigh any ongoing long-term consequences of declining traffic and “Zero-Click” traffic trends. More about “Zero Click traffic” is examined below.
According to the Reuters Digital News Report 2023, shifting traffic patterns can be explained by several factors, such as fallen trust in the news across all global markets (down two percentage points in 2023 vs. 2022), less frequent consumption of both traditional and online media, audiences purposely avoiding news on specific topics being at all-time highs at 36 percent across markets, and audiences’ attention shifting to formats like news podcasting, video-led, and hybrid news podcasts.
Overall, various industry research points to a trend of increased direct and newsletter traffic to news websites, a decrease in the use of social media as a source of referral traffic, and a decline in search traffic across major publishers.
According to Reuters Institute industry predictions for 2024, the majority of their publisher respondents already had plans “to create more video (+64 net score), more newsletters (+52), and more podcasts (+47), but broadly the same number of news articles—as they lean into some of the few remaining areas of audience and advertiser growth.”
Traffic-Less or “Zero-Click Web” and AI-Powered Search Takeover
Another concerning trend, recently identified by Rand Fishkin of SparkToro, is the rise of the “zero-click web,” where users find information directly on search engine results pages without navigating to publisher websites, posing a significant challenge for digital publishers. This trend has accelerated in recent years. While major news publishers with influence are still present where people are searching for content and news, technological innovations such as the growth of voice search and digital assistants, increasing mobile usage (where users are less inclined to scroll past initial search results and are served content based on their interests (Google Discover)), and Google’s Generative AI in Search create a situation where users don’t need to click on links to access content or news on their devices.
As outlined in the SparkToro article, this trend can lead to decreased website traffic and ad revenue. However, by understanding the drivers behind zero-click search and implementing the right strategies, publishers can adapt and even capitalize on this shift in user behavior. Some of the strategies to capitalize on the “zero-click web” trend we recommend implementing in 2025 are:
- Optimize for featured snippets and knowledge panels. Ensure that content is structured to be easily understood and displayed by search engines. Leverage FAQ pages and schema markup to structure your content.
- Focus on creating highly engaging content that users will want to spend time reading and viewing. Continue implementing strategies to convert anonymous users into registered, authenticated users.
- Diversify revenue streams beyond advertising, such as premium content, e-commerce, and subscriptions.
- Invest in owned and operated channels to create “walled gardens” of owned content to bypass search engine algorithms and re-engage audiences via newsletters and mobile apps.
- Participate in industry groups and address concerns about search engine monopolization and unfair treatment of publishers with policymakers.
Publishers Demanding Real-Time Data
According to Deloitte’s Insights’ Trend Lines research, more businesses across industries continue to invest in streaming data pipelines. Publishers are increasingly seeking real-time insights into audience behavior, content consumption, and advertising effectiveness. Streaming data pipelines enable them to process and analyze data in real-time, allowing for timely decision-making and optimization. Not only do they help deliver more tailored content experiences, but they also play a crucial role in processing ad impressions, clicks, and conversions in real-time, allowing publishers to maximize their ad revenue.
Cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform offer robust data streaming services (e.g., Amazon Kinesis, Azure Stream Analytics, Google Cloud Dataflow) that simplify the implementation of streaming data pipelines. This has made it easier for publishers to adopt these technologies. The business cases of companies like Spotify highlight the importance of using streaming data for generating content previews (podcast previews in this case), personalized recommendations, fraud detection, and more.
By leveraging streaming data solutions, publishers can gain real-time insights, optimize content and advertising strategies, and enhance overall business performance. When selecting a streaming data vendor, it’s essential to evaluate their capabilities across audience insights, content optimization, advertising monetization, and data privacy to ensure alignment with your specific business needs.
Publishers Continuing to Embrace First-Party Data Solutions
Digiday‘s research consistently shows that publishers who invest in first-party data strategies are seeing significant benefits, including increased ad revenue, better audience targeting, and higher engagement.
Tightening privacy regulations and a reduction in third-party cookies are the key drivers for continued interest in leveraging first-party data solutions to allow publishers to operate through the means of ad monetization. Publishers still dependent on programmatic advertising as their main revenue source are expected to continue to see a decline in revenue and the ability to remarket users visiting their websites. For example, to minimize this imminent revenue loss, Google introduced the Privacy Sandbox, a collection of APIs and proposals that offer alternative methods for targeting ads, measuring ad performance, and preventing fraud without relying on third-party cookies.
There is no lack of offerings when it comes to leveraging first-party data:
- Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) – Some of the CDPs used by InfoTrust publishing industry customers are Twilio Segment, Adobe Real-Time CDP, Salesforce CDP, BlueConic, and Tealium AudienceStream.
- Data Management Platforms (DMPs) – Some of the DMPs used by InfoTrust publishing industry customers are Permutive, Lotame, and LiveRamp.
- Identity Resolution Platforms like ID5, LiveIntent nonID, or Unified ID 2.0.
- Data Clean Rooms such as Google Ads Data Hub and Snowflake among others.
- Data Analytics Platforms such as Parse.ly and Chartbeat, used by almost all of the publishing industry clients we work with, followed by Piano Analytics used by some of our publishers.
The emerging trend that we are likely to hear more about is using a composable CDP. In a nutshell, you can leverage the technology behind a composable CDP to bring the platforms to your data instead of having to take your data to each of the platforms you’re working with. In a composable CDP, various components of a customer data platform (data ingestion, identity resolution, segmentation, activation, etc.) are designed as independent, interchangeable modules. This allows publishers to pick and choose the specific capabilities they need, assemble them in a customized way, and easily swap out components as requirements change.
Google Marketing Platform just highlighted a case study with Kenvue for their use of GCP (BigQuery) to centralize their user data and then activate it across GMP products. While they aren’t calling it a “composable CDP,” that is essentially what it is. There is a lot of industry talk about the adoption of this approach in the upcoming year.
Hightouch, one of the solution providers, has a few resources on their website on what it means to have a composable CDP. The key benefits of it are that it runs on your data infrastructure, can support any data schema, is extremely modular, and has unbundled pricing. You can then segment your data right where it lives, create audiences, and use them for marketing activation.
To take advantage of this trend in 2025, publishers need to start assessing current and future data infrastructure needs, evaluate vendor solutions that offer desired capabilities as interoperable modules, implement robust data governance policies to ensure compliance and security, and establish their first iteration of the composable CDP architecture.
Conclusion
In navigating the evolving dynamics of the digital publishing landscape, it’s critical for media company executives to focus on quality over quantity. By shifting from mere traffic metrics to deeper audience insights, utilizing first-party data, and adapting to the zero-click web ecosystem, they can secure a competitive advantage. As data privacy becomes more crucial, investing in innovative solutions like composable CDPs and real-time data analytics is necessary. With these strategic moves, executives can create sustainable growth paths and ensure their organizations are well-positioned to thrive amidst industry challenges in 2025 and beyond. Implementing these advanced technologies and strategies will enhance decision-making processes and operational efficiencies, ultimately contributing to the creation of new revenue streams.
