By Peter Wilmot, Chief Product Officer at Shopsense
Publishers have worried for years about reducing their dependence on platform traffic. Now they have no choice.
AI-powered search experiences are answering queries without sending users to publisher sites. Some publishers report revenue declines of 50 percent to 90 percent as referral traffic evaporates. At this month’s IAB Annual Leadership Meeting, Duration Media CEO Andy Batkin publicly criticized the agenda for containing no sessions focused on helping publishers generate new revenue, despite what is clearly an existential business threat.
Shrewd publishers aren’t waiting for the industry to figure it out. They’re building direct relationships with audiences through every channel they can control: logins, newsletters, apps, subscriptions, and increasingly, their own creator networks.
The Pivot to Owned Audiences
Time and Recurrent Ventures have both signaled that video ad revenue will be their biggest growth driver in 2026. Yahoo and Future are expanding creator networks. The logic is straightforward: If audiences are getting news from influencers (as 38 percent of adults under 30 now do, according to Pew), then publishers need to meet them there.
But this isn’t just about following eyeballs. It’s about owning the relationship in a way that search referrals never allowed.
User-generated content is projected to overtake professional media in ad spend this year, per WARC. Publishers building creator networks aren’t just chasing that budget; they’re creating logged-in ecosystems where they control the data, the targeting, and the monetization. But it’s still unclear if they can migrate their audiences.
Direct-to-consumer publishing platforms are adopting hybrid monetization models that legacy ad-supported sites can’t match: pay-per-view events, tiered memberships with real-time access, and exclusive digital goods that maximize revenue per user far beyond what flat subscription fees deliver.
First-Party Data Becomes the Product
The identity landscape that was supposed to consolidate never did. (Thanks, Google?) There’s no universal ID. Publishers that waited for one solution to emerge are now scrambling.
Success in 2026 will come to those who orchestrate multiple identity approaches, combining their own first-party data with contextual signals and select identity partners to meet buyer requirements across environments. According to industry estimates, 85 percent of advertisers now prioritize first-party data strategies.
This is where the omnichannel push pays off. Every newsletter signup, app download, and registration creates a data asset. INMA research shows that paying subscribers who receive personalized newsletters retain 58 percent better than those who don’t. That’s not just a subscription metric; it’s proof that logged-in audiences behave differently, engage more deeply, and become targetable in ways that anonymous traffic never was.
Publishers with authenticated audiences are no longer commodity inventory. They’re premium partners for advertisers who can’t rely on third-party cookies, and don’t want to funnel more budget into walled gardens.
The Content Monetization Gap
There’s an irony in the current crisis. Publishers create the content that trains AI models and informs AI answers, but capture almost none of the economic value when those answers bypass their sites.
The emerging opportunity is monetizing content at the point of engagement rather than hoping audiences click through from somewhere else. Whether through direct transactions, shoppable integrations, or premium ad experiences within owned environments, the publishers building these capabilities now will be well-positioned as the search-dependent model continues to collapse.
Some are already proving this works. Commerce content that converts within the article, newsletter sponsorships tied to logged-in audiences, and video monetization that doesn’t depend on platform algorithms are all growing faster than display advertising for publishers willing to invest in the infrastructure.
What Comes Next
The AI search reckoning isn’t a temporary disruption. It’s a permanent restructuring of how audiences discover and consume content.
Publishers who treat this as a moment to double down on owned audiences – building the logins, the apps, the creator relationships, and the first-party data infrastructure – will emerge with businesses that don’t depend on the whims of any single traffic source.
