The end of the article page
Are we going to be here forever?
Good morning,
I hope everyone has had a good week. We’ve officially hit triple digits here in Texas. Let’s see if we get through the summer unscathed.
Saw Sinners (2025) last weekend. No movie could live up to the amount of hype it was getting. I thought it was impressive, but only fine.
Even so, I am very glad that an original script like that from a big director can actually make a lot of money.
OK, let's get to it. Have a good weekend.
Last month, Brian Morrissey published another white paper through The Rebooting. This one was based on surveys done with product leaders at media companies.
There’s a lot of good stuff in the research and there are some salient quotes that I think a lot of people might relate to. Such as this one:
“One of the clearest structural challenges for media product teams—in AI integration and elsewhere—is that no one truly owns the full picture. Product, tech, editorial, data, audience, and revenue often operate in parallel, with competing priorities and overlapping responsibilities. This fragmentation leads to reactive decision-making, slow execution, and diluted accountability.”
But Morrissey has been spinning off more themes from the research in his newsletter and in panel conversations over the past few weeks.
Last week, Morrissey published insights from The Rebooting’s Media Product Forum. Once again, there is a ton of good stuff in there and a lot of it centers on some of the key issues of the moment.
The two things that stood out to me were points that were made about the decline of the article page and the fact that everyone should prepare for “Google Zero”—or the inevitability of traffic from organic search declining.
“The classic article page—once the atomic unit of publishing—is on its last legs. Bridget Williams, chief product and strategy officer at Hearst Newspapers, said that ‘anyone looking at scroll metrics or time on page metrics’ would have to concede the game is up. It’s a ‘declining asset,’ as DotDash Meredith CEO Neil Vogel put it. According to Hearst's metrics, half of readers don't scroll past the first paragraph and a half.”
I’ve been talking about this for a while now, but it's true. What websites do you actually read? Are you going to websites and reading articles? I very rarely do—mainly it's for research for work and to keep up with this newsletter.
Most of my long form reading is done in print. Otherwise I mainly read Reddit threads in the Reddit app, newsletters, scan Substack notes, follow sports scores on The Athletic app, cook using cookbooks or apps, and ask ChatGPT to help me get information on big topics such as, “What does Ian MacDonald say about the differences in how Paul McCartney and John Lennon approach melody and harmony? Doesn't he have an observation about how Lennon writes melody intertwined with harmony whereas McCartney treats them separately?”
Articles and actual websites don’t really fit into the equation. But as Morrissey asks: what’s next? “The answer remains unclear, but AI has unlocked a range of novel functionalities in this space— ranging from audio versions of articles to Choose Your Own Adventure-style chatbot experiences. Publishers are trying to find out what works.”
The atom of user engagement is no longer the article page or site page itself. It has to be a dynamic format: an approximation of a social feed, a chat agent, a multi-screen swiping experience in an app. It has to be able to move you along often at a sentence by sentence increment with some compelling form of multimedia. That’s where we are now.
And when it comes to “Google Zero,” it’s going to happen. I’m not sure this guy, whoever he is, is right. But things are changing. It’ll happen slowly but all the signs are there.
“Dotdash Meredith, and other publishers to varying degrees, are now planning for Google Zero: the day when Google traffic dries up entirely, the same way Facebook traffic has. Some publishers—including Newsweek—still receive the bulk of their traffic from Google, but as Krish concedes, that means the slightest algorithm change risks an extinction-level event for the company. For most publishers the goal now is to build direct relationships with consumers, bulking up direct traffic and email initiatives and getting rid of middlemen wherever possible.”
This, too, is the name of the game right. But not everybody is going to be able to build direct relationships with consumers (see the below quote). There are only so many, uh, direct relationships that one consumer can handle. Or as Dotdash CEO Neil Vogel says, “AI is not your problem. Your problem is, you're not building things that people love and want to connect with. Like, do the math, everybody. That's our math.”
That math makes sense. It’s just hard to build things that people love. And not everyone is going to be able to do it.
One Substack quote
“Your former co-workers are on Substack, making direct-to-camera entreaties for paid subscribers more passionate than an NPR pledge drive. Your ex-roommate just sent another reminder that her founding memberships are going for $250 apiece...It didn’t used to be like this. Before Substack launched, in 2017, personal newsletters were few and far between, and most people didn’t have to question whether the act of dropping to the free tier of a friend’s newsletter was defensible. Early on, Substack had a DIY feel that made supporting someone on it seem like getting a ticket to their open mic night. At the time, one magazine critic whom we’ll call Susan had a rule that she would shell out for the newsletters of people she knew and liked ‘out of a sense of the importance of friends propping up one another.’ But over time the number of those people has proliferated, and more of them have turned to newsletters as their main source of revenue. The pressure to input credit card information mounted. Susan didn’t want to ‘put the moral burden of this onto them,’ but the fact was her Substack habit was becoming a fiscal affliction. ‘The problem with a million people billing their newsletter as cheaper than a cup of coffee is I drink only two cups of coffee a day.’”
This one is from a Town and Country piece looking at the spread of Substack and, with it, the rise of a new set of etiquette to supporting the people you know. I’m here. You’re here. Some of us are former co-workers and ex-roommates. This is all true and this is all happening one way or another. The question is how much longer can this system hold the way it currently is? There are only so many individual marketing funnels one can encounter and withstand.
Some more links for ya
Vanity Fair wrote about how The Bulwark is thriving in Donald Trump’s second term.
On The Rebooting Show, Brian Morrissey had a conversation with Nicholas Carlson about his new media venture Dynamo, which is based on YouTube and why Carlson believes that’s the best place to start a media brand today. Not familiar with Dynamo but I kind of agree with him. A lot of good conversation about the pros and cons of various business models on this one.
A pair of Digiday stories
Sara Guaglione wrote about the optimism BuzzFeed and the New York Times share about their chances in the current ad market.
Julia Tabisz wrote about branded content rebounding as a source of revenue for some publishers this year. I feel like there is one of these stories every year.
And over at Axios, Sara Fischer reported on The Atlantic’s partnership with Apple on exclusive audio benefits for subscribers.