SODP Dispatch -18 June 2026

CoreMedia Review 2026

By Sreemoyee Bhattacharya

Publishers are gradually moving away from a monolithic system and switching to flexible CMS platforms.

Headless CMS platforms have been designed to meet the market requirements of the publishing industry. The headless CMS software market is estimated to grow from USD 1,193.9 million in 2026 to USD 9,159.4 million by 2036. 57% of users have reported enhanced personalization and user experience, while 41% have witnessed a significant increase in ROI after adopting hybrid CMS platforms. Though these offer omnichannel scalability, agility and faster deployment, not every company is comfortable with a decoupled stack. Organizations with stakeholder groups prefer an adaptable framework with lower operational complexity and better editorial controls. This created a consistent demand for hybrid headless setups.

Organizations are experimenting with hybrid headless CMS architectures that work as the perfect middle ground, offering both traditional content management and API-driven delivery without compromising editorial control. However, hybrid eco-systems often offer the perfect balance of personalization and flexibility along with centralized control, but come with certain trade-offs such as integration complexity and advanced deployment needs.

This is where CoreMedia enters the narrative. Designed as an enterprise CMS and DXP platform, it aims to make the large-scale content operations and workflow management of editorial and marketing teams seamless for enterprise brands. In this analysis, we will take a closer look at the features, strengths and limitations of CoreMedia and evaluate whether it addresses the challenges and meets the expectations of modern publishers without introducing technical overhead.

Forecasting the future: how can publishers thrive in the AI search era?

By Rebecca Ackers

The traffic model that funded a decade of digital publishing is being quietly dismantled, and most publishers are still optimising for it.

In 2026, AI-powered search experiences and zero-click environments are fundamentally changing how audiences discover and engage with content online. Recent data suggests that 42% of UK searches now generate AI summaries, reducing the need for users to click through to external websites. For publishers that have traditionally relied on search referral traffic as a key audience acquisition channel, this marks a significant shift.

But focusing primarily on changes in click-through rates risks oversimplifying what lies ahead. As AI-powered discovery reshapes how audiences find content, scale-based models built around traffic acquisition are becoming less effective. The competitive advantage will come from publishers’ ability to maximise the value of the audiences they already own, not the ones they are still trying to acquire.

That means building environments where users stay longer, engage more deeply, and generate higher-quality monetisable opportunities. Publishers are refining the user journey by investing in smarter content recirculation, adopting mobile-first design principles, and optimising ad experiences to reduce drop-off and improve viewability. These efforts are becoming ever more critical as consumption shifts toward mobile and in-app environments, where audiences expect seamless, immersive, and personalised experiences as a baseline, not a differentiator.

📊 SODP London Dinner — Publishing and AI

We are hosting a private dinner in London for senior leaders across academic, educational and trade publishing. This dinner is for senior publishing professionals who are actively thinking about how to keep their content economically relevant as AI changes everything. If you are making decisions around content licensing, AI integration, or new revenue models, this evening is designed for you.

Date: Tuesday, June 30, 2026
Time: 6:30 PM
Venue: 27c Eccleston Pl, London SW1W 9NF, United Kingdom

What you will walk away with

• Clarity on how publishers are approaching content licensing in the AI value chain

• Peer insight from senior leaders across publishing markets on what is working and what is not

• A practical understanding of new revenue models being built on top of publisher content

Connections with a small, curated group of decision-makers you will not meet at a generic conference

The dinner is designed to be high-trust, collaborative, and off-the-record, with a focus on sharing what’s working and what’s not across markets. The evening will also feature a speaker session from a senior publishing industry voice, with more details to be announced soon.

A big thank you to Impelsys for co-hosting this evening with us.

Reserve your seat here ▸

🎯 LiveRamp × OpenAI: Measure Your ChatGPT Ad Performance

If you're running or planning ads on ChatGPT, you can now close the measurement gap. LiveRamp's Conversions API (CAPI) Hub connects directly to ChatGPT ad campaigns via secure server-to-server data connections, meaning you get reliable conversion tracking without depending on browser-based signals that often break or go missing.

In practice, this means you can:

• See which ChatGPT campaigns are actually driving conversions — not just clicks

• Optimize spend in real time based on accurate performance data

• Justify and grow your ChatGPT ad budget with measurement data you can trust

As consumer journeys shift toward AI-powered platforms, this gives marketers the infrastructure to keep up, connecting data, measuring impact, and proving ROI on one of the fastest-growing ad surfaces in the world.

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By Vahe Arabian

💰 The Paywall Dilemma: Weighing the Pros and Cons for Publishers

Despite what many consumers may believe, digital content isn’t free. Producing great articles, blogs, videos, and podcasts takes time and money; digital publishers must find ways to recoup these costs.

While paywall adoption has grown since the early 2010s, gating content remains a thorny issue, with most audiences still trying to avoid paying for access.

If you are thinking about implementing a paywall, here are some of the advantages and disadvantages to consider.

Advantages of paywalls

• Consistent revenue: Ad revenue volatility is hardly a new phenomenon. Subscriptions provide publishers with a relatively stable income stream compared to advertising.

• Data ownership: Publishers with a successful paywall strategy have access to a swathe of first-party data that is becoming increasingly valuable in the face of the ongoing “pro-privacy” revolution.

Disadvantages of paywalls

• Requires quality, unique, consistent content: I’m not suggesting that having to produce great content should be a reason to avoid paywalls. But it’s essential to be realistic about the level of competition in the publishing marketplace.

• Could hinder growth: Paywalls can be a great approach for sites with a preexisting audience willing to pay for their content. However, a paywall can impede the early stages of a start-up’s audience growth.

• Bypassing is still possible: Typing “paywall” into Google will return a slew of articles on the first page that discuss how to bypass them while searching for “how to bypass a paywall” itself returns hundreds of thousands of results.

Paywalls are powerful tools for publishers, helping them generate revenue consistently while building comprehensive audience profiles. But that’s not to say they are the right choice for every publisher.

Creating a successful paywall strategy requires trial and error, as well as the will and resources to experiment with digital content to determine what truly resonates with readers. This isn’t always viable for new or smaller publishers.

At VG, radical newsroom innovation includes killing the article, CMS | INMA

VG, Norway’s largest newspaper and one of the country’s most-visited Web sites, is known for its innovation. The publication quickly built a custom speech-to-text app, Jojo, in 2023. It has also built an editing tool that automatically converts all its content to video. Its team were finalists in four categories at the INMA Global Media Awards this year. In other words, this is a news brand that has earned a lot of recognition and respect when it comes to creating value by doing things differently and boldly.

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News sites are the new newspapers: People are abandoning them for social media | NiemanLab

News sites are rapidly becoming the newspapers of the digital age. And you know what happened to newspapers. Worldwide, people in all age groups are ditching news sites and publishers’ apps in favor of social media and video networks. In fact, 18- to 34-year-olds are abandoning content on publishers’ platforms even more quickly than they’re dropping TV news. The 2026 Digital News Report from Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) makes it clear: Almost all online news growth is coming from third-party sources, and publishers’ own sites and apps are being left behind.

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How a 150,000-member Facebook group became the Houston Chronicle’s newest newsroom partner | Editor & Publisher Magazine

H-Town’s paper of record recently made a new Facebook friend. This past February, the Houston Chronicle announced a content partnership with popular local online community Black Houston, after the group’s founder Christopher Bush reached out with the idea. Before the collaboration became official, the Pulitzer-winning newsroom sent the paper’s first Black columnist, Joy Sewing, to host an AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) for the Facebook group. The announcement fittingly landed during Black History Month.

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Do AI Assistants Actually Render Your JavaScript when Grounding? We Put It to the Test. | Search Engine World

Our investigation into how AI assistants read web pages all began with a surprising inquiry from one of our clients. They had spent a fortune on a slick, modern front end where most of the meaningful content — the specs, the prices, the descriptions — was injected by JavaScript after the page loaded. Their question was simple: when someone asks ChatGPT or Gemini about our products, does the assistant actually see any of that? What was our opinion? Honestly, we weren’t sure. Half of us assumed every modern AI runs a full browser by now; the other half suspected they cut corners.

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Barr: In Getting It Wrong On Maine, National Media Show Why Local News Matters | TVNewsCheck

A recent Maine Monitor investigation revealed that nearly 100 billionaires and their spouses have donated to Sen. Susan Collins’ re-election campaign. Full disclosure: I serve as board chair of the independent, nonpartisan Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting, which publishes The Maine Monitor. According to reporter Josh Keefe, billionaire donors contributed $9.8 million in support of Collins, while small-dollar donors contributed $9.6 million in support of challenger Graham Platner.

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Why Publishing More Content Is Making Your SEO Worse | SEJ

For most of the history of modern SEO, publishing more content was considered almost universally beneficial. More pages meant more keywords, more long-tail visibility, more opportunities to rank, and more traffic. Entire agencies and publishing businesses were built around this premise. The logic was simple: If one page could rank, then a thousand pages could dominate. In 2015, publishing 500 mediocre (and I use mediocre generously here) articles might genuinely have improved your visibility. In 2026, however, it can actively weaken it.

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