Reddit and Facebook have made up for falling referral traffic from Google for the Daily Beast.
The site’s chief content and creative officer Joanna Coles was interviewed in Cannes by Wall Street Journal editor Emma Tucker alongside Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff.
The challenges caused by falling Google referral traffic as the search engine rolls out AI-generated search answers was a major topic of discussion among publishers and advertising industry executives visiting the Cannes Lions festival.
Tucker said that falling referral traffic, especially from search due to the impact of generative AI, is “affecting everybody, including subscriptions sites like our own”.
Asked for her response Coles said: “We get more traffic from our socials, we get a ton of traffic from Reddit, we are in a lot of conversations in Reddit.
“Facebook, when we came into the Beast, was losing traffic and wasn’t interested in news. Since then they have changed their mind and we are getting a flood of traffic from Facebook which we weren’t actually planning on.
“We’ve been impacted but we have picked up elsewhere.”
Coles took a minority stake in the Daily Beast from its founding owner IAC in April 2024 along with chief executive and publisher Ben Sherwood.
Vox CEO: Platforms don’t value our content properly
Bankoff was asked whether Vox Media’s content licensing and technology deal with OpenAI was good value.
He said: “OpenAI has been a very good partner, our executive team spent some time with them last week. Nothing is guaranteed. Do they value our content properly? I don’t think so.
“I think it should be valued more. Google and Facebook and the others value it at less than OpenAI does.
“It’s helpful to have some ability to talk to them as opposed to the absolute opposite, to have some platforms to actively say news is bad.
“Some platforms are not only not paying, they are saying news is bad, then you have other platforms that are saying we will value it, we’ll have conversations well see where it goes.
“Then you have some in the middle saying we will give you some links in exchange for your content, but we will push those links pretty far down the page and not ask for your permission around that.”
Email pged@pressgazette.co.uk to point out mistakes, provide story tips or send in a letter for publication on our "Letters Page" blog
