Chat With Barry Adams | News SEO, AI Search & The Future Of Publishers

Hello, welcome back to Search Shaun. This is of course another Chat with Shaun episode, and yeah, really looking forward to this one. Someone who we've mentioned quite a lot on this channel before, so it's great to have them finally on the channel. And yeah, as usual, do the quick intros, and we've got a few topics we've laid out, so we try and get through as many as we can. As usual, we get through the intros. See, I'm joined by Barry. Barry is an award-winning SEO and audience growth consultant. Specializing in strategic, technical, and editorial SEO, AI search, and organic growth for news publishers across the globe. He has been building and ranking websites since 1998 and has worked with a wide range of clients from micro businesses to worldwide media brands. Those include the likes of New York Times, The Guardian, The Daily Mail, and The Independent. and is also a host of a great podcast, uh, Beers and SEO with Barry and Steve. Um, really good kind of fresh take on it all with some beers as well, which is awesome. I might have some beers later with the game, but, uh, not now. But cheers for joining me, Barry.

Thank you very much for having me, Sean. That's a nice intro.

Yeah, no, well, well deserved, and, uh, looking forward to getting into this because Because it, you know, I don't really cover the areas that you do as much in my day-to-day job, but obviously I'm across it all with the channel and I find it so fascinating, these areas, to be honest. So yeah, really looking forward to this one. So the first one was, what does it mean for publishers when commodity content is increasingly being replaced by direct answers in search?

Yeah, I mean, it's a layered question, of course, because you have to understand the context in which a lot of publishers have become dependent on commodity content. And it started really in the early days of the web. And when you said in my intro, I've been building websites since 1998, which is true, I realize I'm an old dinosaur of the industry now, and I'm working with people who weren't even born yet when I started doing SEO, which is properly scary. But in those early days, the news industry seemed to make a very conscious decision to give news away for free in exchange for getting traffic on the web. And that sort of became the default business model for the better part of 25 years. Years and using advertising primarily to monetize that traffic. And because traffic was the core KPI, it was the metric around which everything revolved, publishers kept trying to find more ways to get more traffic or to maintain traffic in light of Google introducing new features like featured snippets, direct answers, knowledge graph, map packs, all of those things. And a lot of that revolved not around what we would call journalism, as in investigating stories and publishing them, but about creating commodity content. Straightforward answers that people would search for on Google quite often, so that news publishers had a good chance to show up there because their websites generally had sufficient authority signals to rank high in Google based on the actual journalism that they did. And that probably peaked at about 2017, 2018, when publishers were just throwing everything at the wall and see what would stick. Quite a lot of it would actually stick because they had those massive authority signals. And from 2018 onwards, that really started to diminish. Usually initially in the wake of some massive core algorithm update, which I— the initial ones, the first ones, the one in— especially one in March 2018, which predominantly hit UK publishers, was very much what I call a stay-in-your-lane update where Google decided, yeah, we're not going to let general news publishers rank for everything anymore. We're going to use topic authority signals to decide what you rank for.

And that was a very big update.

You're good at and what you're not good at. And we're just going to stop ranking you for stuff that we decide is outside of your wheelhouse, outside of your core editorial expertise. And that was the beginning of the narrowing of search space for publishers. What AI has done is accelerate that process even further because AI has enabled Google to genuinely take traffic away for web pages that just publish quality content and just use AI summaries instead. Which, if you look at it from a user perspective, is a good thing because users don't have to go through the friction of visiting a publishing website. Because publishing websites, as many websites, have become quite difficult to navigate for users because you click on a search result, you end up on a news website. First you have a cookie consent form, Then you have a newsletter signup overlay, then you have a registration overlay, and then you have to scroll down 3, 4, 5 screens of content before you find the actual answer you were looking for. It's not a pleasant experience. So from a user perspective, seeing that answer straight away in an AI-generated summary, usually with a lot of context around it as well, is a good experience, is objectively a good experience. And despite the initial rough start of AI overviews, with a lot of hallucinations and wrong answers, that really seems to not entirely disappeared, but have become less prominent. It's much less likely to get hallucinated answers now, thanks to the grounding process that Google use. So publishers now are genuinely in an ecosystem where chasing after traffic with all means possible does not work. It just does not work. You're not gonna get that traffic back ever. So publishing that commodity content that, you know, guests on your podcast will have used the term information gain quite often. And that's something that news publishers are very well presented to deliver. But a lot of publishers, the most of their content contains no information gain. They're just reporting what everybody else is reporting. And publishers now have to realign themselves to being proper news publishers again and doing proper journalism and say, no, We still only publish something if we can add something meaningful to the conversation, either add new information, expand on the story, add insights, add our own opinions, whatever it is. And if you're not able to do that, what's the value in publishing this story in the first place? Previously, there was value in it because, you know, it was a free-for-all, whereas now there isn't— the value isn't there anymore. So you have to really think about what your added value as a publisher is. What your expertise is, where you can add information to specific stories and specific topics, and more than that, also try to maximize the value of individual users that do still come to your website from search. We'll probably dig into that a little bit as well later on. But you know, previously, a lot of publishers saw traffic visitors as a renewable resource. They didn't really mind pissing off visitors with. Bad user experiences and advertising overload, because with search you could always generate more new visitors. And now you can't anymore. There's a limited pool of traffic that Google will send to publishers. So you have to maximize the value of that visitor. And that doesn't mean showing 10,000 ads. It means making sure that visitor wants to come back so that they become a repeat visitor. And that too is an entirely different paradigm shift for these publishers, because now they have to treat their visitors with respect. And see them as a precious resource, a scarce commodity. And that means thinking very differently about your user experience, user journeys, the advertising you choose to show, and what other conversion moments you build into that process.

Yeah, it's fascinating, isn't it? And yeah, 100%. Like I see, especially some YouTube channels that I watch, American-based, they usually show like Daily Mail Articles and scroll through it and they're absolutely like fuming about the amount of adverts and irrelevant stuff that's on there compared to like what the actual article's about. And it's a terrible experience. And like you say, I think they've just taken it for granted.

You know, I should say though, the Daily Mail is actually one of the stickier websites. Yes, they have a lot of advertising. The user experience isn't ideal, but the site is very good at keeping people on their website. In terms of average articles per session consumed by a user, they're top of the leaderboard in the UK consistently. So people put up with that unoptimized experience because of the way the Daily Mail is optimized to keep people on their website. You know, the sidebar of shame is a notorious thing where there's a sidebar of recommended articles on the desktop version of the Daily Mail with enticing headlines and thumbnail images, and that keeps people clicking on more and more stories. They're very good at keeping people on the website. despite not being, you know, optimized for, you know, pleasant user experience.

Yeah. And I guess they also, they cover stories that others don't. So, you know, I always say I'm into space and all that kind of stuff, and they cover a lot more of those space stories than other publishers do in the UK. So I guess they do.

They do. They are actually a wide-ranging publisher. And, you know, it seems to be a bit of a common theme in public discourse to shit on the Daily Mail. But when you actually engage with what they do, they're probably one of the leading news publishers in the UK, probably in the world, in terms of generating investigative journalism, original stories, and the breadth of topics that they cover. It's just that the style in which they do so aggravates some people. It annoys people, but there's obviously a massive audience for it because they are one of the most popular news brands in the country.

Yeah, I can't argue with that. And I do think it's interesting, and again, we might go deeper into this, but the strategies around um, how publishers are dealing with this. Because obviously, like you've been saying, the traffic's dropped and the users are going. So a lot of their revenue models were built around those, uh, adverts they hosted on those pages. And a lot of them seem to be going into like the paid model, you know, when you have to pay to— which is really annoying when, for me, when I try and do like my news shows and I'm trying to get the information, then you have to pay. And, you know, people haven't got much money these days. So like, I don't think people are going to be able to pay for every single news publisher they're going to want to read from, whether that's the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Telegraph, you know, and I know the Guardian, like they're still free, but they're still pushing you for money a bit like Wikipedia does. So how would, like, we'll go there now, I guess. Where do you see that going? Like, where's the longevity in these publishers, how they finance themselves?

I think we as the audience do actually need to get used to paying for news again. We always paid for news before the internet. We paid for newspapers. It was never free. And when you say, oh, you could watch the news for free on TV, yeah, but it's just the headlines. It's not a lot of in-depth reporting, and usually just the big national stories and none of the local stories. And proper news is costly to produce. I don't think people realize how much effort goes into covering stories, uncovering news stories, holding people to account. It's not cheap to do proper journalism. And now that the business model on the web has now turned on its head, that traffic can't be the revenue funnel for news and publishing anymore, we are now in a situation where most of the news we want to consume, we'll probably have to pay for. And we'll always have some degree of free news in the form of the BBC, but we pay for that another way through the license fee here in the UK. But I understand that you can't subscribe to all the websites that you want to read, and that becomes a bit of a friction point as well. But at the same time, you know, in the 1990s, we couldn't pay for all the newspapers we wanted to read. We just picked one or two and stuck with those. And that was fine as long as it's a paper that you can trust and rely on and that sort of stuff. What has happened in the last 20, 25 years is that we've lost a lot of the trust in the news industry, specifically because they chased after clicks and traffic so much. Because they didn't seem to focus, in our perspective, on doing proper quality journalism. The publishers who have focused on quality journalism these last 20 years, they generally are already behind paywalls. Think Financial Times, think Wall Street Journal, think New York Times. And people don't mind paying for those because they trust those publishers implicitly. And a lot of publishers who have lost that trust over the last 20 years will have to work hard to regain it. And then, you know, make it worth their audience's money to pay for them again, rather than, you know, chasing after traffic and just trying to monetize that with ads and that whole cheap content funnel that resulted in. I also think subscription bundles are very powerful mechanisms where with one flat subscription fee, you can read multiple different websites. There's several countries already that either because certain publications are owned by the same company, or some companies have actually started collaborating on this, where there's bundled subscriptions, where they just throw a certain amount of websites as part of a bundle. I'm, for example, I'm subscribed in the Netherlands, because I'm originally a Dutchman, believe it or not, with my name, to a bundle from DPG Media, which is one, I think it's €25 flat fee a month, and I get 28 websites. Now, of those 28, because most of them are local, I read maybe 4. But that's worth it. That's worth every single penny to get full access to all the premium content on those 4 websites, plus a reduced advertising overload as well at the same time. And then you have other mechanisms. You know, you don't have to pay for all news. You can just pay for another bundling mechanism like Apple News. And with Apple News, you get a lot of websites factored in for free to read for free, paywall websites for free. So there are those mechanisms for that. You know, there's ways that you can be cost efficient and still read all the news or most of the news that you want. But yes, this is a shift, not just for publishers, but also for the audience. We have gotten used to free news, and now that just is not a sustainable business model. But as a society, we do need news. And there's a big chasm between the news we want to read and trust and the news we're willing to pay for. And that chasm needs to close. Publishers need to work harder to earn our trust back as users, and users need to start paying for news again. That they feel is worthwhile paying for. And we'll converge at some point in the next few years. I am quite optimistic about the state of the news and publishing industry. I think this particular transition period we're in at the moment is painful for a lot of publishers because they have to let go of habits that have sustained them for 20, 25 years and sort of reinvent themselves again as a next-generation online publisher. And it's also painful for the audience who suddenly realizes, oh shit, I have to start paying for news again, whereas previously they could always get it for free. And people always try to find ways to go around that. But because I do believe the free news people will still be able to read won't carry the depth of quality of reporting that they maybe want and trust, so users will also converge on the point that, okay, I'll start paying for news again. It doesn't have to be expensive. You don't have to pay massive amounts of money for some subscribers because, like I said, with the bundling mechanisms and Some paywalled websites are actually quite affordable, quite cheap. So, you know, it's an interesting period. We'll end up in a better position at the end. We will have properly funded journalism that people are happy to engage with, are loyal to, that trust and faith in, because publishers won't have to throw all that crap at the wall just to see and get as much traffic as possible. They can actually focus on doing quality journalism again, and therefore, you know, we'll end up in a better place.

Yeah, that's definitely true. I think, uh, and just on the financial side, I guess also a lot of them are signing deals with the large language models like OpenAI, and that's gonna fund, I guess, some of their stuff going forward.

No, I, uh, I'm not privy to the exact financials of most of those deals, but what I have heard from the publishers I work with who have those deals is that it's not a lot of money. They don't get a lot of money. In fact, some of them are reconsidering the agreements, like, yeah, we're getting this money to be cited, but we're not getting any traffic, we're not even getting any conversions off the back of it, so why are we doing this? We might just, you know, close that particular gate and then go work with a publishing coalition like SPUR to see if we can get a better deal, not just for us but for all publishers in the UK, to form a united front. So, LLM licensing deals, I don't think, will be a significant source of revenue for publishers.

Interesting. Yeah, and I was going to say as well, like, obviously with, like you say, the trust levels— I did something on our channel last week about Reuters. They released something about the trust in the media is at all-time low. And I guess, yeah, hopefully this will be like the kickstart of, like you say, proper journalism again. Like, I think that's the thing, like, one of— I say on the channel all the time some of the things that I think are the worst inventions that we've ever had is social media and 24-hour news. And it just meant that we had to come up with crap all the time, and everything was a big news story, but we didn't really cover it properly. We just kind of like— even earthquakes, it'd just be like a flash-in-the-pan story, and then we'll move on to something else. So even the wars. So I think we lost that real touch of real journalism, as you say. And One thing it has uncovered though from all this is, and again I say about social media, and obviously I'm on YouTube, but I think that's slightly different to the ones I'm talking about. But the things that YouTube has created are these, uh, independent journalists that some are doing really good work in their fields, you know, that really still do that kind of real field research. And I think that's shaking things up. And also like with Google Discover and stuff, like Have you seen it kind of open up new opportunities for the more niche sort of, you know, news websites? I think like when the things I followed it, there seems to be new publishers that I wasn't too aware of that, uh, that I read, you know, a bit more regularly now than I did before.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't wanna get into the weeds of what makes for a good journalist because some of the people who publish news on YouTube was just disinformation merchants. And I think that is one of the areas where big publishing brands actually have an advantage because they have editorial processes, they do fact-checking, they are accountable for the news that they publish, whereas a YouTuber can spew the most insane bullshit and is not accountable for what they publish there at all. But yes, the internet has enabled independent journalism to a large extent, niche journalism. Substack is another one of those channels that has enabled specific journalists to continue their work and be fan-funded and continue to produce good journalism that way. YouTube, like you said, I do agree with you. Social media on the whole, I think, is a failed experiment. It hasn't brought people together. It's divided us even more than ever. And I don't think it's necessarily a net benefit for society. I'm a fan of what the UK is doing and Australia is doing in banning social media for under-16s because it has such a huge, significant impact on the mental health of boys and girls growing up. And is directly correlated with increases in self-harm, increases in depression among teenagers and young adolescents. And we do need to act on that and need to take that seriously because the tech companies are not going to take any responsibility for that at all. So we have to have the government step in here. And I think that we'll see a sea change in that in the next 2 to 5 years, where more governments, especially in Europe, will embrace those sorts of bans and more strict regulation because they see the negative effects downstream from what social media has done to us. As a society. In Discover, it's an interesting one. Discover is an interesting feed. It's built initially on the same algorithms that publish Google Search and Google News, but it casts a broader net. It is much more tapped into what Google knows about you as a person, what your interests are, what recent websites you visited, what kind of content you like to engage with. And therefore, it's a very interesting feed of personalized content specifically for you based on your interests, your favorite websites, your favorite topics. And that has enabled especially very focused niche websites to sort of thrive in the Discover feed. I get a lot of comic book news and Warhammer 40K news in my Discover feed because I'm a total nerd and I love stuff like that. So I absorb that. I get a lot of rugby news as well. Unfortunately, it also gives me a lot of social media bullshit in the form of X posts, and I'm not on X anymore. I deleted my Twitter account when Elon Musk took over that fucking sinking ship. And I'll be entirely honest, I judge people who are still active on X. X, I will totally judge you on that. Because if you— sorry to go off on a tangent here— if you think you are an echo, I need— Yeah, good, good. If you're active on X and you think, yeah, you know, because I'm gonna lose some connections or I'm not gonna be tapping into the state of the industry as much as if I delete it. Yeah. So what if your principles don't have a cost? You don't have principles, you just have opinions. And I consider that to be a bad value exchange. If you care about something, then when the point comes where you need to take a stand and you don't, or you take an opposite stand because it is inconvenient to you, you don't have a principle. You just have an opinion that you can just ignore at your whim. So anyway, that's another side note. But yeah, Discover, powerful feed. I'm not a huge fan of Google integrating more social media and YouTube in that. I know why they do it, because it is sort of a— a social feed without the social connection aspect. It's a very personalized recommendation feed. But yeah, it is very powerful, especially for niche publishers as well as for big publishers. Local news publishers especially seem to be very strong in Discover because Google knows where you are, what location you're based in, and the location that you're interested in, and will show you more news around that from local specialized publishers. It's a very powerful mechanism for them because local publishers generally have a harder time in the news ecosystem on Search because it's much more geared towards the big nationwide news publishers, whereas Discover, you know, allows local news to thrive as well.

Yeah. And that's a good point. Like you've got local, you've got national, you've got these specific niches. So it will vary, but in an overall, like, uh, looking at it holistically, like bearing in mind that all the trends and patterns that are happening, what should like an editorial sort of strategy look like these days? Like, should you be Obviously, I guess knowing your audience is going to be super key because, you know, for me, I get my news like from YouTube or I get my news from like WhatsApp, like even the feed, like the channels there for WhatsApp. I rely heavily on those, you know, Sky News or BBC or whatever. So it's going to vary between like loads of different, and there's so many news avenues now, like we say, discover. So yeah, how do you do that in this day and age?

You already said it, know and understand your audience. It starts with that. Publishers are used to being broadcasters, not listeners. I have a good friend, Andy Jarvis, who runs a marketing strategy consultancy, and his mantra is talk to your customers. And I've adopted that as well in my industry, and it's talk to your readers. I don't think your readers should determine your entire editorial strategy, but it is probably the single most important data point for a publisher. What does your reader want from you? What can you deliver to them that will make them come back, that make them into registered users, subscribed users, that will get them to subscribe to your newsletters, follow you on social media channels, follow your WhatsApp channels, things like that. So start with that. Talk to your readers, invite some into the office, you know, Show them around the newsroom and then ask them a few questions. Do regular surveys, do events where you invite people into a room and, you know, talk to them about what they want from you as a publisher. And yeah, bigger publishers will have an easier time doing that because they have the funds for it, but a smaller publisher, you can still send surveys out to people and harvest email addresses and things like that and get feedback from your readers without spending a lot of money on that. Understanding what your value is to your readers is sort of the starting point. And then you need to make sure that you deliver that in spades, but also see opportunities where you can maybe expand your scope for those readers if they have similar interests and similar outlooks. I also think there are certain channels in Google which are relatively safe from traffic cannibalization, still diminished to an extent, but potentially huge. And news, as in reporting actual news, is a big one. Top stories carousels are very prominent. In Google Search and generally not subject to AI summarization with AI overviews. Google is experimenting in AI mode with very large news carousels as well, so that people will be encouraged to click through to those news stories rather than just read the AI summary. So there's a definite opportunity there. And then once people land on your website, and I mentioned this before, you need to make sure you have a very good user experience that is not just geared towards making that initial article pleasant to read, but also geared towards making people spend more time on the website and consume multiple articles. And that's why you can do things like explainers and background stories that in and of themselves might not get you a lot of Google traffic because Google does tend to summarize those in AI overviews, queries relating to those backgrounders and explaining stories. But if they're on your website as part of a wider news story, they're a great opportunity to keep people on your website, to have them go from the initial news story to the explainer story, And therefore consume multiple pieces of content on your website. And there's other things you can do. You know, there's some publishers who've been very successful with what they call habit-forming content, like puzzles, where people come back every single day because there's the new Wordle is out or the new Connections game is out and just come back for that. And people are even willing to pay for that. And you can do similar things like that. User-generated content is great. A well-moderated comment section is very powerful. It's a great asset because it makes people stay longer on an article. Even if they don't comment themselves, they would tend to read through the comments and maybe upvote a few comments. And it's also a way to get people to register. If they want to leave a comment or engage with a comment, you have to have an account. Great. That's another way to harvest email addresses and build a loyal customer base off the back of that. So there is quite a lot of scope for publishers to do different things. And then you have, of course, different content formats. If you have one particularly powerful piece of investigative journalism, don't just publish it as an article. Get 2 journalists in a room with some microphones and record a podcast and even video that podcast, chop that one up into YouTube Shorts, for example, as well with the little snippets. So you have one piece of journalism, you got 3, 4, 5 different formats for that that can go up on 6, 7 different social media platforms and channels and that sort of thing. And that doesn't have to be expensive. You know, it's not costly to do stuff like that, but you do need to have a certain bravery to step out of your comfort zone as a publisher and try new things. And one of the buzzwords at the moment in the journalism industry is creator journalism, where it's not just about the brand, say The Telegraph, but also about journalists who write for the brand and get them in front of a camera and turn them into YouTube personalities, if you will, and put them in front of a camera, put them in podcasts, things like that. And publishers see that as a little bit of a risk, as in, what if those people leave and we lose all that personality following? Find a replacement. Stuff happens. You know, journalists leave publishers all the time anyway, whether they're just a writer or they're a podcast host, doesn't really matter. Just find someone else to replace that. Or maybe even, you know, have multiple personalities associated with a specific topic, a specific show, so that one leaves, another one can step in and fill the gap. So there is definitely a lot of scope for editorial strategies, not necessarily to deliver maximum traffic, but to build loyal audiences, to build return visitors, to build people who happily engage with your brand. Because a publisher doesn't need 10 million visits a month to be successful. If they have several hundred thousand paid subscribers in the course of a year, they'll be a very successful publisher. You know, you don't need massive market share to be a successful publisher here in the UK. And if you're a small niche publisher with relatively low overheads, A few thousand subscribers is enough for you to be profitable and successful. That's what the whole Substack model is based on, for example. You know, a few thousand fans, a few thousand followers, and you can make a very healthy living off of that.

Yeah, we've seen that, haven't we, in all websites? Like, people have lost chunks of traffic but actually worked out that most of that traffic was just a waste of time anyway. They were just going there, bouncing around, not really engaging with your site and then leaving. So what does that benefit you really? Um, so yeah, 100%. And those kind of like you're saying that building up those sort of people that report for you or like the journalists that becoming a bit more of a known entity, like that is a bit like, I guess, with like the food critics and now they're in TV programs and stuff all the time and that kind of thing. And then also I think they've been driven to it a bit like The Telegraph and that because you've had like popular political podcasts that, like Trigonometry, that are kind of coming into play, and they're kind of taking some of that traffic away, that some sort of attention. So like the Independent and the Telegraph kind of have to do those sort of things as well. But in terms of, um, if they're behind like a paywall, it's all about the loyalty factor. You're really gonna have to push why it's worth paying money to get. Do you feel like they do a good enough job of doing that at the moment? Like, uh, it feels like when I land on them, they're kind of like, if you're already like a reader, yeah, like, you know, The Independent, you know, Wall Street Journal, you don't need much of a sell. But some people who stumble upon it, it may be interesting, the article. I don't know if they do it the best they could, but that's just my opinion.

Yeah, no, I agree with you for that, especially if you're a niche publisher or a publisher that struggles to find its identity. You probably want to experiment with metered paywalls or dynamic paywalls rather than just go behind a hard paywall where users get a certain amount of free articles before they get, you know, asked to register or asked to subscribe. I'm also a fan of freemium models where publisher has like 30, 40% of the output always free and the rest is behind the paywall because it again allows people to sample that. Plus you get a nice mix of free audiences that you can monetize with advertising and a paid audience that you can monetize with subscriptions. So, you know, hard, proper hard paywalls generally work best for publishers that already have a good identity, that know who they are, what they're good at, and what value they can deliver. So they don't really need to communicate that to their audience. If you're struggling with that as a publisher, you probably want to do some things like, like I said, metered paywalls, dynamic paywalls, things like that. I know one particular publisher who has a fairly hard paywall, but when a user comes from a Google search click, they always get that article initially for free. Google had that program way back when called First Click Free, where, you know, publishers would engage with Google so that the first initial visit coming from Google would not get the paywall. And after that, multiple article consumptions would trigger the paywall. And some publishers stuck with that model even when Google retired that program because they saw it working quite well. Okay, you get the first click free, you want the follow-up article, right? Then we're going to ask you to subscribe. And, you know, those sorts of models work well. Dynamic paywalls especially are very powerful because they're built on quite good conversion rate optimization techniques where the paywall only tends to kick in when the software is reasonably confident to get a decent conversion rate. So, you know, if you visit the website 3 times in the course of a month or 4 times in the course of a month, they're like, yeah, we're gonna actually show you the paywall now because you obviously come back, you like what we have to offer, so here. Whereas if you just visit it once every month, over the course of 6 months, they're like, yeah, you're probably not going to convert, not sure if you're going to show you the paywall. So that sort of software works really well as well to sort of drive the conversion rates up. And you can also do a conversion funnel where initially you just ask for email details and registration details, and then you ask for donations, what The Guardian does, for example, you know, so that you don't necessarily throw your content behind the paywall, but there's other ways you can get your readers to support you as a publication Without just throwing up a hard paywall.

Yeah, that's good points. And in terms of something I've seen cropping up, mainly because they sponsor a bunch of podcasts, and we talked about the trust factor earlier, like it's quite low at the moment in media, and we know that certain media publications and that they have their own sort of take on the world and their own biases, and that is kind of hard to ignore sometimes, but There are like these new publisher sites that kind of— well, aggregator sites, I guess they are— where they deem if, if on certain stories, if it's more left-leaning being covered or right-leaning or centered or that kind of thing. Those sites are kind of cropping up. I think one's called like Ground News, or like there's been a few of them. Do you see that kind of thing like actually taking off or working? I don't know how many people use them on a regular basis, to be honest.

Yeah, there's a market for them. I do think those websites will struggle to an extent to get traction in Google's ecosystem because Google doesn't want to intermediate the news even more than they already do. They are the intermediary, and if you— they would— they don't want to send traffic to another intermediary. They just want to send traffic directly to the source of a story. They're getting quite good at it, not perfect at it, but they're getting quite good at it. And especially in the news ecosystem, they have things like highly cited or original reporting where they identify who's the first or the most cited source for a specific story and give that more prominent visibility in the news ecosystem. There is of course still a market for aggregators. Apple News is an aggregator, you know, where they just collect stories. Google Discover in a way is a news aggregator as well, very much highly personalized. And people who want their news to have a certain slant or a certain focus will want to engage with those sorts of aggregators. But then, you know, the filter bubble thing is real. You go on certain subreddits, you always read stories with a certain slant. No other story with a counter perspective will ever get published there. If it gets published, it gets killed by the mods straight away. And I don't think that's necessarily healthy for people's news consumption. You know, you need opposing views sometimes. You need news you don't agree with, but Because it's factually true, you have to read it, you have to engage with it. And, you know, we need to, as readers, be embracing the fact that sometimes the news makes us uncomfortable and challenges our worldviews. If your worldview is never challenged, I can guarantee you it's wrong. You know, if you're 100% sure about everything that happens in the world, I can guarantee you, if you think everything is always aligned with your— the reality is always aligned with your point of view, then your point of view is just wrong. Guaranteed, you'll have massive flaws in it because we're humans. We're failed beings in many ways. We're imperfect creatures. And what we know and what is true are different things. And you need to embrace that part of being human, that what you think is true and what's actually true are in many cases not perfectly aligned. And I am a strong believer in things that help us get closer to what is actually true. Things like the scientific method, things like debate, rational debate about certain issues, and then trying to build your cases again on facts, not on emotions, because emotions generally are what leads us down the wrong path rather than the right path. And that's hard because we're still humans and we still have these things built in, but just by embracing those processes and understanding our own flaws as human beings in all aspects of life, not just in the news we consume, I think helps make us better people. And understand that we, our own opinions and own views, no matter how dearly we treasure them, can be wrong. Just accepting the possibility that you might be wrong already makes you, I think, a better human being.

Yeah.

Amen. I mean, I think that that's generally the right way of thinking, but especially in SEO, like I think one of the main traits to have is just being open-minded. You know, like you say, no one knows fully, especially in SEO, what the hell's going on. I mean, some—

Not even Google, Sean. Not even Google knows how Google works anymore because of the black box nature of their neural networks that they're using across so many parts of their system. A Google engineer can't tell you why a certain webpage ranks the way it does. They literally can't. And for us as SEOs to say, we know why. No, no, we don't. We really don't. We have best guesses. We have educated guesses. Your theory might be as good as my theory. We just don't know. So embracing that part of our industry, our uncertainty, it's probably why I like the SEO industry so much. There's very few people in SEO who have rock-solid certainty and people who do proclaim to be absolutely certain about certain things generally don't get a lot of traction in the industry because we all know, yeah, probably not. You know, we see through that quite often. So yeah, generally most people that I meet working in the SEO industry are nice people because they have that. Part of their character that allows them to embrace the uncertain nature of what we do. And like I said before, I think that makes us better people.

Yeah, 100%. And that is one of the reasons I'm a bit concerned with this whole, um, well, social media kicked it all off, as we said, and then AI has kind of accelerated this kind of echo chamber society that we have. You know, like you say, if everyone's getting things personalized to their needs and requirements and the AI models are kind of like telling everyone they're right and feeding them the stuff that they want to see. That, yeah, that concerns me to be fair in the wider landscape of things. But yeah, in terms of like, you kind of answered, I guess we'll know the answer, but I'll ask anyway just in case there's anything else. But with traffic dropping, how would like people working in search, working on these news publishers, how would they report on success? What does success look like?

Now, yeah, I think newsrooms need to abandon traffic as the North Star KPI. It still has a role to play. You still need traffic, obviously, but it can't be the focus point of your success metrics. You need to derive your key metrics from factors like loyalty, engagement, brand sentiment as well, how people feel about your brand, and try to see if you can find objective metrics that have good indicators for what those areas are doing for your business and find ways to encourage those in a positive way. And again, that's what I said before, that's a cultural shift in newsrooms as well. Newsrooms that have optimized for traffic suddenly need to optimize for engagement, like, oh right, that's a bit different. And you also need to be a bit careful that you don't go overboard, which has happened with traffic-chasing websites so much. You know, probably the worst clickbait possible because it used to send traffic, and that's taking it too far. And you can do the same with engagement. You know, if you optimize too much for engagement with dark UX patterns that trick people rather than deliver a good experience. That's a great way to optimize for engagement, but it's not what you should be doing. And I'm pretty sure that's going to backfire in the long term as well, just as traffic chasing backfired. So always, I think, treat your audience with respect, treat your readers with respect that they deserve, and deliver good value for them. I think I tell this story regularly. I work with several different news websites that are all focused on Formula 1 news. And they are, with very few exceptions, quite interchangeable. Where I sometimes read a Formula 1 news story on these websites and I have to look at the actual brand name on the logo to remind myself which website I'm on, because they all look so similar. They all have the black and red and white design schemes, they all report the same stories, they have similar formats, similar layouts. I'm like, okay, which site I'm on again? Oh yeah, it's that site. And that's bad. That's, you know, that's a situation where you have 4 of those websites and 3 of them were to disappear tomorrow, the only people who would actively notice are the people working for those 3 websites. The audience probably wouldn't notice because, oh, it's just another one, another Formula 1 news website. They're almost boilerplate at this point. And that's the worst thing you can be as a publishing website, is to be mediocre, to be middle of the road, to be forgettable, to be just interchangeable. You need to be unique. You need to have something different, something valuable, something worthwhile, something that makes you stand out, something that makes you memorable. And just reporting the news that other websites are also reporting, rehashing the same stories, using freelance writers and trying to publish as much stories as you can, that's not a sustainable tactic anymore. That worked fine 10 years ago. Now, nah, it's just, it's not gonna deliver the rewards that you're looking for. So you need to have something unique, something worthwhile. And that also means you need to invest in those things. You know, if you're a Formula One news website and you don't have actual reporters at the Formula One races, you're not a Formula One news website. You're a Formula One regurgitation website. Yeah, it's bloody expensive to send reporters to Formula One races, but guess what? It gets you better journalism. It gets you access to drivers. Gets you access to team principals, to people behind the scene. Gets you exclusive interviews. You can't do that sitting in an internet-connected cafe or in an. attic in your own home. No, you need to be at the actual bloody races and at the press events and all of those things. And yeah, that's costly, but it ends up with a better product that your readers are hopefully willing to engage with on a higher level. So yeah, treat your readers with respect, build something that's unique and valuable, be memorable, not forgettable. And like I said before, loyalty and engagement are definitely your key focus areas. Yeah.

And that's what, like you said earlier, they've been trying to stamp down on is that you know, like people used to do, oh, top 10 hiking boots, but they never even wore any of them, or like only wore one of them. And then they said, you know, that's what we don't want. We want to see someone actually wearing all the boots and having a proper hike and seeing how they got on, you know. And like you say, with Formula 1 or anything like that, it's, um, you know, because anyone could— if you get a Sky subscription, you could go and watch the Formula 1 and see it all. So what are you offering on top of what they're offering, you know, what something unique. And I talked to Miriam, Jesse are on here, and we're just saying how like, you know, used to when first had the internet, it used to be like such an escape and used to go on and used to go on the internet and you wanted to check out certain websites because it was a fun experience and it was something new and exciting. And now it's just a bit of like everything's the same and like you say boilerplates and it's like Now hopefully, in a way— again, there's a lot of crap that come with it, but hopefully in a way people will get creative and start creating spaces that people actually enjoy using and bringing something new to the party, you know. Um, we have to see, but yeah, it's definitely going to make people more creative. And before you go, because I want to make sure you leave on time, but What's gonna happen, you think, in the next 6 to 8 months in the news world? Like, do you see, um, some news publishers struggle in terms of actually just staying afloat because they're struggling? Or do you see Google relaxing some things, adding new features? The LLMs, kind of like you said, the deals are pretty rubbish, but maybe they realize they need to pay more or do more there. Where do you see things going?

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Yeah, I don't think 6 to 8 months is a long enough timeframe for meaningful change because we have been talking about AI for more than 3 years and everybody said, oh, within a year everything's going to be different. And it turns out actually, no, it's more or less the same as it was, just more bullshit being written about AI.

Right.

2 years. Yeah, I don't think the rate of change is as dramatic as people sometimes think it is. Some parts, yes. Other parts, no. The fundamental business of news is not going to drastically change in the next 2 years. It's just publishers are going to be more focused. They're going to be following a trend which other publishers have already embraced in the form of probably fewer articles but better articles. That seems to be a much more common theme among publishers. I'm a big fan of that. Don't write about everything, write about what you're good at and make sure that they're good pieces. And there's a lot of case studies already doing the rounds of publishers who have been doing that with great success is in seeing traffic increases by publishing fewer articles, which goes against everything we've been led to believe would actually work. But hey, if you deliver better content, guess what? More people will want to read that. Surprise. There'll be some interesting things in the world of AI and LLMs. I'm not entirely sure what form that'll take. I've been predicting, as many people have, that the AI bubble is going to burst for the last 2 years. It still hasn't burst. At this point, I'm almost inclined to believe it's never going to burst because the sunk cost fallacy is so deep. Vestas has been so deep, they're never going to be willing to admit that they fucked up and pumped all that money in a technology that just does not deliver the return ever. There will need to be a reckoning of some sort of AI, but I think it might be not as dramatic as some people are maybe hoping for. I do see in the The specific realm of news and publishing, you know, there's a bit of a trend at the moment to consider Google traffic as permanently lost. Google Zero is a big thing in publishing, and I've been rallying against that a little bit because the data just doesn't back it up. Yes, it's more difficult to get Google traffic because the growth is flattened or even negative growth, as in you're losing traffic, but it's not going, it's not disappearing. You could literally take the traffic that Google sends today to publishers and cut that in half, and it still would be the single most important source of traffic to your website. You could cut it by 70, 80, 90%, and you'd probably be still optimizing for it because it's one of your significant sources of traffic to your website. So abandoning Google entirely will make your competitors very happy, and it's going to do a lot of damage to your own business in the long run. You still need to optimize for Google. And yeah, you can take AI search seriously to an extent, but There is a limited value exchange there for publishers in that being cited as a source in an AI summary, be that in Google or in ChatGPT or Perplexity, doesn't necessarily carry the same benefit for a news website as it does for like an e-commerce website or a brand website that sells products or services, because the conversion point for you is the content itself, not a product associated with content. And to be cited as a source means you lost that conversion moment. They're not going to go to your website, they're not going to click through, they're just going to read the content there. So you have to be very careful as a publisher to optimize for AI search. And I specifically call it AI search, I don't call it GEO because I think that's an invented hype phrase meant to repackage SEO and sell it at a higher cost. It's SEO, it's still search, it's AI search. And You know, we—it's just another vertical for us to optimize for. Like news search is a separate vertical, image search, video search—all separate verticals. AI is just another vertical we add to our already impressive arsenal of tools as SEOs. We're going to win that battle in the long run. I have no doubt about that. In the short term, we're going to have to deal with all the grifters who before they embrace geo embrace crypto and NFTs and blockchain and all the same bullshit. So we're going to come full circle again with the same. grifters in another year or two. Where was I? Oh yeah, 2 to 5 years.

I think we'll be fine.

I think some publishers might disappear, others will be bought up, others will be merged, but that's always been a constant thread in the publishing industry. The narrowing of traffic probably hastens that process a little bit. I do think we'll end up in the space in maybe 5 years where we'll have fewer news websites, but there'll be better news websites. And I think that's something we should welcome rather than be afraid of.

Yeah, and I like what you said about the packaging as well. I think that could be something quite interesting. But yes, it's like the health industry that I work in, like, you know, a lot of our service is the content. So when that's being cited and stuff, and yeah, that's the same thing. Yeah, well, it's been fantastic, Barry, really great insights. I've learned a lot. And yeah, it's been really interesting. So yeah, thank you. I'll let you go. But, um, yeah, thank you.

Thank you for having me.