Gone are the days when publishers could rely on a steady stream of traffic from Facebook and Twitter. Digiday surveyed nine digital media executives, and most have shifted their focus to Instagram and TikTok to expand their audience. However, the question remains whether they can do it.

As reported last year, these platforms more so strengthen publishers' brands than drive visitors to websites. Despite this, publishers continue to diversify their audience development efforts, making them less vulnerable to changes in social platform algorithms.

New Horizons for Attracting Audiences

Publishers need to rebuild their strategies for attracting traffic from social networks, especially in light of the possible ban of TikTok in the US.

"If TikTok is banned in the US tomorrow, we believe users will simply switch to another platform for short videos, which we can quickly adapt to," says Chris Anthony, commercial director at Gallery Media.

Despite such statements, most publishers are not ready for a quick ecosystem switch, especially considering the expected decline in traffic from search engines.

Developing Accounts on Other Social Networks

The most obvious step is to shift focus to other social platforms besides Facebook and X. When Meta announced the closure of Facebook News, a specialized tab for news content, in February, publishers were not too surprised or concerned. Most had time to prepare.

Annmari Duling, vice president of audience growth and experiences at Gannett, said her team now has two video producers creating content on TikTok ahead of this year's presidential elections in the US. In addition to short videos, her team creates discussion topics and polls and publishes them on Instagram Threads and Reddit.

Duling noted that links in Instagram stories helped increase traffic to Gannett's websites, but declined to say by how much.

Bustle Digital Group also focused their efforts on Instagram and TikTok. Wes Bonner, senior vice president of marketing and audience development and head of social networks at BDG, said at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, Colorado, that he hopes to convert even a "small part" of BDG's 25 million TikTok followers into website traffic by testing a new feature on the platform that allows adding URLs to organic videos.

Search as a More Stable Source of Traffic

Deb Brett, chief commercial officer for digital at Condé Nast, acknowledged that platforms like TikTok are walled gardens, which cannot be considered as traffic sources to publisher websites. Instead, TikTok and Instagram are used for storytelling and community building.

To increase traffic, Condé Nast relies on Google search. "Search is our main priority, as it is much more stable," said Sarah Marshall, vice president of audience at Condé Nast. She did not share how much traffic comes from search but said that the share has increased compared to last year.

Traffic from Google Discover "has grown significantly for us compared to last year," added Marshall, declining to say by how much. She attributed this growth to turning off Google AMP on Condé Nast's sites and working on optimizing their own sites, which helped their content appear in Google Discover.

However, Google Discover is not a stable source of traffic for publishers. At the Digiday Publishing Summit last month, several publishers reported significant spikes in referral traffic from Google Discovery but had difficulty understanding these spikes.

In response to questions about potential threats to publisher traffic in connection with the launch of Google's new search engine based on generative AI (Google SGE), Sarah Marshall, vice president of audience strategy at Condé Nast, showed no particular concern. "Realistically, if Google wants, they can stop sending [all this traffic to us]," said Marshall. "But they can't do what [a publication like] Wired can do—write trusted reviews and do journalism. We haven't seen anything bad from Google SGE. Our work and stories will continue to attract people to our sites for a long time."

Will It Work?

The exchange between social networks and publishers was once simpler, said one of the surveyed publishers. Someone saw a link, clicked on your site, and either saw an ad, became a subscriber, or purchased a subscription. But now, as platforms like Instagram and TikTok give less traffic and create more "closed" news feeds, publishers need to better understand the real value of creating content like Reels. "Sure, we get engagement and views. That's great. But what does this mean for the business of a publisher? I don't think anyone has convincingly assessed this," added one of the publishers.

Indeed. At the moment, there is no clear understanding of which specific actions lead to certain results or revenue. And publishers are currently operating blindly.