How Hello! plugged Discover traffic gap | People Inc considers blocking Google

Good morning from the team at Press Gazette on Thursday, 6 August.

👋 Hello! is proving there can be life after Google for consumer newsbrands.

In August last year it was one of many publishers that suffered after Google decided to make its Discover platform crapper by prioritising X posts and Youtube content over articles from professional publishers. Website traffic fell off a cliff overnight.

In our latest podcast, Hello! chief content officer Sophie Vokes-Dudgeon explained how the celebrity news title has plugged the Google Discover revenue and audience hole by refocusing on syndication partners like MSN, Apple and Yahoo.

She gets down into the weeds of all this by explaining how a new data dashboard helped them figure out what content to do more of and what to ditch.

Advertising revenue share from these content syndication platforms is helping Hello! build a bridge to the sunlit uplands of reader revenue via its new VIP subscription offering. It is also making major progress on building a direct online audience with more than one million people now signed up to receive email newsletters and other registered reader benefits.

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📉 The biggest consumer publisher in the US, People Inc (formerly Dotdash Meredith), put a brave face on its latest financial figures.

But four years after Barry Diller’s IAC married its online publishing business Dotdash with magazine giant Meredith in a $2.7bn deal, revenue decline is not where they would have hoped to be.

Overall revenue for People Inc was down 2% year on year to $416.7m in the second quarter of 2026.

Google referrals now make up 21% of traffic to People Inc’s 19 leading brands, compared with around 66% a few years ago.

Actually blocking Google’s crawlers remains on the table for People Inc, CEO Neil Vogel said, because in the US (unlike the UK) there is still no way for publishers to opt out of Google AI Overviews without also leaving the search index.

As with news publishers elsewhere, People is pivoting fast toward social-first creator-style content, apps, events and paid online products.

The success of tabloid-style online newsbrand Daily Beast offers a bit of encouragement. Revenue there was said to be up 53% year on year to $20m in the second quarter.

Earlier this year, chief operating officer Keith Bonnici told Press Gazette’s New York conference how AI-powered product innovation and AI licensing revenue had directly helped the brand become profitable for the first time in its 17-year history.

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📻 The latest quarterly radio listening figures for the UK show GB News surging ahead as the fastest-growing talk station – up 34% in a year to 731,000 listeners per week.

News UK-owned Times Radio and Talk also saw healthy year on year growth.

Meanwhile, Radio 4’s Today held steady at 5.6 million listeners per week. It is down from its 2017 peak of 7.8 million (under the current RAJAR methodology). But it maintains a commanding lead as probably the single newsbrand with the biggest audience in the UK.

It makes the BBC decision to cut its roster of presenters from five to four following the impending departure of Amol Rajan seem like a strange thing to slice from the corporation’s £6bn annual budget.