Publishers Should Redirect Social Budgets Into More Content

At the MX3 event in Barcelona last week, I participated in a fireside chat called Direct-to-consumer: Thriving in a post-social, AI-driven world. One thing we discussed was where publishers would get traffic post-social and what it even meant to be post-social.

The problem for publishers is that platforms have woken up to our antics. For years, we’d promote our content—for free—to their audience, hoping to monetize them once they hit our site. For search, it made sense. Google was in the business of finding the best information and delivering it as quickly as possible to its audience. But Facebook, X, LinkedIn… these were platforms built for engagement on the platform.

And yet, as publishers, we spent excessive time trying to find ways to get those people from the platforms to our sites. Sometimes, this was done by invitation from the platforms, i.e., they would pay for it. And in some instances, it was simply a byproduct. However, as the ad markets have become more competitive and more platforms are competing for the slow-growing digital ad spend, keeping engagement on platforms has become so much more important.

This is why the algorithms have become so strict against driving traffic off-platform. Why allow for free what so many other companies pay good money for? Naturally, publishers struggle with this because the vast majority are ad-dependent, and the money we can generate on ads doesn’t offset the cost per click on these platforms. And so, publishers see diminishing traffic from platforms.

This is not a new phenomenon. There have been numerous stories over the years of publishers seeing a massive drop in traffic from platforms. In the very first edition of A Media Operator, I threw up the image from Slate, which referenced its traffic from Facebook. In January 2017, it received 28.33m referrals. By mid-2018, that was down to 3.63m. Maybe that’s changed, but I seriously doubt it.

During the session, someone in the audience asked, “What would you recommend publishers do?”

My answer likely confounded some people, so I wanted to expand on it here. In a nutshell, I told them to get rid of their social media teams. Depending on the company’s size, that department could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars—if not more—in annual salary. In an era when platforms resist giving us free traffic, spending that kind of money is not a good use of resources.

Instead, I would reallocate every last of those dollars to create more content and then build the distribution engines into your CMS. Anytime a story is created, automatically share it on social media. With generative AI tools, you could summarize the article in a tweet or a LinkedIn post in seconds, thus saving you considerable time and creating higher quality social collateral. For many media companies, this already exists.

It’s important to remember that content is the product, and that’s what your audience wants. So, spending more money on serving your audience can only be a net positive for the overall health of the business. The word more could also mean spending more time on higher-quality content.

As a follow-up, I got a question: “But you were at Morning Brew, and you have social media people.”

It’s a fair point, but it’s worth qualifying. In 2022, the b2b division I ran decided to get rid of our social media team. We weren’t generating the necessary traffic to make a business case. We debated the decision a lot, but ultimately, it boiled down to cost, and it was far more important to put every dollar we could toward creating good journalism.

But on the consumer side, it was different. This was all about creating content on the platform. Very few links point to Morning Brew on social media because the team creates content natively. And for those media companies investing in social in 2024, this is the only place where they are potentially having success.

However, there is also an inherent risk with this. Many media companies have millions of followers on these platforms, but those could disappear overnight. Look at TikTok. If the U.S. government forces ByteDance to sell, China may decide to shut it down. As I wrote on Tuesday:

There is a cataclysmic risk of building on rented land. If you depend entirely on a single platform for your business’s health and prosperity, you risk losing your business.

If your business can justify creating native content, you will want to find content-first social media people. These people are comfortable being on camera or can create interesting text-based content on X and LinkedIn. Social media becomes less about distributing website content and more about serving the algorithms.

If you can’t justify that—or there is no ad business for it—then the only social media experience I recommend is paid social media experience. Publishers will need to change their approach to paid acquisition fundamentally. It will become a necessary skill, similar to what media was before the internet. I’ve said this multiple times, but getting free traffic taught us to get lazy regarding marketing. We used to have to acquire paid subscribers with paid marketing.

And that’s going to be the case again. Publishers must improve their paid marketing. They must understand how to move users from the platforms to strong converting landing pages and then engage and monetize them appropriately. Audience development will be about more than free distribution. This requires a deeper appreciation of not only good content but also conversion rate optimization and a deeper appreciation of the overall business.

This doesn’t mean that we’re never going to get free traffic. The internet is massive, and people share stuff all the time. But it’s not going to be a primary source. Every dollar that goes into social media salaries would be better invested in content to serve the users who are either coming to your site directly, finding you from search (still a massive source even with generative AI), or engaging with you in your newsletters.

Social media may have once been a good source of traffic, but those days are over. The sooner publishers can reallocate those resources into creating what the audience wants—better and more content—the healthier the business will be.

Have you made this change already? Let me know. Hit reply or join AMO’s Slack to discuss further. Have a great weekend!