Mark Zohar, President and CEO, Viafoura
For more than a decade, digital publishing operated on a simple but fragile bargain: Platforms delivered scale. Publishers monetized attention. Search and social referrals powered growth, advertising followed traffic, and optimizing for third-party algorithms became core business.
That bargain is breaking.
AI overviews, generative search, declining organic reach, and platform volatility are fundamentally reshaping how audiences discover journalism. Search engines increasingly answer questions without requiring a click. Social platforms throttle unpaid reach. Referral traffic is shrinking, and publishers now compete not just with one another, but with the platforms themselves for attention, loyalty, and trust.
In this new reality, one conclusion is unavoidable: the future of publishing is direct.
Direct audience relationships—built on owned engagement, first-party data, and trusted community experiences—are no longer a growth lever. They are essential infrastructure for sustainable publishing.
The End of Borrowed Audiences
Generative search is accelerating a trend publishers have felt for years. As platforms increasingly answer questions within their own interfaces, fewer readers click through to publisher sites. Often called “Google Zero,” this shift does more than reduce traffic, it undermines a foundational assumption of digital publishing: that discovery will reliably happen elsewhere.
The paradox is stark: Platforms now license publisher content to power AI experiences while simultaneously reducing traffic back to originating sites. Publishers are compensated for content while losing control over distribution, engagement, and data.
The lesson is clear: Third-party platforms cannot be strategic foundations. They must be reframed as acquisition channels, while durable relationships are built on owned properties.
The strategic goal is no longer maximizing visits at all costs. It’s converting readers into known, engaged audiences who choose to return directly.
From Consumption to Participation
One of the most underappreciated shifts in audience behavior is the move from pure consumption to expected participation.
Modern audiences, especially younger readers, are shaped by platforms where interaction is the default. They expect to comment, react, ask questions, follow journalists and topics, and see their perspectives reflected in coverage. A one-way experience (read, scroll, leave) no longer meets expectations.
Participation changes how audiences value journalism. When readers can respond to reporting, influence coverage through questions, or contribute lived experience, trust deepens. Return frequency rises. Registration and retention follow.
Crucially, participation must be intentional. Engagement fails when bolted on superficially. It succeeds when designed as meaningful exchange, where audiences understand why they’re invited in and what they gain by participating.
The Economics of Engagement
Direct relationships fundamentally change publishing economics. When users are registered, engaged, and returning frequently, publishers see measurable improvements across every metric that matters:
- Higher retention and loyalty driven by repeat visits and deeper session engagement
- Stronger subscription conversion as engaged users are far more likely to pay
- Better advertising outcomes enabled by first-party data and premium brand-safe environments
- Greater resilience with revenue less exposed to algorithm changes and platform policy shifts
Across Viafoura’s customer base, publishers prioritizing community consistently see double-digit lifts in return frequency, session depth, and registrations. Highly engaged users often generate 20x the lifetime value of anonymous visitors.
In the post-search era, economic gravity shifts from pageviews to identity, frequency, and depth. Registration, retention, and lifetime value become the metrics that matter.
What Direct Relationships Look Like in Practice
Leading publishers are already demonstrating what this shift looks like:
Some have reinvested in commenting as a core engagement channel, supported by AI-assisted moderation and clear community standards. Others have embedded live Q&As, journalist-hosted discussions, polls, quizzes and games, and audience prompts directly into editorial workflows.
In the strongest examples, engagement data flows back into the newsroom. Editors surface community insights during story planning. Reporters mine conversations for expertise, emerging angles, and lived experience. Months of discussion become a searchable reporting asset—turning community into an editorial advantage that algorithms cannot replicate.
This is what it means for community to become infrastructure, not a bolt-on feature.
Strategies That Are Working Today
The most effective approaches share common characteristics:
Live Q&As and expert forums: Leading publishers like Future plc, The Independent, The Toronto Star and others use journalist-hosted sessions to deepen trust and create opportunities for nuanced interaction that reinforces publisher authority.
Lightweight membership mechanics: Polls, quizzes, and interactive tools that convert casual readers into registered users by offering clear value in exchange for identity have proven effective at publishers like Newsweek and People Inc.
Personalization powered by first-party data: As third-party cookies fade, behavioral signals captured on owned properties—what users comment on, follow, or return to—become powerful inputs for personalization and lifecycle messaging.
Trust and safety at scale: AI-assisted moderation, paired with human oversight, enables growth without compromising brand integrity or advertiser confidence.
These approaches succeed because they respect audiences. They move publishers away from hyper-optimization and click chasing toward experiences that build trust over time.
Future-Proofing Against Platform Volatility
The core lesson of recent years is that platform dependency is structural risk. Algorithms change. Incentives shift. Alignment with publishers’ interests is never guaranteed.
Building direct relationships doesn’t mean abandoning search or social. It means rebalancing—treating third-party platforms as sources of discovery, not sources of control.
Publishers best positioned for the post-search era:
- Design engagement intentionally, not incidentally
- Invest in first-party data and identity
- Treat community as a growth engine, not a cost center
- Align editorial, product, and revenue teams around shared audience outcomes
Choosing Direct
As generative AI reshapes discovery and platform volatility accelerates, the value of trusted, direct audience relationships will only increase. Publishers that build owned engagement and meaningful community experiences will be best positioned to thrive where attention is scarce and control is limited.
Because in a post-search era, the future of publishing doesn’t belong to those with the most clicks. It belongs to those with the strongest relationships.
To learn more about Viafoura, visit their website, or connect with Mark Zohar at the 2026 Mather Symposium,where he’ll be joined by Erin Valois, Vice President of Product and Strategy at Postmedia Network Inc to discuss audience relationships in a post-search world.