Google Discover can deliver vast amounts of traffic to publishers but is unpredictable and volatile.
Swedish publisher VK Media has developed a product which makes sense of Google Discover and helped it deliver a ten-fold increase in reader revenue.
Anton Gunnarsson Molin, the head of sales and a digital media strategist for Swedish regional publisher VK Media, said the publisher decided to make sense of Google Discover in 2022 after a first-person piece about a VK reporter’s “addiction” to reality TV show Paradise Island was picked up by the platform and delivered 75% more traffic than anything else the company had published that year.
What is Google Discover?
Google Discover is a personalised content recommendation feed embedded in Google products. Android users may encounter it by swiping right on their home screen, while it is displayed by default in new tabs on Google’s Chrome browser for all smartphone users.
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Major UK publisher Reach told Press Gazette last week that Google Discover had grown to become its single largest source of referral traffic, more than making up for a decline in visits from Google search.
Reach audience director (distribution and customer marketing) Martin Little told Press Gazette that “soft lens” content, for example first-person or lifestyle writing, tends to do well on Discover. The platform also tends to select for headlines that contain a “curiosity gap” — i.e. ones that withhold key information.
Reach attributed its Discover referral growth in part to Google adding new analytic tools allowing publishers to track traffic from the recommendation feed. But in 2022, when Gunnarsson Molin and his colleagues at VK Media learned of their Discover-powered traffic spike, it was difficult to differentiate visits from Discover from the rest of Google search.
It had turned out the success of the Paradise Island article had been part of a trend for the publisher: “Google picked a certain amount of articles within a certain amount of time and put them on Discover and Google News,” Gunnarsson Molin said.
“The problem was that they did not convert, because all these articles were hidden behind our premium paywall.”
VK Media is based in Umeå, a university town in the north of Sweden. Founded 120 years ago as a print newspaper and magazine company, the business has diversified to encompass TV, radio and broadband internet services, as well as broader digital operations: the company also runs the app for Umeå’s ice hockey team.
The revenue mix allows the business to play around with novel bundling ideas. Students signing up for internet through VK Media, for example, get temporary free access to its paywalled journalism as part of the package.
“It’s weird, but it actually works,” Gunnarsson Molin said.
‘Backflipping over the problem’ with the ‘Article Horn’ predictive data analysis tool
The paywalls raised a problem, though: the large number of fly-by readers referred by Google Discover were unlikely to already have the subscription necessary to read the recommended content, and were unlikely to pay to do so.
The solution devised by Gunnarsson Molin, along with the company’s data team, was a predictive data analysis tool named the Article Horn.
The tool, which was shortlisted for Press Gazette’s Future of Media Technology Awards this year, is an alert system that tracks Google traffic to VK Media articles.
If traffic on a story increases a certain amount within an hour, the system alerts the newsroom via Slack that it is likely about to go or has already gone viral on Discover. The team is given information about the volume of traffic, how many paywall conversions the story achieved before the alert and what type of paywall it is behind.
He said Article Horn was “half human, half machine, like Robocop”.
Once they know a story is picking up steam on Google Discover, he said, “myself and the newsroom could then decide [whether] we need to act… and decide if we should lock articles, keep them open or put them on a [metered] paywall.
“In this way we kind of twist and turn our revenue stream to gain high traffic with open articles”, which bring in more ad revenue, “and then we lock it again and then we get a certain amount of reader revenue onto it.”
As a result, he said, annual digital advertising revenue has increased 60% compared with the year before Article Horn rolled out and annual paywall conversions.
The approach has also boosted VK Media’s ranking in Google, creating a virtuous cycle.
“So it really works,” Gunnarsson Molin said.
A former professional snowboarder sleeved with tattoos up his arms and neck, Gunnarsson Molin said the sport “actually taught me to think in a creative type of way… To think outside of the box, to find solutions, backflip over the problems”.
One of the lessons many publishers have taken away from the past decade is not to get too reliant on traffic from tech platforms. Facebook, once a major referral source, has throttled the visibility of news, Elon Musk has done the same to posts containing links on X/Twitter, and Google itself has repeatedly made changes to its search ranking algorithm that have left news outlets scrambling to reorient themselves.
Asked whether he was concerned about Google Discover ever turning off the taps, Gunnarsson said: “I would cry in the shower.”
But he was optimistic that Article Horn can be redeployed to other ends.
“I don’t want the Article Horn to be a one-hit wonder. We could use it in other ways — we could use it towards social media traffic or something else… How could we gain even more ad revenue and reader revenue in total from all this traffic that we’ve got, without being gatekeepers?”
[Read more: Publishers hooked on Google Discover traffic risk race to the bottom]
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