AI Survival Strategies for Publishers: How to SMASH 2026!

Hi everyone. Uh, we're back. Yes. Uh, Christmas is a dim and distant memory, but, uh, Barry's got a new microphone and we have more beer. I believe we do, don't we? Right. Um, plus, um, we've got some sweet podcast theme music, Barry, um, which I've, uh, wedded onto this, uh, podcast. Um, which actually, uh, you may not know, but I did myself.

Yes, you are a musical genius, Steve. Thank you.

Thank you for helping me to recognize that, Barry. But right, I think on the success of our previous podcast, I think people know what to expect from our chats. You know, we're going to cover everything you need to know about what's going on in the digital publishing space. Each week we take a different theme and pull it apart. And this week's theme is going to be pretty weighty, but we'll come on to that a bit later. But I was wondering, Barry, if our second podcast might be A bit like either a huge success or, you know, one of those difficult second albums that bands have to do.

I was just going to say, yeah, is this going to be a smash hit to build on the previous one or a total dead rubber where people tune out? Yeah, I hope for the former, I'll be honest.

Yeah, it's a bit like Nirvana's, you know, Nirvana's second album, absolutely fantastic. Stone Roses' second album, less so. Right, but, you know, let's hope and pray and see what we get. So just before we dive into the topic of today, just a reminder to like, comment, and subscribe, people. I really am turning into a creator now. Obviously, you know, we want— we're all about the algorithms, and we want to send all those juicy signals to the algorithms to get people to, to get raised up in your feeds. So, Please do. So look, before we go into the main topic, a little bit, something a little bit potentially awkward, but we did reach out on the previous podcast to ask you, the humble listener and viewer, what they wanted to call this podcast. And Barry, we did have some amazing suggestions. So I'm just going to go through here. There seems to be a theme to some of them. We've got the Boldly Optimized. SEO Scoops, To Boldly Go. We've got one that came in, it was just called The Beers, which maybe, maybe that's a side quest where we just drink beer and that's it really. The Bald Serpents, the Bald Serpents. But equally, we actually had quite a few people also respond saying that Um, Beers and SEO with Barry and Steve was spot on. So we're actually going with the, uh, the general vote there to actually keep our original name. So we will go forward with Beers and SEO with Barry and Steve. Um, it's a great name. I'm not going to, uh, back that.

I like it. You came up with that, didn't you, Steve? I really appreciate it.

Thank you. But, you know, thanks for everyone that contributed to that. And also, they also sent in ideas for conversation points and topics that they want to get deeper in. I think we're going to cover that a lot on today's podcast. But if we don't cover anything, we will come back to it in future episodes. So what we're going to discuss today is basically AI survival strategies for publishers. And I think we'll, uh, this is very much, uh, inspired by, uh, Barry's, uh, own post on his Substack called, uh, called, uh, SEO for Google News. If you don't, if you aren't aware about it, we'll put the links in the pod and also the YouTube, uh, et cetera. Um, so we're going to flesh the podcast based out on, uh, on, on his article. Um, but also Barry, did you know that I also launched a Substack, uh, a couple of hours ago?

A couple of hours ago. Please do let me know. I'll be one of your first subscribers.

Well, so I've called it Publishing Strategies. And obviously, it will cover elements of SEO, but it's also pulling in experiences from my editorial and product experience as well. So a little bit of wider context than SEO, but with a bit of humor. So that's gone live and some of the posts that I've already put up there are going to be covering the subjects for today. So Publishing for Strategies, go and check it out.

So my question to you then is, are you going to write more often than I am? Because I can barely manage one post every 2 to 3 months nowadays.

Well, you know, obviously it depends. You've got to like strike the balance between what everyone, what everyone else is covering, right? And then as we know in SEO or just in publishing in general, Sometimes it's quite good to sit back from the original breaking news item and put a bit of research into it. So that's what I intend to do. Although, to be quite honest, my, my, one of my first posts was actually responding to the Reuters Journalism and Technology Trends and Predictions report, which has come— came out from today from Nick Newman, which is hugely significant. For those that don't know, it's an annual look at the kind of of, well, media predictions, which Nick does a lot of research in talking to quite a few consultants and editorial teams, a big survey response on the back of that. But for those that haven't read it, it's absolutely a must-see for digital publishers and also newsrooms. So go and check it out. And I've written my responses to that on my blog.

And I also think it's highly relevant to what we're going to be talking about here today.

Absolutely. So there are several points that we're going to discuss in your article, Barry, but there is a key point that we should start on, particularly because of some of the response that we've received in the Reuters report, but also a survey recently published on Press Gazette around around SEO, the value of SEO in our new environment of AI that's there now affecting everything in publishing. And I think one of the crucial points in your article, which let's talk about right now, which is traffic is still there in search, search lives on. So do you want to respond to that and we'll dig into that?

Yeah, I found it interesting. There was a few pieces I read today about that Reuters report and also reporting how news leaders are considering spending less effort on classic search, what they called old school SEO. And then I looked at the graph also in the same report about where the traffic actually comes from with Discover sending what, 45, 48% of traffic to publishers and search, a second source, 30, 35% of traffic. And then social media and all the other channels are distant thirds.

Yeah.

And then I thought, why would you want to spend less effort on arguably the second largest, and for some publishers, the largest source of visits to your website? Just because it's declining doesn't mean you should spend less effort on it. In fact, it's probably the exact opposite of what you should do. Yes, it's harder. Let's be honest. The amount of clicks that Google is sending to the wider web and to news especially is decreasing. But if you spend less effort on it, if you try less hard, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. As in, you spend less effort, you get less traffic, and you think, oh yeah, it's not worth it. Spend less effort, less traffic until you reach total Google zero. I think this should be a signal to news leaders that they need to work harder at SEO. And I also think, and speaking from my experience working with many publishers, and you can probably share some of your own experiences there, Steve, That a lot of publishers have taken their SEO a bit for granted, that they've been doing the same things over and over again and expecting to see growth off the back of that, that they haven't really been innovating. They've just been doing the same SEO tactics, the same SEO approaches. They also have probably been ignoring the technical debt on their own website. I see this very, very commonly that the website might look very good superficially, but the moment you start digging under the surface, especially on a technical SEO level, You find absolutely gaping holes and huge problems that prevent Google and other systems from crawling and indexing the content efficiently. And those have never been addressed because the publishers think, well, it's working, you know, we get traffic, why should we fix that? And then to draw the conclusion that search traffic is declining, so we should spend less effort on search without actually taking a good hard look at your own tactics and strategies and efforts to date. is the height of folly. I think it is self-defeating. It is, I dare say, stupid. I think publishers need to take a bit of ownership of what they've been doing and what they've not been doing and have a bit more of a long-term perspective. And I understand this can be challenging for news publishers because news moves very quickly. You have to make rapid decisions on editorial agendas, on story selection, all those things. But you don't want to make knee-jerk decisions about the long-term survival of your own company. I think you still need to look at the potential that exists within search and discover and all the other channels and then evaluate where you actually get the biggest bang for your buck in terms of actual visitor numbers, actual audience growth, and actual long-term revenue.

Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, some of the bad practice, if you like, if you can call it now, has probably come about Because search in some businesses has just been taken for granted, as you say, that a bedrock of search traffic has come in, which is probably low quality traffic. It's been there and it's just been assumed that that will always be the case where obviously, as you know now, we just need to interrogate what is that audience coming in and is it of value to us? And, you know, as we'll go through in the points that we'll come across, it's obviously challenging publishers to step up and to analyze, you know, each of the platforms, each of the strategies that they're taking in order to get that, you know, the good quality traffic in. And on your point also, you know, there is a correlation to your point around technical SEO and visibility in AI, which we'll come to. And, you know, those are, as you say, yes, I agree. You know, we go to many publisher websites and you can see that there is a focus on the stories, less so on the server response time or the structure of the website, internal linking, things like that. Lots of, lots of opportunities still to optimize for that traffic. But I assume a lot of confusion has come about really with the number of AI visibility tools that hit the market in the second half of last year. And all their marketing and promotion has somewhat muddied the, the actuality of the fact that there's still traffic coming in by Google. And it vastly, vastly overpowers the kind of referral traffic that we get from AI answer engines, which we discussed on the previous podcast, right? So still lots of opportunity in SEO, lots of things to do there to support the good editorial. And, you know, it must obviously come as a crushing blow to some publishers. If we look at some of the data from the December core update, we saw visibility dips on on some of the news publishers out there. So, you know, I mean, I always respond to publishers by suggesting that it's not a de facto— it's not de facto that your site is going to have less visibility going forward. It can swing back. So we need to sort of like accommodate for the ebbs and flows of Google. But But even so, there's always work that we can do in the background with technical SEO and structures and lots of different things that we should continue doing irrespective of our performance after a Google update. Barry, you got some thoughts on that?

Yeah, the update was fairly brutal, wasn't it, for many publishers? I think if you came out of that relatively unscathed, you should count your blessings. I'm not entirely clear what the underpinning sources and mechanisms are of the downgrade, 'cause some of the brands that were downgraded, like The Guardian, for example, you don't really expect them to be hit that badly by any core update. But I think it's one of those core updates where Google just fiddles with certain buttons, certain volume signals, certain levers that they can pull and push in the background to try and create a certain response. And the effect it has on publishers is almost collateral damage, as it were. I did see some publishers penalized, especially publishers that target the English language market but are not based themselves in the UK or in the US, who were hit very, very badly, very negatively, and I think that was maybe the goal that Google was trying to achieve because those publishers, and I'm not going to name names here, but They have been mentioned many times on LinkedIn and other social channels in the last few months, maybe even years, about how they're using basically clickbait and spam tactics to try and manipulate their presence in Discover, in Google Search, in trying to just maximize their visibility without necessarily underpinning that with journalistic quality. So I suspect that this update was trying to target that, and I think it was pretty successful at it, but there's been collateral damage. There's been some publishers who were caught in those same crossfires that don't necessarily deserve it, who haven't really been using those tactics, but for some reason, their signals align with those signals that those more spam-targeting websites were using.

Okay, so, you know, there's still, I think people were still trying to dig into the weeds for the, for that to get the answers from that core update. We'll find out more as the month progresses. One other point from your article was, which we've touched upon a little bit here, is AI is an accelerant, not a solution. And, you know, again, brands just need to work harder at their USP. And it's always interesting looking at some of the optimization tactics that are that seem to be recommended out there. I mean, we see it every day, they're shared on LinkedIn and raises an eyebrow by the rest of the SEO community. One that I continuously see is the use of listicles by brands. So I mean, I've got nothing against listicles, everyone likes a new, a great listicle. But it strikes me as somewhat disingenuous when a publisher will put their own brand at the the top of that list. Now it's all done in order to obviously get your— to trick the AI algorithm to see your listicle as an authority signal. And oh, whoever's at the top must be the best. And I know there's lots of publishers doing out there. So I don't see that as a long-term strategy for publishers. But it's just one One example where publishers maybe are being recommended certain tactics that doesn't seem to be right for a long-term strategy of encouraging audience loyalty to your brand?

I think publishers have been chasing after these quick-win tactics for as long as the web has been around. And there is a deep irony in there that publishers are using all these tricks to basically manipulate Google into showing them and generating traffic for them. And then they get all outrageous and self-aggrandizing when Google punishes them and other publishers for using those tricks. Publishers are their own worst enemies. They really are. I love news. I love journalism. I love the value that it brings. But news websites and the digital strategies employed by many publishers really deeply frustrate me at times. They see this hunger for clicks as their main driving goal in many cases, and it encourages bad habits. It encourages them to do bad things. We see this in search, we see this in Discover, we see this now with these listicles. On a side note, by the way, I find it also highly amusing how easy it is to manipulate these AI overviews into showing the weirdest answers. Yeah. By publishing a few listicles or even just one article. I mean, I don't know why anybody would trust anything these AI answers actually tell them because most of it is just so obviously easily manipulable. I think there's gonna be a whole industry built on the manipulation of AI overviews, and I think it's gonna backfire on Google, but that's a side point. Back to publishers. I think publishers, like I said earlier, need to take a bit of a harder look at themselves. They have been chasing after the cheap clicks for so long, and those habits are so deeply ingrained. That they don't know how to stop and they're always finding new ways to chase after them, you know, with listicles, with AI-generated journalism, with clickbait headlines, with misleading featured images, anything they can really use to get those clicks and also using technology like Google AMP Web Stories, still popular in many countries because of the preferential presence it used to have in the Discover feed without really editing anything new, without really creating proper journalism, and then they get all outraged when Google slams the door shut in their face and penalizes them for doing that. I mean, they shouldn't be complaining. I think the publishers that are succeeding to a large extent are less concerned with those tactics and more concerned with being themselves and presenting their news in their way to their audience in their format and with their viewpoints that aligns with the values that they hold. as a brand. And we're going to be talking about that in a bit as well about, you know, how you do brand. But, you know, I think publishers just need to be a bit more honest with themselves and a little bit less eager to point the finger at everybody else when quite often they have no one else to blame but themselves.

Well, we'll see, won't we? As the months ebb from 2026, we know that publishers are going to be using more of these AI strategies. So it would be, you know, look to your SEO experts and your consultants that are guns for hire, Barry, aren't we? That can help you in, you know, to navigate your way forward. So also in your article, there was a number of points suggested for that publishers should focus on. And it was interesting because for those that may not have read it, NewsDash surveyed over 20 SEO and audio audience growth professionals just before the end of the year. And I'll go through in order of the most prioritized suggestion that those experts said that publishers should focus on. And, you know, it kind of aligns with what we're about to cover. But at the top, what publishers should focus on for next year, at the top was traffic diversification beyond Google. Second, EEAT and trust signals. Then topical and entity-driven SEO. Next, Google Discover strategy. Optimizing for AI LLMs. So that's pretty, a little bit low in that list.

That is quite encouraging to see it low on the list.

Yeah. Technical SEO fundamentals. And lastly, AI overview optimization.

I would put technical SEO a lot higher on that list myself. But hey.

Yeah. So hey, let's go into our list of prioritized recommendations. So one you've got there in your article that you cover is Discover, Barry. So you want to talk a little bit about Google Discover, its risks and pitfalls?

Yeah, it's a constant theme in publishing. I actually saw a really interesting study from Marfeel, and I'll send you the link to that as well, about the data they have in Discover and how a lot of it is now shown with AI-generated summaries, which means there's less incitement for people to click through to the answer, and that YouTube is becoming more and more dominant Uh, on Discover. So it looks like, yeah, the space for publishers on Discover is also narrowing and diminishing, which is also reflected in that Reuters report that show a decline in the amount of clicks that Discover sends to users. And of course, we have known about the classic pitfalls of Discover, which is clickbait and journalism and just trying those cheap tactics to get people to click on a headline that entices them without really adding anything new of journalistic value. And also because of the broader net that Discover casts versus, say, a top stories box, you see different types of websites in Discover that don't necessarily have the same trust and authority that news websites have. And there've been some people like Nicola Aegis who've been writing about that on LinkedIn regularly about how spam websites are basically taking over the Discover feed.

Yes.

So with that all in mind, I still think it's worth, definitely worth optimizing for Discover because yeah, it is the single largest source of traffic to publishers. Just now, but you also need to put that in the right context and make sure you do it in a way that is sustainable and not risking you getting slapped by another Google algorithm update and losing all that visibility, because that is a real, real risk. So those tactics are known tactics. It is actually the topic of one of my upcoming newsletters. I'm writing a tactical guide to optimizing for Discover. So trying to be as direct and focused on what actually works. And yeah, you want headlines that have that curiosity gap thing, but without being misleading, without being too clickbaity. You want very strong featured images in like 16 by 9 banner size, 1,200 pixels wide that show an image that people are more likely to click on. People's faces work really, really well. People's expressions, that sort of thing. You can also add text into those images. Your introduction sentence or your lead-in paragraph needs to be quite strong, mentioning the right keywords, the right topics and entities. And, you know, those sorts of tactics really, really work. And I think Discover also rewards experimentation. What I see happen and what I hear from many others is that Discover likes to vary the websites it shows for specific topics, like one day or one week, one particular website will dominate entertainment and celebrity news. And then the next week, another website will dominate entertainment and celebrity news. And that seems built into the system. I think Discover is set up in such a way it wants to show a very wide variety of different websites for the exact same topics, which, you know, makes it harder to build loyal audiences. Even though Google now has this experimental feature, Follow on Discover, I don't think many users are going to adopt that. So I think it'll stay difficult to build consistent returning visits via Discover. And I think also that's why publishers need to experiment and probably fire on multiple different tactics and multiple different topical areas to try and get some sort of consistency out of Discover and see what works for them for their type of journalism, their type of content, to see if there's any way they can have a reliable foundation of Discover traffic.

I think you're absolutely right. It does take an analysis. I mean, obviously, you can use tools like NewsDash or Snoop or Marfil to dig into your Google Discover data. What I've often done is exported from Google Search Console the headlines and looked at the headline analysis. And then also obviously looked using maybe a third-party tool at the thumbnails that other publishers are using. You know, obviously, it's no secret, you apply the same attention that you might do on any other social media platform. Exactly, you said an engaging image, which is so interesting how publishers might look at things like MrBeast does on YouTube, using those kind of— AI-generated images in Google Discover. But the thing that's always been known from experience is it can be extremely addictive, Google Discover. And as you said, it is putting or wants to pull from a diverse range of publishers each week. So that is going to contribute to the spikes, the dips that publishers see. And unfortunately, when you have a large spike, that's when the publishers get addicted to it. And what I've seen before is newsroom teams start depending on how they're reporting back, but sometimes the organic search and the Discover are not split out. So they're seeing a total search traffic number, they're seeing a bump in the search traffic, and they're going, where's that coming from? Oh, it's Google Discover, right? Let's go all in on Google Discover. And, you know, on a typical day, there are some— I always call Google Discover a bit like Facebook in 2016. 2017, because the headlines are sensational. And as you say, curiosity gap, we're not allowed to say clickbait. But, and also the topics can be extremely interesting. So at one point, it was all about your high street shops that are closing. And as soon as one publisher noticed that that was performing particularly well, they went all in on that, and others followed. So again, as we'll come to, you know, is that what you should be producing as a publisher. But, you know, it's again, experiment— experimentation is key around Google Discover. But don't lose sight of what, you know, long-term audience loyalty— where do you want them to ultimately engage in? What I have seen is around Black Friday, there were Google Discover posts that did extremely well, and they were quality posts at that. And obviously, that is a time where people are open to recommendations and discounts and exploring products they may not be aware of. So it seems to have worked well in the affiliate area of Google Discover around that time. So it seems like key commercial shopping events, it seems to be like a good channel. Okay, so moving on to multichannel approaches. Obviously, we've You know, it's kind of like logical, this one, is that we've seen the dip in search traffic. So it doesn't even matter that that's happening to the actual algorithm. Anytime there's a dip in traffic, publishers should take stock and review where, what and where they are publishing. So I know we're going to go through a number of channels, but they, you know, if you're not already across these channels, You should be because you need to not have all your eggs in one basket, as they say. So we're talking a little bit about newsletters and I wondered, Barry, what are your favorite newsletters? I'm gonna say, I think you're on mute.

Yeah. Oh, that's a good question.

Yeah.

The spacebar only works if I'm actually focused on the screen. What are my favorite newsletters? I mean, I love Jesse and Shelby's What the Fuck Is SEO newsletter. That is my go-to read every single time.

Yeah.

There's a lot of SEO-related newsletters I follow. I like the Leadership in SEO from Harry Clarkson-Bennett as well. I'm probably going to like your newsletter, Steve. I haven't read it yet, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to like it. I don't read that many newsletters, I'll be honest. I have a few like niche hobbies That I get newsletters for like Warhammer 40K and some, some cyberpunk stuff and video games and rugby. I have seen some examples of sports newsletters that really drew me in. For example, when the NFL season was starting, uh, I subscribed to The Athletic and I got some of the NFL newsletters and I almost never read sports newsletters or those sorts of stuff, but those ones from the very first sentence. Somehow grabbed me and really made me want to read the whole thing. I find them to be very, very good, very engaging, very useful in giving me information that I don't necessarily get by just reading articles on the website. And I think that's one of the things that really helps a newsletter stand out: that you don't just make it a summary or extension of what you're reporting on the website. Maybe maybe add something new and different in there as well. I like what Press Gazette does with their Substack newsletter for. I think Dominic writes that one. He gives a bit of commentary on the news as well as summarizing what the stories are on the website, on the Press Gazette website. And I like that. I like to hear what he thinks about it because he's of course a very seasoned publishing professional and his insight, his opinions, and his experiences, you know, add an extra layer to that newsletter rather than just a factual article that he has to publish on the website. So I think if you are going to do email newsletters as a publisher, Look at those sorts of things, how you can add an extra layer to that newsletter that makes it worthwhile for a user to subscribe to that newsletter by giving them something they're not finding on the website. And I think if you are a news-focused publisher, giving that commentary, that personal touch to the newsletter that you can't necessarily do in just the news itself, that is a really good tactic that really makes the newsletter come alive, feel more real, feel less auto-generated and more human-written. by humans for humans. And I think will help people subscribe to it and help people stay subscribed to it and engage with it and read it and click through it to your website.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And actually, I think I'm the opposite to you when it comes to newsletters because I subscribe to so many that I have to have like an audit every 3 months to try and delete the ones that I haven't— I've forgotten that I signed up to. My inbox is a complete mess and I kind of use it almost like a social feed. But as you quite rightly say, those newsletters that are very strong in tone and have a distinct personality are the ones that kind of like are more memorable to me. So there's an excellent newsletter called The Know, which is a daily news briefing, which drops in, I think, about 8 AM or earlier, which will grab onto some of the news stories, but also focus on one particular area. It's a short, brief briefing. And then, yeah, I'll have all the news-related newsletters from Politico, Semafor, Sky, LBC, you name it. I will often choose a diverse range of political newsletters because I often quite like, just in general, I like to see how the news is tackled from, well, left, centre, and right perspectives. And quite often in newsletters, they will lead with with a key point where you can gauge exactly where the political direction is coming from. So yes, absolutely, tone is really important. I tend to not really— I'm not really interested in newsletters that seem automated, i.e., they're just pulling in blocks from the website. I may have subscribed to those in the past, but I seem to delete them because I can get that by going to the website. So as you say, Quite often those with an editorial forward, I tend to keep in my inbox. But one thing that obviously all good CRM teams know is that newsletters are a fantastic way for driving subscriptions through digital, right? Because a user may It may be hard work to get the subscribe— to get the user to subscribe immediately to your publication from your call to action. They may be more likely to subscribe to the newsletter first. So it's a crucial first point before particularly going into page descriptions, right? So yeah.

Yeah, I think the newsletter is a great opportunity to give a sample of what might be behind the paywall. And also if you have like a newsletter that is part free, part paid, I see, I know a few people who do this really well where like the first third of the newsletter is free and the rest is behind the paywall. That also is a really good way to give people a bit of a taster of what they can expect. Or maybe you can just, you know, provide the conclusions in the intro and then the actual data and analysis in the rest of the newsletter. It's just, again, something you probably want to experiment with, see what aligns aligns with your audience, aligns with your journalism, aligns with your brand, and how you can make the most of those opportunities without spamming users and without making it overly commercial, because that's something that really turns off potential subscribers and readers.

Yeah. So moving on, in your articles, obviously video is a big area. And in the Reuters Media Trends report launched today, it mentioned again around the importance of video But also how journalists are learning from the creator economy. And that's one of the challenges because the creators are already out there engaging their audiences across video. That's challenge one. So publishers need to cut through that. But then also one of the things I noticed in the report is that publishers are becoming increasingly anxious about losing their talent as that talent might decide to move on to become creators themselves. So the advent of the news creator, which is more established in the US at the moment, is certainly something that is coming about more and more. So we'll, you know, that's something that we need to contend with, right, as publishers and embrace.

Yeah, we have a few in the UK as well, like Lewis Goodall, the news agents in general. Oh yes. Well, you know, Alastair and what's the other guy's name? Rory. The Rest Is Politics is the podcast.

Yeah, Alastair Campbell. Yeah.

Yeah. And it aligns with what we're seeing in terms of which platforms are growing and which platforms are getting better visibility. It will surprise no one that YouTube is the single largest presence in the Discover feed, in Google's Discover feed. Which of course taps directly into the creator economy and in the video aspect of presenting the news. If you are a print-based newspaper or news website with a history background, a foundation of print, video might seem quite daunting and it might indeed be appearing to be a high-risk enterprise to put journalists in front of cameras and turning them into news celebrities, as it were. And it's not something that every journalist can do, to be entirely honest.

Yeah.

But I think the risk of not doing it is higher than the risk of doing it. I think journalists who want to become news creators will do it anyway, with or without your permission. And I think it's better if you tie them to your brand as much as possible and give them that space to embark on that journey for themselves and see if they can help your brand in that way as well. And the rewards are written all over there. And yeah, the risk is that they leave, but you'll have the risk anyway that they'll leave even if you're not doing it. So, you know, you just gotta have to seize those opportunities and maybe find a few journalists who do have that desire to explore that part of their career and enable them to do it, give them the platform to do it. And, you know, you'll find that it'll benefit you as a news brand a lot more than it'll hurt you. And if they do decide to move on, maybe go freelance and do it for themselves, you can still engage with them. You can still keep them on board in some sort of capacity, and you can maybe give space for a younger generation of upcoming journalists to take their space and help carry on that banner for your news brand. But yeah, like I said, the risk of not doing it is greater than the risk of doing it. I think you should just step out of the comfort zone a little bit because no meaningful growth has ever come by not taking risks.

Yeah, absolutely. And your point sort of dovetails obviously with social media. I mean, a lot of video is, we're talking about social media video, right? And it's a no-brainer that publishers should invest more in social media. It's, you know, I think I mentioned on the previous pod around a fantastic piece by the Washington Post where they looked at TikTok adoption of around 400 users, I believe. And yes, they observed how much that the person used it in the first week compared to the last week. And some of the heavy adopters of that at the end of the month were on TikTok 4 hours a day, right? So, I mean, that sounds a bit like my kids, right?

So it's crack cocaine, Steve. It is total crack cocaine. It is an algorithm fine-tuned to make you addicted as soon as possible. And it terrifies me. It absolutely terrifies me.

Yeah. But that's where an audience is, particularly younger audiences, right? So depending on your brand, you've got to look at that space. And the challenge will be, as ever, is to entertain and to entertain the algorithm effectively, but also work out how to convert that audience and move them over onto your onto your own platforms. Although, you know, that is main— that might be one strategy. Equally, it's about keeping users engaged on their own platforms that may never come to your platform, right? So that's where looking at particularly what the news creators are doing out there, the independent news creators, they're doing amazing things out there, which we should celebrate because they are communicating the value of journalism to an audience that may not have experienced it or may be questioning what is it that actually journalists do?

Yeah, and it means you can reuse the same piece of content for multiple platforms. If you have a YouTube video, you can turn that into a few Shorts, a few vertical Shorts, which you've really done really well with our very first episode, Steve. And then you publish that on multiple platforms. You can publish it on LinkedIn, on YouTube, on Facebook, on Instagram, on TikTok. So you have one piece of content, like a 30-minute, 1-hour video and it becomes 10, 20, 30 pieces of content on all these different channels. So, you know, this is an almost exponential way to build your presence on social media platforms, grow your brand and make yourself more visible and more attractive to potential new readers.

Right. So, you know, we covered a lot of things that are probably going to be relevant to this final point, which is really around the value of brand. And there's lots of different things that can make your brand unique and distinct. And we haven't got time to go through all of them here. But in my recent Substack, which I published today, I looked at like 2 ways that you could look at at brand and through the prism, if you like, of trust. Now, trust is a, or building trust with your audiences is a great way of building your brand authority. And people can go and have a look at the Substack post, but I looked at basically the kind of like the more rational things that you can do. For instance, getting a team agreement on a mission statement where it clearly explains to users what your brand values are, and why you publish the content that you do. And it's quite interesting that that kind of information is quite often hard to find on a website or an app. So particularly for, as we mentioned before, younger users that might be trying to work out what journalists do, often that information is hidden on a corporate section of a website where it should be, I think, very easily found. Again, An important part of that is obviously author personas, etc., explaining who your journalists are. But do we actually, in that information, cover why that journalist decided to become a journalist? We know what they did, what they studied, what they cover, but what inspired them? Quite often, that will be socially orientated. They want to make a difference. So that's going to chime with the audience. Anyway, lots of different things in that substack. There's also a more emotional approach that you can do to build up trust. And an area of that might be around areas of how you delight the audience, how you create wow moments. So that could be gamification areas. It could be just clever UX. It could be personalized or personalization in general, but personalized messages. Just before Christmas, I received something in the post, which was a note from The Times, handwritten note, which said, thank you for your subscription. We'd like to give you a book from this book website. Here's a code. I wasn't expecting that. And that is something that, you know, also created delight for me, Barry. But because obviously I haven't received a lot of that in the subscriptions that I have in news or non-news. So it was great. So yeah, so a bit of the emotional pulls of trust and the more serious side of it or the rational side of it. But it's also, you know, trust alone will not get audiences to you, right? You still need to engage with the algorithms. And, you know, and there's lots of things that we can do on that. So there's a lot of conversation in conferences and just editorial discussions around the importance of trust, whereas I think there needs to be more conversation on the specifics of what we need to do on the platforms to engage our audiences. Trust alone is not going to get us over the line.

No, no, exactly. And on the topic of brand, there's 2 things I want to talk about. The first is something that a good friend of mine, Andy Jarvis, who runs his own marketing strategy consultancy called Eximo. It's a mantra of his and I've sort of adopted it as well. He says, talk to your customers. And in the case of news and publishing, talk to your readers because they are essentially your customers. No, your advertisers are not your customers. Your readers are your customers. I don't think enough publishers talk to their customers. And it boils down to a simple fact that brand is not what you think you have, but what your your audience thinks you have. And too many companies in news or anywhere else, if you're a consumer-facing company, the risk is there that you have a perception in your mind and your corporate culture of what your brand is that doesn't align with what the actual outside world thinks your brand is. And that is a very big risk to have because it means you sometimes do things that you think align with your brand but don't align with the external perception of your brand at all. So I think first and foremost, to understand your brand, let alone improve it, understand what it actually is to the outside world. Talk to your customers, talk to your readers, ask them what they think about you, ask them what they like about you, what they don't like about you, what they think you can do better, what they think you need to improve on, other things you can try. Not necessarily to take it as pure gospel, but to help guide your internal decision-making and maybe align the internal and external perceptions of your brand. brand a bit better. Second, when it comes to trust and authority as part of your brand, too many news publishers don't do any original journalism. They just report what others are reporting. They rely on the news to come to them and then they regurgitate it and throw it through their lens and throw it out there in the wider world. I don't think that builds trust. I don't think that builds authority. I think you need to put the effort in to do your own original investigation, investigations, original journalism, find the stories yourself rather than wait for them to come to you and use that as sort of one of the foundational blocks to build your news brand on, to build that trust on, to build that authority on. I think the ease with which you can create a website and become a publisher on the web has helped to erode some of those fundamental journalistic building blocks that we did have in the era of print where you sort of had to go out there and find the stories yourself. It's now too easy to let the stories come to you. But I do see an increasing trend that websites that don't have enough of their own stories and just report what others are reporting, they tend to be on the losing side of algorithm updates, on the losing side of the traffic trends, and generally not really, you know, managing to maintain, let alone grow their traffic in most aspects of Google. So that's tough. That's hard. That takes time. That takes investment. That takes, for some websites, a big step out of their comfort zone, and it takes consistent effort to build those internal journalistic skills, but with the trends that we're seeing and the way that publishing on the web is going, I do think it is an absolutely foundational aspect. of succeeding, of surviving in this AI-dominated era. If you have stories that AIs can't report on because no one else has written about it, you have an advantage that is very hard to replicate.

That's right. And, you know, there's lots of things that publishers can do because effectively that is an AI survival strategy, right? It's to create content that can't be summarized easily. So we're looking at original journalism, first point, first person stories, real human stories, stories where you could read the summarized version on AI, but that is not going to give you any way the kind of value of actually going through, clicking through and reading the actual article. Quizzes, interactive features, video itself, you know, that's another reason to invest in video. Lots and lots and lots of different things. So I think that's a good point to end on really. There's lots to be done, but it's a question of putting, you know, having the courage to experiment and to innovate. As I've said before, you know, traffic decreases are always the point in time to bring your teams together to look at things and to try out new things that you may not have tried before. So hopefully, You know, that's some areas that publishers could look at. I mean, we've both written and reported back on lots of these in more detail, and there's many other things that we could talk about, but let's reserve that for future podcasts. I mean, how do you measure? I mean, what are the metrics that really matter, Barry? But let's maybe approach that later on down the line.

Oh, so many ideas. You know, how do you Like you said, measure AI visibility properly in an actual meaningful way. What kind of metrics do you attach to brand? How should you engage with paywalls, freemium models versus hard paywalls? So many topics left to cover, and we'll probably invite a few guests along the way as well to help us untangle those topics.

We'll have to get more beer in as well, Barry.

Oh, definitely.

Okay, guys, thanks so much for all your time. As I said before, Please, as I say, like, comment, and subscribe wherever you're receiving this podcast or video on YouTube or on your social media channels. Get stuck in. Please let us know what you want us to cover on future episodes and we'll cover it.

Also, if you absolutely hate this, please be honest. I am a Dutchman and notoriously direct. I can take it as well.

I can't, so be gentle. Okay, thanks everyone. See you, see you on the next episode.

See you all then. Bye-bye.