The power-shift coming to a device near you

Algorithms decide everything you see in your social feeds and search results

For digital publishers, these automated sets of rules decide whether the content you create will keep eyeballs glued to their screens and keep those views going up and up and up. We play by their rules to help people discover our work through these channels.

These rules change all the time, but the recent wave of changes from Meta and Google have had a huge impact on publishers, big and small. The challenges are obvious, but, is it all bad?

The changes are hitting publishers across the board

Leeds-founded Ladbible Group, and Future, the publisher of brands like Marie Claire and Country Life have spoken out about how fewer people are seeing their content as a result of these dramatic algorithmic shifts.

Solly Solomou, The chief exec of the group behind brands like LadBible has been impacted as much as any, with a single day loss in share price spiking at 40%. He’s quoted as saying in the Guardian “We have seen a backward step … There is inevitably going to need to be change in our business model to address it….”.

This rings true for Kevin Li Ying, Future’s CEO, who declared a “Google Zero” strategy shift last December.

Sounds bad, doesn’t it? It’s not good. And no digital publisher is happy about them having so much control, effectively giving them the ability to turn off the taps. The UK Competition and Markets Authority – the body responsible for ensuring fair play – seems to agree. They’ve set out the world’s first legal framework to allow publishers to opt-out of their content being used to power AI features in Google Search. Whether this will be meaningful remains to be seen.

But it’s not all bleak

But there might be an upside? Long before the advent of AI slop in our feeds, international, certain national and regional publishers were notorious for creating sensationalist, low-value, clickbait content that was ostensibly designed to game the system and get attention at any cost.

It might be a harmless “Which MAFS character are you?” quiz, but LADbible classics like ‘Cleavage Thursday’ (now retired) definitely attracted a fair share of negativity alongside huge amounts of online attention, as do local publisher greatest hits on grizzly crimes happening in their region.

So are we going to see less of this kind of content in our feeds? Probably. And I don’t think this is a bad thing. I have many peers that have simply uninstalled their social apps because it’s so hard to wade through the slop to get to the little nuggets of value.

What this means for business is twofold. Although some brands saw this kind of content as an irreverent way to get audience numbers up, my experience is that this kind of attention rarely results in meaningful engagement for their brand, let alone sales.

Survival of the fittest

Underpinning this, there is a shift going on. While some publishers have doubled down on a ‘click at any cost’ strategy, which ultimately and invariably ends up alienating their readership in the medium to long term, some have been playing the long game. One of the factors within LLMs is that it rewards rich, verified and trusted content, from reputable organisations. This is already seeing investment in quality output, and a form of darwinism on lower-quality products. Survival of the fittest.

So whilst across the board we’re looking at lower reach numbers, it’s quite likely that brands will get more and better quality engagement that actually drives better business results. And that’s with the added benefit of brands avoiding risque and sometimes downright inappropriate content just designed to bait clicks.

By Dan Murray, Founder and CEO

Photo credits:

Main image by Timothy Hales Bennett on Unsplash
Photo 2: by Chase Chappell on Unsplash