SODP Dispatch - 4 September 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 soon. Be the first to receive exclusive insights.

Generative AI is not a ‘calculator for words’. 5 reasons why this idea is misleading

By Celeste Rodriguez Louro

Last year I attended a panel on generative AI in education. In a memorable moment, one presenter asked: “What’s the big deal? Generative AI is like a calculator. It’s just a tool.”

The analogy is an increasingly common one. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman himself has referred to ChatGPT as “a calculator for words” and compared comments on the new technology to reactions to the arrival of the calculator.

People said, ‘We’ve got to ban these because people will just cheat on their homework. If people don’t need to calculate a sine function by hand again […] then mathematical education is over.’

However, generative AI systems are not calculators. Treating them like calculators obscures what they are, what they do, and whom they serve. This easy analogy simplifies a controversial technology and ignores five crucial differences from technologies of the past.

1. Calculators do not hallucinate or persuade Calculators compute functions from clearly defined inputs. You punch in 888 ÷ 8 and get one correct answer: 111.

This output is bounded and unchangeable. Calculators do not infer, guess, hallucinate or persuade.

They do not add add fake or unwanted elements to the answer. They do not fabricate legal cases or tell people to “please die”.

🍽️ SODP Dinner series

Following our recent dinner event in New York, we are pleased to announce the upcoming editions of our Audience & Revenue Innovation Series, with events scheduled to take place in London and Dubai. 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 events. Register for London dinner ▸ Register for Dubai 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 ▸

🔍 Edge of Search 2025

The 2025 edition of this in-person conference brings together leading search marketing professionals to share real-world strategies, future-focused SEO skills, and proven frameworks. You will learn how SEO really works, sharpen your search skills for what’s next, and boost the performance of your digital team with insights built for action. See more ▸

By Vahe Arabian

📊 Core Web Vitals: the SEO game-changer for publishers

If your site is slow, you’re leaving traffic and revenue on the table.

Core Web Vitals are no longer optional. Google has made them a ranking factor, meaning publishers that ignore them risk losing visibility, traffic, and user trust. For those of us working in SEO and digital publishing, the message is clear: speed, stability, and responsiveness directly affect performance.

Core Web Vitals focus on three measurable aspects of user experience:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): How quickly the main content loads. Target: under 2.5 seconds.

• First Input Delay (FID) / Interaction to Next Paint (INP): How quickly the page responds when a user interacts. Target: under 200 milliseconds.

• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): How visually stable a page is. Target: less than 0.1.

These metrics are designed to capture the “real” experience of a visitor, not just what a developer or SEO sees on their end.

Why publishers can't ignore CWV in 2025:

1. SEO & Trust: Only ~47% of sites pass CWV assessments, presenting a competitive edge for publishers who optimize now.

2. Page performance pays off: A 1-second improvement can boost conversions by ~7% and reduce bounce rates—benefits seen across industries

3. User expectations have tightened: In 2025, anything slower than 3 seconds feels “slow” to most users—under 1 s is becoming the new gold standard, especially on mobile devices.

4. Real-world wins: 

   a. Economic Times cut LCP by 80%, CLS by 250%, and slashed bounce rates by 43%.

   b. Agrofy improved LCP by 70%, and load abandonment fell from 3.8% to 0.9%.

   c. Yahoo! JAPAN saw session durations rise 13% and bounce rates drop after CLS fixes.

Practical steps for improvement

• Measure regularly: Use lab and field data to monitor Core Web Vitals across templates and devices.

• Prioritize technical quick wins: Image compression, proper caching, and removing render-blocking scripts can deliver immediate improvements.

• Stabilize layouts: Define media dimensions and manage ad slots to reduce layout shifts.

• Invest in long-term fixes: Optimizing server response times and modernizing templates can help sustain improvements.

Here are the key takeaways:

1. Core Web Vitals are measurable, actionable, and tied directly to SEO performance.

2. Faster, more stable sites not only rank better but also improve engagement, ad revenue, and subscriptions.

3. Publishers that treat Core Web Vitals as ongoing maintenance, not one-time fixes will see compounding benefits over time..

Google not required to sell Chrome or Android, judge rules in win for tech giant | BBC

Google and its investors have prepared for worse, but today's ruling has turned out to be a relief for them. The judge has ruled that the tech giant does not have to sell Chrome and Android, so the company has avoided what could have led to a break-up. Shares in the company have instantly risen by more than 6% - a sign that investors welcome the result. But it's not all good news for Google. Part of the judge's decision means the tech giant must share its search data with competitors. Read more ▸

Peak YouTube: advertiser value to weaken on the world’s biggest streaming site – how, why and what to do about it | Mi3

YouTube is reaching the peak of its maturity as a product, and that’s a bad thing for marketers. As YouTube’s organic growth runs out of road, Google’s revenue growth pressures will erode advertiser value on the world’s biggest streaming site. It’s a new era – one where digital platforms have to reckon with an increasingly mature ecosystem. As the “YouTube Illusion” begins to falter, advertisers must avoid getting caught out. Read more ▸

Who’s suing AI and who’s signing: Brazilian newsbrand sues OpenAI and Japanese newspaper sues Perplexity | Press Gazette

A small number of news publishers have followed in the footsteps of The New York Times to sue OpenAI and other AI companies over the unauthorised use of their content. However many more now have signed deals with the AI companies which commonly include the use of their content as reference points for user queries in tools like ChatGPT (with citation back to their websites currently promised) as well as giving them the use of the tech to build their own products. Read more ▸

Is The Atlanta Journal-Constitution leaving print readers behind? Not necessarily, says its publisher | The Poynter Report

Reporting last Thursday on The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s decision to discontinue its print edition at the end of the year, I had posed some questions by email to president and publisher Andrew Morse. The column posted before he had time to reply, but he did reply. Here is a lightly edited version of our exchange, which went a few steps further than Thursday’s press release and daily reports. Read more ▸

Let's Look Inside An Answer Engine and See How GenAI Picks Winners | Duane Forrester Decodes

Ask a question in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or Copilot and the answer appears in seconds. It feels effortless. But under the hood, there’s no magic. There’s a fight happening. This is the part of the pipeline where your content is in a knife fight with every other candidate. Every passage in the index wants to be the one the model selects. For SEOs, this is a new battleground. Traditional SEO was about ranking on a page of results. Now the contest happens inside an answer selection system. And if you want visibility, you need to understand how that system works. Read more ▸