Britain’s biggest news publishers have been forced into taking drastic action after recent changes by Google saw their traffic collapse overnight.
Titles including The Sun and The MailOnline have long relied on their content appearing high up in search results to drive engagement.
But a change to Google’s core algorithm has had dramatic consequences for both.
The result has been that much of their content has, in effect, disappeared from search.
As one exasperated newsroom insider explained: “We just can’t get our stories in front of audiences”.
It has seen traffic collapse by as much as a third, with visitors to The US Sun plunging from a high of 96million to 34million.
The warning signs began in August. There was no shortage of good stories around.
There was the tragic death of Matthew Perry – and the shock split of Tommy Fury and Molly Mae.
Both big showbiz tales that would have been expected to drive significant traffic.
But they didn’t.
The insider added: “We could literally see the traffic from Google falling off a cliff. That was when panic set in.”
The Sun has described the changes to the digital landscape over the past twelve months as “seismic”.
As a result they are making large cuts to their workforce there. The Mail Online has also confirmed it is laying off ten per cent of its US staff.
It’s a cautionary tale.
Newsrooms became hooked on the huge audiences that Google and Facebook drove to their sites.
They set out strategies and ambitious targets based on those huge number of eyeballs that were being sent their way.
But the crucial element that was missing all the way through was any meaningful relationship between publishers and platforms.
Of course the publishers made hay while the sun shone – enjoying record growth and booming audience numbers.
But they have been left utterly blindsided as Google and Facebook have changed their focus from news.
These giants are now firmly concentrating on those brave new landscapes that AI and AR provide.
So again – the nation’s newsrooms are left licking their wounds and working out what to do next following what has been described as the “end of the traffic era”.
They’re forced to regroup and devote their attention to what they should have been doing all along – building audiences themselves and not relying on others.
This is another setback for an industry that has been decimated over the last decade.
Yet our newsrooms are defined by determination and creativity.
They will dust themselves down and build themselves back up – this time with better, more meaningful relationships with their audiences than search could ever hope to deliver.