How Publishers Can 10X Their Revenue

Search is taking back the readers it lent. The inbox holds the ones publishers own.

For twenty years, publishers ran on a simple bargain. They produced the journalism; the platforms sent the readers. Search sent the most, social sent a surge and then a trickle, and advertising monetised whatever arrived. Newsroom budgets, the number of ad slots on a page, even the length of a headline were all built on the assumption that the readers would keep coming.

That assumption has broken. Search engines are answering questions themselves. Social networks stopped sending readers years ago. The AI assistants that were supposed to become the new front door send almost no one. What remains is the audience that comes back on its own, and for most publishers it is far smaller than the cost base they have built.

A little over a year ago, in News Media’s Renaissance, I argued that the inbox offered news media a way back. The data since then have made the case more urgent, and the tools more concrete. This essay sets out the crisis, how publishers are responding, and why I think the answer lies in an asset most of them already own and underuse:

The email list is the largest first-party audience most publishers have, and the one they control most directly. Run as a product rather than a pipe, it can multiply the revenue each reader brings tenfold.

Underneath the products is a bigger shift, and it is the real argument of this essay: from monetising visits to monetising relationships.

The programme rests on three innovations: NeoLetters, NeoNet and NeoCards. The essay closes with the tests that would prove the argument wrong.

The argument in one paragraph. Search referrals to publishers are collapsing, and AI is accelerating the collapse. Advertising falls with pageviews, and subscriptions have stopped growing in most markets. The readers who stay are the loyal ones, and email is the one channel where a publisher knows them by name and reaches them every day. Yet the newsletter has barely changed in 25 years: it is still a list of links asking for a click. Rebuilt as a product, with editions that update when opened, actions that happen inside the email and collections readers come back to complete, it multiplies four numbers at once: subscribers, newsletters per reader, engagement and yield. None of them has to double: 1.5 × 2 × 1.5 × 2.25 comes to just over ten. The shift underneath is from monetising visits to monetising relationships.

1

The Floor Gave Way

Search, the largest free source of readers publishers ever had, is shrinking fast, and AI is the reason.

The numbers moved from worrying to alarming within a year. Data from Chartbeat for the Reuters Institute’s annual industry report showed Google organic search traffic to more than 2,500 news sites down by a third globally between November 2024 and November 2025, and by 38% in the United States. Chartbeat’s own 2026 playbook is worse: across its network, Google Search referrals fell 40% between July 2025 and July 2026, almost double the fall of the year before. Google Discover fell 34%. Search Engine Journal’s report of the playbook puts Google Search at about 5% of the network’s pageviews, down from 9% two years earlier.

The damage is worst at the bottom. Over two years, small publishers lost 60% of their search referrals, mid-sized publishers 47% and large ones 22%. And the leaders of the industry expect more of the same: in the Reuters Institute’s survey of 280 media executives in 51 countries, publishers expect search traffic to fall by a further 43% over three years, and about a fifth expect to lose more than three-quarters of it.

The mechanism is no mystery. When Google shows an AI summary at the top of the results, users click a traditional link in 8% of visits, against 15% when there is no summary, and they click a link inside the summary in 1% of visits. The summary is the answer. As The Atlantic’s chief executive, Nicholas Thompson, put it, “Google is shifting from being a search engine to an answer engine.”

Nor are the AI assistants filling the gap. In the Reuters Institute’s data, ChatGPT’s share of referrals barely registers: Google sends about 500 times as many referrals from search alone, and about 1,300 times as many once Discover is included. Social went first: over the past two and a half years, referrals to news sites from Facebook fell 43% and from X 46%, after Facebook spent years deliberately deprioritising publisher pages. There is no third platform to lean on now.

Figure 1. Referrals from the platforms have fallen sharply, and publishers expect worse. The figures cover different periods and show direction, not a single index. Source: Reuters Institute, Trends and Predictions 2026, using Chartbeat data.

The consequences are in the headcount. In February the Washington Post cut about a third of its staff, with leadership citing losses and a near halving of search-driven traffic over three years. The year before, Business Insider cut 21% of its workforce so that it could “endure extreme traffic drops outside of our control”, in its chief executive Barbara Peng’s words. For much of the industry, this is no longer a downturn. It is a question of survival.

2

The Appointment, and the Three Doors

The newspaper created a daily appointment. The platforms broke it into visits, and AI is now replacing the visit with an answer.

The newspaper’s great invention was not ink on paper. It was the appointment: a trusted bundle of news, judgement, utility and surprise that arrived every morning at the same time. The web replaced the appointment with a stream. Search replaced loyalty with intent. Social replaced intent with distraction. AI is now replacing the visit with an answer. The publisher’s job is to recreate the appointment, and email is unusually well suited to it, because it combines identity, cadence, personalisation and the ability to act.

Today a reader can reach a publisher through three doors. The owned door: the website or app opened directly, an email, a push alert. The rented door: search, Discover, social and video platforms and aggregators, where someone else’s ranking decides what the reader sees. And a new agent-mediated door: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and personal assistants that answer on the publisher’s behalf, often without a visit.

For two decades the rented door brought the most readers, and publishers built their businesses around it. That door is now narrowing, and readers are spending more of their time behind it. In this year’s Digital News Report, for the first time, social media and video networks overtook news websites and apps as the most widely used source of online news, 54% against 51%. Use of publishers’ own sites and apps has fallen 12 points since 2020. The agent-mediated door is still small but growing: weekly use of AI chatbots for news rose from 7% to 10% in a year.

Yet the same data contain the clue to what works. Across Chartbeat’s network, overall pageviews held up far better than search, because loyal readers, those who visit on at least eight days in sixteen, stayed steady while new readers fell 14% and returning readers 8%. Chartbeat says loyal readers “are a major reason why overall pageviews haven’t seen a major decline.” The Reuters Institute finds the same pattern in its survey: the most engaged news users are fewer but undiminished in their habits, what it calls “a smaller, but durable, target market.” And at The Atlantic, Thompson has noticed that the readers Google still sends are the valuable ones: “Google is sending us fewer people who aren’t going to subscribe.”

The audience that survives is the one that comes back on its own. Every strategy that matters now is about growing it.

3

Two Revenue Lines, Both Under Pressure

Advertising follows pageviews down, and subscriptions have stopped growing in most markets.

Display advertising is priced per impression, and impressions are a function of pageviews. When a third of the pageviews go, a third of the inventory goes with them, and what remains sells into a programmatic market where most publishers have little pricing power. Cutting costs keeps pace with that for a while. It does not reverse it.

Subscriptions were meant to be the answer, and for a handful of brands they are. The New York Times ended 2025 with 12.78 million subscribers, having added 1.4 million digital subscribers in the year. But the market is winner-takes-most. Across the 20 richer countries the Reuters Institute tracks, the share of people paying for online news is stuck at 17%, unchanged on the year, and it fell four points in the United States. The Institute’s explanation matters: as fewer people visit news sites and apps, fewer enter the subscription funnel at all. In price-sensitive markets, including most of Asia, the share paying is lower still.

Even the Times’s success carries a lesson. More than half its digital subscribers take a bundle or more than one product, and the Reuters Institute notes that the share paying for news alone fell from 17% to 12% last year. Most pay for a bundle that includes puzzles and cooking. People pay most readily for the things they return to every day, not only for the news.

Both revenue lines were built on the same funnel: a stranger arrives from a platform, reads one article, and is shown ads or asked to pay. As the platforms stop sending strangers, the top of that funnel empties. A business model that depends on strangers cannot survive the end of free distribution.

4

What Publishers Are Doing, and What Others Suggest

Publishers are cutting, licensing, diversifying and doubling down on distinctiveness. Most of these responses still rent attention rather than own it.

The Reuters Institute’s survey gives the clearest picture of the industry’s plans. Subscriptions and memberships remain the top revenue focus for 76% of commercial publishers, ahead of display advertising (68%), native advertising (64%) and events (54%). The biggest new opportunity they see is getting platforms to pay for content, cited by 37%, though only a fifth expect AI licensing to be a substantial source of income, and another fifth expect nothing at all.

On content, the consensus is to be more distinctive: more original reporting, analysis and human stories; less of the service and evergreen material that AI answers best. Aftonbladet’s head of AI, Martin Schori, frames the goal as “journalism that can’t easily be summarised in the three bullet points.” The Wall Street Journal’s head of digital, Taneth Evans, argues for doubling down on what makes a publication unique and on direct relationships with readers. AFP’s Latin America bureau chief, Maria Lorente Estrada, describes a shift away from volatile platforms towards owned communities, including premium newsletters. Nine’s Sophia Phan, in Australia, makes the point that matters most here: as search traffic falls, publishers must engage readers directly through newsletters, podcasts and puzzles.

Others are diversifying into businesses that earn per action. Condé Nast says its commerce revenue has grown 170% since 2020 and its US tentpole event revenue ninefold. Many publishers now run vertical platforms in personal finance, autos and product reviews, earning as a trusted middleman. Dotdash Meredith’s chief executive, Neil Vogel, has said Google’s share of his company’s traffic fell from about 60% to about a third, with growth now coming through newsletters and specialised platforms. In Finland, one local publisher is even designing a news product modelled on Duolingo, with stars and tokens that reward participation.

Two cautions run through these responses. First, verticals fed by search inherit search’s fragility. When Business Insider cut staff, it also said it was exiting most of its commerce business because that business depended on search traffic. Second, much of the new effort, from video on YouTube and TikTok to newsletters on Substack and answer-engine optimisation, still builds audiences on someone else’s platform. A strategy built on rented attention is only as durable as the landlord’s next algorithm.

5

The Asset Hiding in Plain Sight

The email list is the largest first-party audience most publishers have, and it is run as a pipe.

Every publisher of any size has one, built from registrations, sign-ups and subscriptions over years or decades. It has three properties no platform can offer. It is known: each address belongs to a person who chose to hear from the publisher. It is direct: no search or social ranking decides whether the reader is referred; mailbox providers still filter and sort, but the publisher does not have to rent the reader back. And it is daily: a publisher can reach the same reader every morning without paying anyone for the privilege.

Yet the newsletter has barely changed in 25 years. A typical edition is a list of headlines, each asking for a click back to the website. Its job is to generate pageviews, the very metric that is collapsing. Its success is measured in opens, a number inflated by Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection and by security scanners that open emails no person has seen. It carries a few banner slots sold at low rates. Most titles reach only a small share of the registered base, and millions of addresses sit dormant.

A newsletter built to send readers somewhere else inherits the economics of somewhere else.

The fix starts with a different question. A link-list newsletter asks: did this email create a visit? A newsletter built as a product asks: did this edition make the next one more likely to be opened? I have called this the Next Open. Recurring attention is not produced by one excellent send; it is produced by a sequence of editions worth opening, and it is the one metric search cannot take away.

Search economics ran from content to a stranger, a visit, a pageview and an impression. Relationship economics run from identity to attention, habit, intent, action and revenue.

The opportunity is not to make newsletters better at producing pageviews. It is to change the unit of publisher economics from the pageview to the relationship.

6

The 10X Equation

Email revenue is the product of four numbers, and each of them can double.

Strip a newsletter programme to its economics and four numbers decide what it earns:

Email revenue = Subscribers × Newsletters per reader × Engagement × Yield

• Subscribers: how many readers are on the list and reachable. Capture on the site and app, a weekly digest for the dormant base, and reactivation all move it.
• Newsletters per reader: how many of the publisher’s newsletters each reader takes. Most publishers run many titles that only a small share of their base has ever seen.
• Engagement: how often readers come back and do something: engaged days per reader, not opens alone, which privacy features and scanners inflate. Live content and a reason to return tomorrow move it.
• Yield: what that engagement earns, from advertising, from actions completed in the email and from subscriptions sold there.

These numbers multiply rather than add. Growing subscribers grows the audience every other lever works on; raising yield raises what all that engagement is worth. None of them has to double. Grow subscribers by half, double the newsletters each reader takes, lift engagement by half and raise yield by 125%, and the product is just over ten. Yield carries the largest multiple because it has the most room: most newsletters today earn from a handful of banners. Newsletters per reader carries the next largest, for reasons section 8 sets out.

Figure 2. An illustrative path to 10X. The multipliers are targets to test, not forecasts.

A word on the claim itself. 10X here means the revenue a publisher earns from its email relationships, not the whole company’s revenue overnight. That stream starts small for most publishers, which is exactly why it can grow tenfold, and why it matters: it is the revenue that does not depend on a platform’s next decision.

Yield is where the arithmetic is most striking. Take an illustrative newsletter with four banner slots, sold at a $4 CPM and 60% filled. It earns about $10 per thousand opens. Now replace one slot with an action the reader completes inside the email. If an action is worth $2, the publisher needs one action in every 200 opens to match all four banners. If it is worth $20, a qualified finance lead or a test-drive request, it needs one in 2,000. A subscription sold in the email at $100 needs one in 10,000.

Figure 3. The breakeven is a threshold to beat, not a forecast. The higher the value of the action, the fewer readers need to act.

7

NeoLetters: Attention You Own

A NeoLetter is composed when it is opened, not when it is sent, and it lets the reader act without leaving the inbox.

NeoLetters are the publishing form of NeoMails, messages worth opening, built for media companies and for brands that publish. They rest on AMP for Email, which lets supported inboxes run live, interactive content inside a message. I described the underlying shift in What Changes When Emails Are Composed at Open, Not Send. For publishers it changes five things.

• Living Emails. Markets, scores, prices and the latest headlines refresh every time the edition is opened, so a morning edition is still current at lunch.
• Stories read in the email. Readers can expand a story inside the edition. That creates more surface for advertising, without asking for a click the reader may not make.
• Polls, quizzes and one-tap registrations work inside the email. Every answer is declared interest, the most valuable data a publisher can hold. I wrote about this years ago in Quizzing in Email; AMP has made it practical at scale.
• Subscriptions started in the email. A reader who has hit the meter can choose a plan and confirm intent inside the message, and where the inbox and payment rail support it, complete payment there too. Elsewhere the email collapses most of the journey and hands off only the final authenticated step. Renewals work the same way, from the reminder itself.
• Reach across titles. A weekly digest carries one item from every newsletter the publisher runs, with a subscribe button beside each. Reactivation gives dormant readers a one-tap choice to stay, go weekly or pause.

Two design rules keep this honest. Every interactive block should end in a link back to the publisher’s site, so engagement adds clicks rather than replacing them. And AMP renders only in supported clients, including Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail, Mail.ru and FairEmail, and senders must register and authenticate, so every edition must travel with a strong static version carrying the same content and links. For a large share of readers, the static version is the edition.

None of this is exotic. Brands have spent fifteen years learning lifecycle marketing: segmentation, preference capture, triggered journeys and win-back flows. Publishers can borrow the playbook and apply it to readers rather than shoppers.

8

Publishers as Aggregators Again

AI makes a new publication cheap to start. That turns newsletters per reader into one of the biggest multipliers.

In the early days of the Indian internet I built Samachar to bring the day’s news from many sources into one place, and later experimented with the idea again in Vartam. Techmeme has done it brilliantly for technology for two decades. What limited the model was the cost of curation: every beat needed editors watching it all day.

AI changes that cost. A publisher with trust and distribution can now launch an AI Daily, a Markets Daily, a Health Daily, a City Daily, an edition for each major sports team, a jobs digest or a personal morning edition, each assembled from its own reporting and the best of the web, without building a newsroom for every vertical. Explainers on allied themes such as health and personal finance, and reader-written formats in the spirit of the Times’s Tiny Love Stories, extend the range further. Editors set the rules, check what matters and credit and link the sources the edition draws on.

This is not newsletter personalisation; it is portfolio expansion at a near-zero marginal cost of assembly. Each new edition is a subscription a reader can add with one tap, a new context for ActionAds and a new set of declared interests. It is the most believable way to double the second lever of the equation.

9

NeoNet: Action Without Friction

To raise yield, publishers must sell actions, not impressions.

Ad servers and programmatic exchanges fill slots with banners. A banner asks the reader to click, leave the email, land on a page and act there; most never do. An ActionAd lets the reader act where they already are: check card eligibility, get a quote, request a callback, book a test drive. Because the action happens in the email, there is no click to lose, and advertising becomes lead generation and performance rather than display. I set out the larger idea in Inbox Media Network: How the Next Ad Category Has Been Hiding in Plain Sight.

The first advertiser should be the publisher itself. A publisher with a personal-finance platform, an autos site, a product-review brand, an events business or a subscription to sell already has offers that pay per action. Those can fill the ActionAd slot from the first day, with no sales cycle and no revenue share. This also solves the vertical trap from section 4: email gives the verticals their own distribution, so they stop depending on search.

Then comes outside demand. NeoNet is the network layer: it brings lenders, insurers, carmakers and other performance advertisers to the slots the publisher’s own verticals leave empty, alongside the existing ad stack. The order of priority is simple: direct deals first, the publisher’s own verticals next, then network demand, and programmatic banners last.

Two cautions belong in the design. Regulated offers such as loans and cards should start in the email and finish in the publisher’s app or site, where consent, credit checks and lender disclosures live. And some affiliate programmes restrict their links in email, so affiliate offers should point to the publisher’s own page, which carries the retailer links.

10

NeoCards: Driving the Next Open

News is read once and forgotten. A collection is kept.

Every edition is gone by evening. Nothing pulls a reader back tomorrow except the next headline, and the next headline is now one an AI can summarise without a click. Publishers need magnets: reasons to return that the news alone cannot provide. Games are the proven example. The Times has built its bundle around them, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post have followed with daily puzzles, and the Finnish experiment above borrows from Duolingo. NeoCards add a different kind of magnet, built from an asset every established publisher already holds: its archive.

A NeoCard is a collectible card issued inside the newsletters, app and site. A publisher might issue a Set of a hundred front pages from its history, one card a day. Or a Set on the companies that built its country, the great matches of a sport, or the cars that changed a nation’s roads. Some cards can be Living Cards that keep updating after they are collected: a player whose statistics refresh after every match, a company whose share price moves on the card. One version of the game runs like this:

• A few cards a day, inside the emails readers already get. One stays sealed until the reader answers the day’s quiz or poll.
• Duplicates are swapped with friends. Large Sets are hard to finish alone, so trading brings in new readers.
• Each Set runs for a season, and some cards are rarer than others.
• The first finishers get prizes only the publisher can give: a printed edition of the hundred front pages, an ebook, an invitation to an event. Sponsors can add their own.

These mechanics are choices to test, not laws. The principle is what matters: NeoCards turn ephemeral media into persistent objects.

A streak makes yesterday fragile. A collection makes yesterday valuable.

Cards work on all four levers. They lift engagement, because every missing card is a reason to come back. They grow subscribers, because trading pulls in new readers. They raise yield, because a brand can present a Set as a new kind of sponsorship. And they route readers into the verticals: a card in a personal-finance Set can open a credit-score tool, a card in an autos Set a test-drive offer. For readers drifting away, Atomic Rewards can add a small incentive to open, used sparingly and only where attention is fading.

One design question comes up early: should the cards live in the publisher’s own album? My strong preference is no. A private album starts with no collectors and no one to trade with, so Sets stall before they are finished. Cards belong in one shared album that readers of many issuers already use. The publisher keeps what matters: its name on every card, its own shelf in its app and site, its distribution and the data on its own Sets. Other issuers never see its readers, and it never sees theirs.

11

The Second Reader

Publishers used to publish for millions of humans. Soon they will publish for millions of humans and millions of agents.

Personal AI agents are arriving. The Reuters Institute points to tools such as Huxe and OpenAI’s Pulse that compile personalised news briefings, and three-quarters of the executives it surveyed expect such agents to have a large impact on the industry within a few years.

The two readers want different things. The agent wants structure: facts, entities, prices, provenance, permissions and actions it is allowed to take. The human wants what no summary delivers: narrative, judgement, humour, surprise, play and a sense of belonging. An agent can summarise a story. It cannot be surprised by one, laugh at a cartoon, argue in a poll or feel the satisfaction of finishing a Set. The future news product may need two editions inside one object: one that people enjoy, and one that agents can understand and act on. A Living Email, composed at open, is a natural place for both to meet.

Habit has to be designed, too, because it can no longer be inherited. Among 18–24-year-olds who did not read a newspaper last week, the Reuters Institute finds that 56% have never read one regularly, and most people of every age say their news routines vary from day to day. Interest in news has fallen 13 points since 2021. The daily newspaper habit is fading; a daily inbox habit has to be earned, edition by edition.

12

How the Pieces Compound

The order matters more than any single tool: identify, earn attention, build habit, learn intent, and only then monetise.

There is an obvious failure mode. A publisher sees a new email surface and fills it with advertising, repeating the web’s old mistake in a new place. An address is not an audience, an open is not attention, and an empty slot is not inventory. The sequence has to be disciplined, as Figure 4 shows. A network of weak relationships merely networks weakness; NeoNet becomes valuable only after the editions have earned their opens.

Figure 4. Each step earns permission for the next.

Run in that order, the loop compounds. The digest and reactivation bring more of the base into play. Cards and Living Emails give those readers a reason to open every day. Each open carries live content, a question and an action, so engagement produces both declared interest and revenue. Declared interest makes the next ActionAd more relevant, which raises yield. Yield, much of it from the publisher’s own verticals, funds better editions and richer Sets.

The website does not disappear in this model; its role changes. It remains the home for deep reading, archives, video and tools. What changes is the hierarchy: the website no longer carries the whole economic burden of the relationship. Search rewarded publishers for attracting strangers once. The inbox rewards them for keeping readers every day.

13

What Would Prove This Wrong

Every claim in this essay comes with a test that could kill it.

Each test can be read within months, and each uses a concurrent, randomised holdout: part of the list keeps today’s best newsletter while the rest gets the new one. Last year’s numbers are not a baseline.

• Inbox AI eats the open. If AI assistants in email apps summarise newsletters the way AI Overviews summarise search, the open itself erodes. Test: human opens per engaged reader over twelve months. If they fall as search clicks did, the inbox is no refuge.
• Actions stay below breakeven. If, after six weeks, actions per thousand opens sit below the level that matches display, ActionAds do not pay. Stop and redesign the offer.
• Interactivity is not the driver. AMP reaches only some inboxes. If the static version captures most of the gain, the interactive layer is not earning its cost.
• Cards are a novelty. If engaged days per reader fall back to the holdout level once the first Set ends, cards are a gimmick, not a habit.
• Reach costs reputation. If sending the digest to dormant readers pushes spam complaints towards the limits Gmail sets for bulk senders, reach is being bought with deliverability. Narrow the audience before widening it.

14

Where to Start

Start with ninety days and four pilots, each with an owner, a clock and a holdout.

• Yield: ActionAds for the publisher’s own verticals, and subscription offers started in the email. Measured as revenue per thousand opens against display.
• Subscribers and newsletters per reader: a weekly digest with one-tap subscribe, one AI-assembled vertical edition, and a reactivation flow for a tested slice of the dormant base. Measured as new subscriptions and declared interests per thousand sent, with complaint rate as the guard.
• Engagement, Living Emails: a Living Email version of the flagship daily edition. Measured as engaged days per reader and the Next Open rate.
• Engagement, NeoCards: one Set, drawn from the archive. Measured as engaged days per reader against the holdout.

None of this needs a new audience, a new platform or a bigger marketing budget. It needs publishers to stop treating newsletters as a way to send readers somewhere else, and to start treating them as the place where the relationship lives.

Search was a gift, and it is being taken back. The inbox was never a gift. Publishers earned it one subscriber at a time, and no answer engine can summarise it away. The publishers who turn their newsletters into messages worth opening and objects worth keeping will not need the traffic back.

For twenty-five years, publishers taught themselves to maximise the value of the pageview. The next twenty-five will be about maximising the value of the reader.