Search traffic fell 36%: what a direct reader is worth now

A direct reader is the only reader a publisher can reach again without asking a platform for permission. Piano's benchmark across hundreds of publisher sites put search traffic down 36% while revenue fell just 16%. That gap is the case for owned audience: readers a publisher can email, register, or retain keep paying after the referral dries up. Three things decide what any visitor is worth: whether you can reach them again, how long they stay, and which revenue path they can enter. Search visitors monetize per impression. Direct readers can become accounts, then subscribers. One caveat up front: Piano's figures are vendor benchmark data, self-reported by one analytics firm. We watch this space in our digital coverage. What happened to search traffic? It fell off a cliff, per the same benchmark. Piano's data across hundreds of publisher sites showed search traffic down 36%, revenue down 16%, and overall audience down 9%.

This excerpt comes from the named source. Read the original for the full reporting.