Where does the traffic come from?
And how should you spend your time?
Good morning.
I hope everyone had a good weekend.
On my end, things are busy and I’ve got less time to post. I’ll be traveling the next two weeks so there may be some radio silence as well. I’ll see if I can get two posts out this week though.
Alright, enough of that. I’ve got a long one for you today so we’ll get right to it.
For the first time in several weeks, Dylan Byers had Julia Alexander on the Grill Room podcast and they talked about something other than the state of network and cable news.
Now, they still touched on it—let’s be clear—but they also talked about some more interesting and philosophical items.
To me, one of the most interesting things they discussed came at about the 25th minute of last Tuesday’s episode. It’s when Byers starts talking about his interview with Graydon Carter from the week before and then Alexander starts talking about the “self-marketing of content.”
They touch on this because they point out, rightfully, that it's very hard to be discovered today if you are writing articles. Instagram and TikTok, where people spend a ton of their time, don’t want you to leave their platforms. X isn’t the home for news that it used to be. And Google is in a transitional phase as it decides what it is with the rise of AI chat agents and information discovery through non-Google surfaces like Claude or ChatGPT.
Sometimes I feel like I’m too negative here but when you think about the challenges facing any place with a website and article pages today, it's hard not to feel daunted. Every channel that you once had for people to discover content on your site has changed and yet the paradigms for measuring audiences and success are still relatively the same.
Anyway, Alexander sets the table nicely when she says “before I came back to Puck, last year I started a Substack because that’s what you do. If you don’t have a journalism job, you start a Substack.”
That right there is one of the crucial points of today’s media ecosystem: the actual jobs at companies are decreasing but the ability for individuals to create properties to build subscription businesses on and market are rising fast.
What Alexander points out is that she doesn’t deliver scoops like Byers, she writes “long media-theory things” that don’t lend themselves to being shared on Twitter/X. Instead she posts jokes on LinkedIn and says that, because of the kind of audience on that surface, it helped convert people to subscribing to her Substack. And on Twitter/X, instead, she posts a chart.
Alexander distills this in the following way: “I have to understand the etiquette of the platform, the audience of the platform, and I have to basically understand what people are willing to convert on and therefore where to spend my energy.”
As she explains, it sounds simple enough but it requires a lot of trial and error because the platforms are constantly changing—and nothing is reliable. She and Byers then go through all of the platforms journalists or creators are expected to understand and have fluency in and how much work that is.
Alexander then uses an example of a friend of hers who runs an independent newsletter who claims that none of the platforms matter; what matters is email forwarding. That’s how he gets all of his new subscriptions. Which, Alexander explains, is the trend right now: direct audiences and smaller communities—WhatsApp groups, Instagram Close Friends, Substack Group Chats. Everyone wants to go more direct.
But, as she says, her friend acknowledges that newsletters and the inbox are stable for now and that most likely won’t be the case forever. And that’s another example of how hard everything is now. Every creator, every individual, every brand has to hustle across platforms but almost nothing is reliable.
Which brings us back to why I feel bad about sometimes painting a negative picture here. If there were good answers, I’d try and share them. But my experience, like I’m sure many others, is too close to what Alexander later describes to Byers:
“Like there was a time period, and I’m sure you remember this Dylan, when you would have Chartbeat up and you would see the traffic come in and it was pretty even. Like it was Twitter, Facebook, Google. Like it was a pretty even thing. Like the efforts of your labor were there and you could see the value of it. Now, it’s like, you talk to anyone who runs a website and ask where do you get your traffic from? And it's like, maybe Google, Twitter nothing, Bluesky maybe something, nothings coming from Instagram anymore and so we’re kind of paying for partnerships to bring traffic in and it's resulting in 40% less pageviews and our ads are down. It’s just this moment where if there was some form of reward still in participating in the ecosystem that once said if you participate we will reward you, if that reward is gone why should you invest the time? I realize that everyone has to and its marketing and you’re trying to reach people and there’s still some kind of reward but I do think that eventually Google is the last part of the equation and as that kind of falls in terms of traffic it becomes a big question of where do we even go to post.”
That’s not a pretty picture. Alexander acknowledges it just as much as I do. But that’s the truth.
And the more that the reality of things is truly accepted and addressed by people at all levels of the media, the better chance there might be to understand how all of this continues to stay alive.
One winning the digital realm quote
“BDG has transformed from a digital media publisher into a company that uses events as a centerpiece for influencer marketing, gifting campaigns, branded content, and social media impressions. ‘We’ve had to fundamentally change what we’re doing,’ Goldberg said. ‘Instead of being a website that publishes stories, we’re now basically an events company…The best way for us to win in the digital realm is for us to win in the physical realm,’ Goldberg said. ‘If you try to win only in digital without winning in real life, you won’t win digital.’”
This one is from an AdWeek story by Mark Sternberg looking at Bustle Digital Group’s reshaping into an events-focused business. The pivot to events feels slightly overstated by the Semafor guys and in this piece. And Bryan Goldberg is a complicated figure, but I always appreciate reading or hearing a business leader talk about assessing what their company actually is and how it has to change to survive—even if they are kind of doing it for some good PR. Kind of ties back to what I was talking about two weeks ago.
More links from the digital realm
The New York Times reported on how much people are paying for newsletter subscriptions.
CNN has hired Choire Sicha as senior vice president of features editorial. This is a good, splashy, and cred-seeking hire for their “digital subscription product.” The days when I was receiving kind, somewhat off-the-wall rejection emails from Choire to my naive pitches for The Awl certainly seem very far away.
Sara Fischer had a couple news items from last week
Conservative media remains dominant and Fischer looked at how Fox News is diversifying their revenue streams.
Fischer and Kerry Flynn looked at how digital creator jobs have grown since the pandemic.
And Fischer reported on The Guardian’s further expansion into U.S. hiring after a record revenue year.
Casey Newton analyzed a statement from Google’s antitrust trial that said “Google searches in Safari” dropped for the first time ever in April 2025 and what that means for the state of search.
The Media Copilot looked at what the Texas Tribune has learned from adding an AI chatbot to their site. These are still the wrong use cases: Why would anyone use a chatot to search a general news site when they can just use Claude or ChatGPT? That’s what those companies do. Your chatbot has to be expertise based. You’re competing with focused GPTs trained on certain subjects or tighter corpuses of data—not ChatGPT or Claude itself.
The People vs. Algorithms guys talked about the state of search and AI and what media properties are doing to prepare for “Google zero.” I thought this was an especially thoughtful episode.