SODP Dispatch - 26 September 2025

Featured

Glide Nexa Review for 2025

By Kamalpreet Singh

Managing digital audiences has become one of publishing’s toughest operational challenges. Nearly 70% of major publishers now run paywalls, yet only 17% of consumers actually pay for a subscription when they see a paywall.

Referral traffic from search engines and social media too has steadily declined since 2024, just as Google’s phasing out of third-party cookies has hit ad revenue hard.

To compensate, publishers are doubling down on first-party data, which not only makes ads more valuable, but also enables publishers to implement dynamic paywalls, cleverly varying offers to customers, offering personalized bundles, and smarter retention strategies.

In fact, many publishers are now experimenting with hybrid or dynamic models, managing free readers, trialists, premium subscribers, and corporate accounts, each with different access rules, entitlements, and personalization needs.

This complex balancing act is possible only by leveraging first-party data. The challenge, however, is that this data typically lives across scattered and often ill-matched systems.Traditional CMSs were never built to handle this kind of identity and entitlement complexity, while CRMs are geared toward sales, not editorial workflows. Paywalls can manage content gating, but fail on identity management or other integrations.

As a result, publishers end up patching together half-measures: an access rule here, a paywall plug-in there, without ever achieving a unified view of their audience.

The result is a patchwork view of audiences, rising costs as you try and fill the gaps in the patchwork, and missed opportunities for personalization and growth.:

Glide Nexa claims to close that gap.

Deinfluencing Shapes How We Think About Shopping, and Our Economy

By Aidan Moir

Valued at more than US$250 billion, the influencer industry is the centre of the digital economy.

Popular haul videos, where influencers display and discuss a recent collection of purchases, and unboxings — videos where content makers open, showcase and review new products — have long been promoting endless streams of consumer goods that can be purchased with an easy click.

But what happens to influencer culture and popular consumption practices when many are worried about their financial futures?

Social media feeds become full of content-makers encouraging us to save our money — influencers telling us not to buy trendy, perhaps unnecessary, goods, like tons of Halloween decor or luxury skincare products.

This comes as American tariffs wreak havoc on the global economy and youth unemployment soars, and points to growing economic uncertainty. Consumption, the social practice that becomes publicly and hotly debated during times of economic uncertainty, is back on our radars.

For the past year, social media users have declared almost everything and anything as “recession indicators.” Influencer Kate O’Brien’s viral TikTok, for example, showing users how to squeeze out the remaining beauty product from its packaging to not waste anything, is one of many examples.

As talk of a recession continues to build, social media trends like deinfluencing help us understand how popular culture navigates economic downturns.

The rise of the recessionista

Economic recessions have always had a major impact on popular culture. The jobs lost during the 2007-08 global financial crisis helped pave the way for today’s influencer industry. Fashion bloggers grew in popularity during this time.

🍽️ SODP Dinner series

Following our recent dinner events in New York, London and Dubai, we are pleased to announce the upcoming editions of our Audience & Revenue Innovation Series, with events scheduled to take place in California. This exclusive dinner series will bring together senior media publishing leaders and executives to explore the rewritten global and local playbooks for audience monetization and growth. Seats are limited, register now for the event.  Register for California dinner ▸ 

🧭Elements of Audience Engagement

Elements of Audience Engagement is a mindset, an introduction, and a toolkit. It is grounded in the belief that in a digital information ecosystem, prioritising audiences, their needs and habits, is journalism’s most resilient foundation for growth and impact, enabling newsrooms not just to survive but to adapt with purpose. See more ▸

By Vahe Arabian

🔍Why personalisation is the key to stable traffic & Google rankings

Personalisation is no longer optional for publishers; it’s the key to staying visible in Google top stories and building long-term audience loyalty.

Google’s top stories carousel continues to shape how readers access breaking and trending news. But as algorithms shift, it’s not just about speed or keyword targeting anymore. The deciding factor is relevance, that is, how well your content aligns with a reader’s preferences.

When readers consistently engage with stories from certain publishers, those signals strengthen the likelihood of that publisher’s content reappearing in their personalised feeds. This means publishers who can encourage subscriptions and repeat engagement will gain more stable visibility.

Encouraging audiences to subscribe, whether to newsletters, browser alerts, or site accounts, goes beyond retention. It helps send stronger intent signals to Google that your content is a preferred source. These micro-commitments from readers (sign-ups, frequency of visits, article saves) all contribute to authority in personalised ranking.

Many publishers focus personalisation efforts only on the homepage or recommendations widget. However, sitewide personalisation is what reinforces the habit. Examples include:

• Content tags and filters that let readers prioritise coverage of topics, authors, or regions.

• Dynamic internal linking that adapts to what the reader has engaged with.

• Contextual modules that recommend similar stories or background explainers.

This creates a cycle where readers shape their own experience, spend longer on site, and provide feedback signals that search engines can measure.

Editorial and SEO teams should treat personalisation as an extension of optimisation. Beyond metadata and structured data, building systems that allow readers to express preferences strengthens both discoverability and user loyalty. Personalisation helps to future-proof against traffic volatility by creating stronger recurring engagement pathways.

Here are key takeaways for publishers:

1. Personalisation drives visibility – Google’s Top Stories isn’t just about speed; it’s about relevance and aligning with reader preferences.

2. Engagement builds authority – Subscriptions, repeat visits, and micro-commitments (like saves or follows) strengthen ranking signals.

3. Go beyond homepage widgets – Sitewide personalisation (tags, filters, dynamic links, contextual modules) builds deeper reader habits.

4. SEO + personalisation = future-proofing – Treat personalisation as part of optimisation to reduce reliance on one-off viral hits.

5. Stable traffic > short spikes – Creating pathways for recurring engagement ensures stronger, long-term visibility in top stories.

The path to sustainable visibility in Google top stories lies in connecting two priorities: optimising for personalisation signals in search while simultaneously creating pathways for readers to subscribe and shape their on-site experience. Publishers who combine both will see stronger recurring traffic and reduced reliance on one-off virality.

Less clickbait, more distinctiveness: how journalism has changed in the past four years | Alan Hunter

For a profession that barely changed for hundreds of years, journalism has certainly made up for it in the age of digital. In fact, we have seen significant evolution in its practices and products even since we launched HBM Advisory four years ago this week. Thinking about the state of the news per se, in September 2021 we were emerging from the trauma and/or hibernation of Covid and there was a widespread sense of relief. Thank goodness that’s over, we may have thought to ourselves. Read more ▸

Microsoft’s AI CEO on the future of the browser | The Verge

The AI browser wars are heating up. Google has Gemini in Chrome, Perplexity is building its Comet AI browser, and The Browser Company just got acquired by Atlassian for $610 million. Now, Microsoft wants to be part of the AI browser conversation. I sat down with Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman today to talk about the future of Edge, and why Microsoft is betting on its experimental Copilot Mode that controls your tabs and makes restaurant bookings. Suleyman says Microsoft’s path is to evolve the browser and AI tools it has today — turning Edge into something AI can control directly. Read more ▸

From Line Item To Leverage: How Web Performance Impacts Shareholder Value | SEJ

Despite years of digital transformation talk, too many CEOs and CFOs still treat the corporate website as a necessary marketing expense, a sunk cost with limited upside. I have far too many CEO’s of billion-dollar companies who view it simply as an expensive interactive brochure, setting the tone for the company and dooming the web as just that, a brochure without strategic value. But the modern website is not just a cost center. It’s a capital asset. One that, when strategically managed, generates revenue, lowers acquisition costs, accelerates growth, and protects brand equity. Read more ▸

When Agents Replace Websites: How Agentic Systems Devalue Websites and Domains | Duane Forrester Decodes

Let’s talk about an agentic future. As task-completing agents move from concept to adoption, their impact on how we discover and transact online will be significant. Websites won’t vanish, but in many cases their utility will shrink as agents become the new intermediary layer between people and answers. Domains will still exist, but their value as discovery assets is likely to erode. Building and maintaining a site will increasingly mean structuring it for agents to retrieve from, not just for people to browse, and the idea of domains appreciating as scarce assets will feel less connected to how discovery actually happens. Read more ▸

Cloudflare offers way to block AI Overviews – will Google comply? | Search Engine Land

Cloudflare today announced a new feature that allows you signal via robots.txt whether your content can be used in Google’s AI Overviews (as well as for AI training). Cloudflare’s new Content Signals Policy is meant to give publishers more control over how crawlers and bots use their data, beyond traditional directives that only regulate crawling and indexing. How it works. The policy adds three new machine-readable directives to robots.txt: search: permission for building a search index and showing links/snippets (traditional search). Read more ▸