The traffic crisis: Why media websites are losing audiences

Publishers once controlled the digital distribution of their stories. Today, they are competing with the very channels that once helped them grow—social media, search, and independent content creators. This isn’t just a drop in traffic: how news is consumed is changing.

Where is your audience going?

Your audience’s new content sources: Social media platforms, search results, and alternative news channels.

Social media—once only a distribution channel has evolved into something far more powerful: a trusted multiverse (as social media consultant Rachel Karten puts it) where platforms, influencers, and AI-driven algorithms now control the news.

A substantial percent of a publisher’s audience is no longer coming to its website. It’s consuming news where it already exists: inside the media multiverse.

By the time a story is live on a media website, the news has already spiraled across the social media multiverse. On TikTok, a 30-second video recap—lacking key details—garners millions of views. On X, influencers have hijacked the narrative, reshaping public perception in real time. On YouTube, an AI-generated summary, stitched from unverified sources, dominates search results.
Meanwhile, the newsroom’s meticulously reported piece?
It’s struggling to break into the conversation.

What you have here isn’t just a distribution challenge:

It’s a fundamental shift in online news consumption.

The audience is no longer coming to the news.

The news must go to them—and fast.

The evolving search channel

Constantly changing search algorithms and updates have also impacted search traffic to publishers.

Google, for instance, has been increasingly favoring “instant” results in the form of snippets, news carousels, and AI-generated content. These features display brief summaries or highlighted points from articles, reducing the need for users to click through to the original source. This shift means that while users may see the headline or a portion of the story in their search results, they’re often bypassing the full, in-depth report on a media site, further diverting traffic away from traditional outlets.
In 2023, when Digiday surveyed 115 publishers, 80% of the respondents reported a decline in search traffic compared to 2022, which directly impacted their revenue from channels like advertising and affiliate marketing. While the majority of respondents (94%) expected some rebound in lost search traffic (ranging from 1-20%), it remains unclear how this has played out. However, in general, even the more recent research data continues to highlight the ongoing decline in traffic.

Alternative content consumption channels

Alternative content consumption platforms, too, are emerging as influential players in the media landscape, further cutting into the audience share of your “regular” media houses.

One of the most notable shifts is the rise of podcasts and audio-based content, enabling users to consume news while multitasking. With the convenience of listening to in-depth discussions, interviews, and analyses, podcasts have become a significant source of news.

Newsletter platforms like Substack and Revue, where independent journalists and creators are building direct relationships with their audiences are another challenge.

Similarly, interactive platforms such as Reddit and Discord are also hosting dynamic, real-time discussions about news events. Subreddits dedicated to breaking news stories or live events often provide in-the-moment analysis and crowd-sourced fact-checking, which allows users to access a wider range of opinions and perspectives on current events. Discord communities, on the other hand, create spaces where audiences can engage with content creators or journalists directly, ask questions, and participate in live discussions, making news consumption more interactive and community-driven.

The solution: Building direct audience relationships

In this evolving landscape, the key to retaining your audience lies in investing in direct relationships with them. Investing in a direct relationship with your audience means leveraging channels where you can interact with users without intermediaries—creating a true one-to-one connection.

77% of the respondents, comprising 314 media leaders across 56 countries, stated in the Journalism, Media, and Technology Trends and Predictions 2024 report that they plan to invest in direct relationships to navigate this shift in news consumption.

With reliance on third-party platforms proving unsustainable, publishers must own their audience through:

Emails

Whether you’re delivering breaking news as it happens, rounding up the top stories for a day, or simply sending some curated content, emails create a continuous, one-to-one dialogue between you and your audience, helping maintain relevance and engagement over time.

Mobile apps

Your app is an extension of your media website that feels like a personalized, immersive, on-the-go newsroom—bringing your content directly to your audience in the most seamless, branded experience.

Direct messaging

While often seen as an extension of social media, channels like WhatsApp can provide a far more direct and personal communication channel. These messaging apps provide the opportunity to communicate with your audience on a more intimate level, even if it’s only through broadcasting updates directly to your subscribers. WhatsApp, in fact, is showing promise with most publishers banking on it, and early adopters saying ,“that this new channel is already producing more referrals than Facebook and X. WhatsApp has the advantage of being widely used by mainstream audiences, according to the digital director of one leading French publisher.” “There is greater trust in this network and the creation of communities is one of our key priorities.”

Alice Newton-Rex, head of product at WhatsApp., likens WhatsApp Channels “to how people received email newsletters, something that her team focused on when designing the Channels product. She noted that people regularly forwarded links and messages they found on Channels to their own private chat groups, allowing more people to discover news articles or updates from other people or companies running their own Channels.” This is evidently working for publishers.

Instagram, too, seems to interest publishers with its similar broadcasting features

The key lies in investing in multichannel-friendly content

It doesn’t matter what kind of direct lines you try to build with your audience, multichannel-friendly content creation and distribution sits at its core.

And when it comes to creating such digital publishing solutions, WordPress, in its headless setup, is the perfect solution.

In a headless WordPress setup, your CMS isn’t your content’s final destination, it’s more like your central content repository.

Write once, distribute everywhere

A single story in WordPress can automatically push to all your channels—emails, mobile app, and even third-party social media platforms.

Many media houses are already adapting to the new news consumption landscape by leveraging WordPress headless to meet their users where they are. Take the global media network, Al Jazeera, for instance. Al Jazeera has successfully leveraged WordPress in a headless setup to engage its audiences wherever they are:

“Engagement is one of Al Jazeera’s core KPIs. To engage readers, Al Jazeera strives to serve timely, relevant content across multiple channels. Leveraging a decoupled architecture allows creators to spin up the content in WordPress, which becomes the organization’s content hub. Then, via integrations and APIs, Al Jazeera quickly delivers that content wherever their users are.”

WordPress’s features like Custom Post Types (CPTs) help with such content creation and distribution. With CPTs, you can structure your content in a way that fits the requirements of all your target frontend platforms. You can then use APIs to deliver the same.

Live updates, synced everywhere

When breaking news evolves, WordPress updates instantly across all embedded formats—no manual editing required. By utilizing APIs, any update made in WordPress is instantly pushed out to the various channels where the content is live, keeping it consistent and up-to-date. No manual intervention is required, freeing up valuable time for journalists and content managers.

Content repurposing

With customizations, it would also be possible to generate summaries, platform-specific headlines/personalizations, and social posts from a single piece of content—without starting from scratch—all while staying in the familiar WordPress dashboard.

Future outlook: What’s next in traffic trends?

AI-generated news summaries continue to dominate search. It doesn’t look like the lost search traffic share will return—you could also anticipate even lesser traffic.

Social and messaging apps become news hubs. WhatsApp, Telegram, and Instagram broadcast channels could overtake traditional homepages as primary news sources.

Multichannel-friendly content becomes essential. Static websites won’t be enough—you must deliver content seamlessly across a number of channels, including apps, newsletters, and AI-driven search.

Key takeaways

Media consumption has changed—your strategy must too.

Own your audience → Invest in email, messaging apps & direct relationships.
Leverage multi-channel CMS workflows → Go for hybrid or headless, automated content distribution.

Prepare for AI-driven search changes → Adapt content for AI summaries, optimize beyond Google.