SODP Dispatch - 25 July 2025

A Publisher’s Engagement Playbook!

🚀 We’ve launched the first industry research report in partnership with Glide Publishing Platform!

Join global publishing leaders, product owners, data strategists, and tech innovators to benchmark how your team personalizes, engages, and grows using first-party data.

🔍️ What’s in it for you?

• Benchmark CDP Engagement, Adoption & Performance

• Discover Emerging Personalization Trends

• Access Actionable Best Practices

• Learn From Real-World Challenges & Wins

Whether you're using behavioural signals, AI-powered tools, or topic-based tagging, your insights matter. Help shape a report that reflects what’s really driving results across the industry.

👉️ Take the survey now! We need 300 respondents, and the survey closes on the 30th of July, 2025. Be the first to receive exclusive insights.

African Media Is Threatened by Governments and Big Tech – Book Tracks the Latest Trends

By Hayes Mabweazara & Bethia Pearson

Media capture happens when media outlets lose their independence and fall under the influence of political or financial interests. This often leads to news content that favours power instead of public accountability.

Media Capture in Africa and Latin America: Power and Resistance is a new book edited by news media scholars Hayes Mawindi Mabweazara and Bethia Pearson. It explores how this dynamic plays out in the global south and how journalists and citizens are resisting it. We asked them four questions.

What is media capture and how has it reshaped itself in recent times?

Media capture describes how media outlets are influenced, manipulated or controlled by powerful actors – often governments or large corporations – to serve their interests. It’s an idea that helps us understand how powerful groups in society can have a negative influence on news media. While this idea isn’t new, what has changed is how subtly and pervasively it now operates.

These groups include big technology organisations that own digital media platforms – such as X, owned by xAI (Elon Musk), and Instagram and Facebook, owned by Meta. But it’s also important to consider Google as a large search engine that shapes the news content and audience of many other platforms.

A book cover featuring an illustration of a hand in a suit manipulating the Earth with puppet strings. Palgrave Macmillan This matters because the media are important for the functioning of democratic societies. Ideally, they provide information, represent different groups and issues in society, and hold powerful actors to account.

For example, one of the key roles of the media is to provide accurate information for citizens to be able to decide how to vote in elections. Or to decide what they think about important issues. One big concern, then, is the effect of inaccurate or biased information on democracy.

Or it might be that accurate information is harder to access because algorithms and platforms make it easier to access inaccurate or biased information. These can be intended and unintended consequences of the technology itself, but algorithms can amplify misinformation and fake news – especially if this content has the potential to go viral.

🔍 News Reach Conference 2025

Join top minds in news search at NRC 2025, the leading conference for publishers and digital newsrooms. This conference will explore how publishers can strengthen their brand in a fast-moving news environment – ​​by sharpening their identity, building trust, and maximizing their visibility in search and beyond. In an age of shrinking attention and constant updates, knowing your brand has never been more important. See more ▸

🤖 AI Monetization Layer Framf Search 2025ework V1

Off the tail of last week's AI Monetization Layer POV, I've drafted up a V1 framework that goes even deeper into each bucket, the sub-buckets in each, there are 10 in total in the V1. Inside the framework, I've broken down each of the 10 sub-buckets with an explanation of what it is, why you as a pub might or might not want to consider it, and some thought-starting tips for each. See more ▸

By Vahe Arabian

🚨 Keep content alive with post‐publish action

Publish once and keep it working; without post-live action, your content becomes invisible.

When your article goes live, the real work begins. Recent data from Chartbeat shows average engagement drops by over 90% within 72 hours of publication. Meanwhile, the Reuters Institute finds that about 82% of readers don’t take further action unless prompted. Unless you activate a deliberate post-publish workflow, even your strongest content will fail to generate lasting impact.

The post-publishing Oversight

• Engagement decay - Most of your audience fades within three days; therefore, front-loading activity is vital.

• Passive readers - Without prompts, 82% won't click, comment, or convert.

• Lack of repurposing - Untapped quotes, stats, and assets sit idle instead of reaching new audiences

A 3-phase post-publish framework

1. Monitor (Hours 0–72) - Track real-time performance. If engagement drops >15% in 24 hours, update your title tag, meta description, and primary keyword. Then add two internal links from high-traffic pages. Sistrix reports a ~33% average visibility rebound from such updates.

2. Engage (Within 90 minutes) - Promptly respond to feedback. Posts show stronger conversion rates when comments are addressed quickly — delaying risks losing reader interest. Convert passive readers into community participants, not just one-time visitors.

3. Repurpose (Days 3–7+) - Break content into reusable formats:

   a. 3–5 social prompts using key quotes or insights.

   b. 1 newsletter snippet elaborating on a core point.

   c. 2 discussion topics for forums or groups.

This extends reach and taps into different audience behaviours and platforms.

Data-backed tactics that deliver

• Rescue Decaying Content: If >15% drop in 24h, improve metadata and internal linking, and this can regain ~33% of lost visibility

• Boost Conversions: Embedding contextual CTAs after key takeaways (e.g., “Want the full dataset? Download here.”) can increase conversions by ~27%.

Here are the key takeaways

1. Treat content as a living asset, not a finished product.

2. Maintain momentum: act within 72 hours, ideally within 24 hours.

3. Prompt, meaningful engagement builds community and trust.

4. Stretch your content: repurpose deliberately for different channels.

5. Use data-driven checks (drop rates, visibility gains) to refine your approach.

AI-powered search is rewriting the rules – What does it mean for the creative and media industry? | AdNews

How people search for information is changing - and if you’re in a creative or media role, you may be wondering what that has to do with you. For decades, the industry has designed campaigns, creative and media strategies to drive visibility, attention and action - usually in the form of a click. But what happens when audiences are receiving a summarised response from AI and are no longer clicking?
Read more ▸

AI summaries cause ‘devastating’ drop in audiences, online news media told | The Guardian

News companies have been warned of a “devastating impact” on online audiences as search results are replaced by AI summaries, after a new study claimed it caused up to 80% fewer clickthroughs. The threat posed by Google’s AI Overviews, which summarise a search result with a block of text, has rapidly risen to the top of the concerns among media owners. Some regard it as an existential threat to outlets reliant on search result traffic.
Read more ▸

YouTube sees a rise in ad revenue to reach nearly $10B | TechCrunch

YouTube continues to lead in the streaming market, with advertising revenue increasing by 13% year over year, according to Alphabet, Google’s parent company, in its second-quarter earnings report released on Wednesday. This growth brings YouTube’s total ad revenue to $9.8 billion, up from $8.7 billion in the same period last year. The company slightly exceeded analyst expectations, which had forecast YouTube’s Q2 ad revenue to be around $9.6 billion. Read more ▸

Google posts massive quarter, looks to introduce AI ad formats | Mumbrella

Google is looking to introduce new ad formats native to AI Overviews, which are already being monetised by the search giant at around the same level as normal search. The search giant gave the insights into its AI summaries – which have many publishers deeply concerned – during an earnings call in which it beat market expectations for the second quarter running. In terms of the numbers, Google showed its advertising, services and cloud divisions all growing strongly year-on-year. Read more ▸

Beyond Fan-Out: Turning Question Maps Into Real AI Retrieval | SEJ

If you spend time in SEO circles lately, you’ve probably heard query fan-out used in the same breath as semantic SEO, AI content, and vector-based retrieval. It sounds new, but it’s really an evolution of an old idea: a structured way to expand a root topic into the many angles your audience (and an AI) might explore. If this all sounds familiar, it should. Marketers have been digging for this depth since “search intent” became a thing years ago. The concept isn’t new; it just has fresh buzz, thanks to GenAI. Like many SEO concepts, fan-out has picked up hype along the way. Some people pitch it as a magic arrow for modern search (it’s not). Read more ▸

The 30-second statement that triggered Australia's next privacy tranche – marketing, media and tech on notice | Mi3

When Attorney General Michelle Rowland sat down with Sky News on the weekend, she did not unveil a draft bill, a consultation paper or even a timetable. She did something more consequential: in just a few lines of an interview she signaled to corporate Australia the conversation is over. "This is the second tranche," the Attorney-General said, "and Australians are sick and tired of their personal data being exploited... We will not have our privacy reforms dictated by multinational tech giants. Read more ▸