Plenty has been written over the past year about publishers seeing declines in referrals from Google, as the search giant has upped the presence of its AI tools within Google Search. With Google’s AI Overviews and AI Modes delivering direct answers to audience queries, many publishers are reporting that audiences are clicking through to their website from Google Search less than they used to.
UK publishing group Reach revealed in its full year earnings this morning that it saw a major drop in Google referrals in the second half of last year, with Google traffic down by 46 percent, after a relatively stable first half of the year. This put a dent in page views for Reach’s owned and operated properties, which fell by eight percent year-on-year. But Reach CEO Piers North said that a drop in traffic from Google Discover, rather than Google Search, was the primary culprit
“Certainly, the buzz has been around Search,” said North, speaking on a call with investors. “For us, and many publishers, the change has really been in Google Discover, which has had a far greater impact. If we look at Google referrals, we see the number of referrals from that source declining by nearly 50 percent, meaning Google now represents around 50 percent of our on-platform [traffic].”
AI isn’t present in Google Discover — the mobile-first personalised feed of articles which Google shows on its homepage, app, and via a dedicated tab on Android devices — in the same way it is on Search. So why the fall in traffic?
According to North, Google has said it is pushing for video content and user-generated content within Discover, as well as more local content (though Reach, which owns a number of local news titles, says it has yet to see much evidence of the latter). As a result, written articles produced by the kinds of titles which Reach owns are showing up less in the Discover feed.
Rebuilding social connections
One of the positives for Reach is that video has been a strategic priority for the company since North took the reins last year. As its video output continues to grow, the frequency with which its content appears in the Discover feed might start to rise again.
Reach has now embedded around 110 new specialist video roles across its newsrooms, which currently produce more than 300 video stories per day, a figure which is expected to continue growing. Thanks to this, social referrals to Reach’s websites have grown significantly, up 21 percent year-on-year in the second half of the year. Social referrals now account for 27 percent of Reach’s traffic.
Reach’s investment in video isn’t just about driving audiences back to its owned and operated properties, though. Growing audiences on third-party platforms is a growing priority for the business. “On-platform is still important to us,” said North, “but it’s essential we spread our audiences across a wide range of sources, and live up to that promise of being where our audiences are. That will be through growing our off-platform audiences, and that is where video plays its part.”
Reach’s CFO Darren Fisher said that the company’s monetisation of audiences on social platforms has improved over the past year. Partly this is a function of Reach’s increased investment in social content, but Fisher also said that platforms are “increasingly rewarding engaging content”, which benefits the company.
It’s an interesting swing back towards the social platforms. Wind the clock back eight years, and many publishers were pulling back from third-party platforms, as changes to Facebook’s algorithm made it harder for publishers to show up in people’s news feeds. Many remain wary of becoming overly dependent on any third-party business.
But as North alluded to, the reality for publishers remains that social platforms can help them reach significant audiences they otherwise might miss. And in the intense battle for audience attention, working with the platforms — imperfect though they may be — in many cases will make a lot more sense than trying to retain complete independence.
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