SODP Dispatch - 02 April 2026

Meta and Google just lost a landmark social media addiction case. A tech law expert explains the fallout

By Rob Nicholls

Social media platforms Instagram and YouTube have a design defect which means they are addictive, a jury in the United States has ruled.

The Los Angeles jury took nearly nine days to reach its verdict in the landmark case brought by a woman known as KGM against social media platforms. It awarded US$3 million in damages, with Meta (owner of Instagram) being 70% responsible and Google (owner of YouTube) 30%. The jury later awarded a further US$3 million in punitive damages.

Both TikTok and Snap settled on confidential terms before the six-week trial commenced.

This is Meta’s second big loss in the US courts this week, with a New Mexico jury finding the company guilty on March 24 of concealing information about the risks of child sexual exploitation and the harmful effects of its platforms on children’s mental health.

KGM’s case is the first of its kind, but won’t be the last: it is one of more than 20 “bellwether” trials due to go to court soon. These are essentially test cases used to gauge juries’ reactions and set a legal precedent.

As such, the verdict is set to have far reaching ripple effects. It could be big tech’s big tobacco moment, with thousands more similar cases waiting in the wings.

📊 SODP Publisher Revenue Dinner in London

We're hosting an off-the-record dinner for senior publishing revenue and commercial leaders on Wednesday, June 10 at Cornus Restaurant, London (6:30 PM GMT.) The focus is on how to extract a reliable commercial signal as AI reshapes content creation, audience discovery, and inventory measurement simultaneously. You'll get candid peer exchange on revenue strategy, content licensing, inventory quality, and how to future-proof your commercial model at a moment when the rules are changing fast. You will have access to dinner, drinks, strategic insights that won't be shared publicly, and our private post-dinner network. Many thanks to Ezoic for partnering with us to host this. Seats are limited.

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🎯 Google Discover Content Audit

Most publishers are guessing why their content doesn't appear in Google Discover. They're optimizing blindly without understanding the actual pipeline their articles need to pass through. This free audit tool from State of Digital Publishing tackles that gap by mapping your content against the 6-stage Google Discover pipeline: ingestion and entity extraction, OG tag configuration, content classification (evergreen vs breaking), quality signals and E-E-A-T assessment, predicted click-through rate modeling, and user topic matching. It shows you exactly where your content is failing to qualify, whether it's poor image optimization, missing entity signals, clickbait patterns being flagged, or weak topical authority, the same diagnostic framework that determines which articles actually surface in users' feeds. If your team is publishing content hoping it reaches Discover without understanding the pipeline, give it a try. We built this to help publishers see what Google actually evaluates. We'd love your feedback.

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By Vahe Arabian

🎯 Think Like a Creator: How Publishers Can Reclaim the Ad Budgets

Advertising budgets are not gone; they’ve simply shifted to creators who act like publishers.

For years, businesses relied on big ad networks and media agencies to distribute their budgets. But spending patterns are changing. Increasingly, we see brands allocating funds directly to individuals who can create content that resonates, drives attention, and fosters trust with their audiences.

This doesn’t mean advertising is shrinking; it’s just moving closer to the people who can capture attention with relevance and authenticity. The challenge for publishers and businesses is clear: how do you act like a content creator to access these dollars?

Marketers are under pressure to prove ROI. Instead of broad placements, they’re betting on creators who deliver measurable engagement in niche communities. Research shows that influencer marketing spending continues to rise, with global estimates in the tens of billions annually (Statista, 2025).

That money isn’t disappearing; it’s just flowing through different pipes.

What content creators are doing right

Creators earn this share of the budget because they:

• Publish consistently: They show up regularly with content that’s fresh, timely, and aligned with audience interests.

• Focus on niche authority: They don’t try to be everything to everyone; they build depth in one area.

• Foster community: Engagement is two-way, not broadcast-only.

• Show personality and trust: Their audience knows who is behind the content, which builds credibility.

How can publishers adapt

If you want to attract these budgets, act more like a creator:

1. Prioritise storytelling and expertise: Showcase the human side of your brand alongside expertise in your subject matter.

2. Invest in consistent output: Treat your publishing cadence with the same discipline as a professional content creator.

3. Build identifiable voices: Authors, editors, and contributors should be visible, not hidden behind a logo.

4. Measure and prove value: Track engagement, conversions, and attention metrics, not just impressions.

Advertising money hasn’t disappeared. It has moved closer to creators who can demonstrate relevance, authenticity, and impact. For businesses and publishers, the opportunity is to stop thinking like an ad slot and start thinking like a trusted creator who can tell stories, build audiences, and drive results

How publishers are capturing the value of quality engagement for advertisers | INMA

Clicks, impressions, and pageviews were once the currency of digital media. But those metrics are no longer enough. “Media is increasingly being valued for its business impact, rather than the impressions delivered,” Gabriel Dorosz, INMA’s Advertising Initiative lead, said during the recent Advertising Measurement and Effectiveness Master Class. The challenge for publishers is clear: How do they capture the value of quality engagement — and prove it to advertisers? During the master class, media leaders from Ringier Axel Springer, News UK, and The Guardian, and Newsworks shared how they are making the case for publisher effectiveness in the advertising landscape.

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Three newsletters for the price of 1.5: Independent journalists experiment with a bundle | NiemanLab

One of the problems with the recent boom in personal newsletters is that subscription prices add up. Many of them go for somewhere between $5 and $10 per month, with a discount for yearly subscriptions, and supporting your favorite writers gets expensive quickly: One person last year that she paid about $600 annually for 11 newsletter subscriptions; another had annual subscription costs of $3,000. That’s an amount that few people are willing to pay. There are some initiatives that do things differently, like the publication Flaming Hydra, which has 65 contributing members — and looks more and more like a magazine, complete with print editions for top-tier subscribers — and the app Noosphere, which Hanaa’ wrote about last year.

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Attekmi’s Roman Vrublivskyi on Ad Tech Trends, Ad Strategy, and AI | ExchangeWire

In my view, first-party data and AI are sharing the first place among the most impactful trends of the year 2026. Prioritising responsible first-party data collection and usage is becoming a must for businesses to survive. In turn, AI already impacts virtually every ad tech aspect (creative generation, media buying, bid optimisation, etc), and its influence keeps growing. Nowadays, using AI helps brands gain a competitive advantage, but it’s crucial to remember that human oversight is required in any case. Supply path optimisation is also gaining momentum, as both advertisers and media owners aim for greater transparency and efficiency.

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Programmatic Isn’t Defined by Delivery. Workflow & Supply Access Are What Matter | TVNewsCheck

In his TVNewsCheck column earlier this week, Tom Sly raised an important and thoughtful point: The industry should avoid overstatement and strive for clarity as television evolves. On that, we agree. However, his conclusion that linear TV is not yet programmatic because it lacks impression-level delivery rests on a definition that is both too narrow and too rooted in digital precedent. In this situation, Sly is creating a rigid definition of the category, one that is extremely limiting to local linear and creates unnecessary obstacles to its progression. We don’t see the benefit of this approach for the industry.

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Despite predicted downturn, global media consumption grew yet again in 2025 | The Drum

This time last year, research firm PQ Media was predicting something rare in the 13-year history of its global survey of media consumption: an overall year-on-year contraction in the amount of media we as a species would consume in 2025. The reason for that prediction: first, predictions that we may have finally reached “media saturation” point, with no more juice to squeeze from our 24 daily hours. And second, a quirk in the scheduling of globally significant media events like sporting tournaments and elections that sees most of them happen in even-numbered years. 2025, an odd-numbered year, was predicted to be the first year since the Great Recession to buck the trend of yearly increases in the overall time we spend consuming media.

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SEO leads martech replacements, but not for the reason you think | Search Engine Land

SEO tools were the most replaced martech application in 2025 — but not for the reason you might expect. According to the 2025 MarTech Replacement Survey, SEO platforms topped the list of replaced tools for the first time, overtaking categories like marketing automation platforms (MAPs), which had led for the past five years. At first glance, that might suggest instability in SEO. After all, the discipline is being reshaped by LLMs, AI-generated answers, and the rise of zero-click search experiences — all of which challenge traditional keyword tracking and ranking-based workflows. But the data tells a more nuanced story.

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