Get real: back to basics with people, not bots
Amid rampant digital ad fraud, publishers are rediscovering the power of direct relationships through email, events, and trustworthy journalism
You’re reading the Your News Biz newsletter. My goal is to help digital media entrepreneurs find viable business models.
Last time I told you about some AI tools that I use and trust in my work as a volunteer business coach and as a help to independent news publishers.
This is a post of good news that contains responses to bad news. So you’ll hear about:
— A magazine editor whose novel strategy triggered a subscriptions boost
— A former publisher who urges clients to start with personal relationships
— A news and tech innovator whose products “eliminate intermediaries”
— How all of these pivots were triggered by spam and rampant automated ad fraud
From New York via Madrid
We’re going to begin with a story about how a publisher is “getting real” and seeing rapid subscription growth. A friend referred me to this interview with Katie Drummond, global editorial director of WIRED U.S. and WIRED UK, which appeared in the English language edition of El País, Spain’s leading newspaper.
Drummond told Ana Vidal Egea of El País that publishers around the world are facing a similar problem: Their traffic, and their ad revenue, have declined drastically on social media and search.
"I think we’re in a moment where the ability of those platforms to drive audiences to these publishers has essentially disappeared. And now, publishers need to rely on nothing more than excellent journalists to tell those stories.”
“We’re really seeing it as an opportunity to get back to having a direct relationship with our audience, instead of a relationship mediated by Facebook or Google." — Katie Drummond, global editorial director of Wired magazine.
In Drummond’s two years at the influential tech industry publication, she greatly increased the coverage of how politics is intertwined with the industry. It’s Musk-Trump and the Silicon Valley oligarchy of billionaires focused on influencing policy in Washington.
The strategy seems to have worked. The magazine gained 62,500 new subscribers in the first two months of 2025. Relatively that’s small — 0.3% on its base of 19.5 million print and digital subscribers in 2024. But the rest of the industry is bleeding traffic and subscribers.
Why did they grow? It starts with trustworthy, exclusive content, Drummond believes. “Generative AI cannot report, write and publish a scoop,” she told El País. “Generative AI cannot generate new and newsworthy information in the public interest.”
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You can’t scale relationships
About the same time that I was reading Katie Drummond’s message about trustworthy information, I saw a post on LinkedIn by an old friend, John Dinkel, who I had the good sense to hire as sales manager for the Baltimore Business Journal years ago. The paper had some of its best years under John’s leadership in sales and later as publisher.
John has always been a believer in the power of relationships. Here is what he had to say on LinkedIn:
“In a world flooded with digital noise and cold outreach, meaningful, in-person relationships are still driving serious results. According to a study shared by MakingThatSale, ‘85% of people say they build stronger, more authentic relationships during face-to-face business meetings’—and that makes all the difference when it comes to trust and closing deals.”
“Whether it’s a coffee with a referral partner, a breakfast round-table, or a community event—your network is your pipeline. — John Dinkel, founder and CEO, Dinkel Business Development
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The elephant in the room: digital fraud
Drummond and Dinkel are responding to the turmoil in the world of digital advertising. It’s getting harder for publishers and advertisers to get their messages to real people. There are lots of pieces to this puzzle. Here are two examples:
Ad fraud schemes using generative AI will increase in sophistication — Digiday
Ad fraud statistics (2025) Nearly half of internet traffic attributed to bots — Business of Apps
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‘Own the relationship’
This scary stuff brought me full circle to an interview I did last year with another former colleague, Tim Bradbury. When we met in 2000 at American City Business Journals, the internet was still a relatively new thing.
Bradbury recognized the potential of an email newsletter with local content to generate sponsorship revenue. American City had 40 titles around the country. (I had just started experimenting with a newsletter in Baltimore.) In a few months, he landed a multimillion-dollar contract with a software company. (I told the story here.)
The subject line of these newsy emails contained the name of American City’s local publisher. The goal, Bradbury recalled, was to make it feel like a personal communication with no intermediary. “It created a direct relationship between the publisher and reader. At the time, it was the main way to identify and understand who our digital customers were.”
‘Eliminate the intermediaries’
At that time, spam was still just a meat product in a can. It wasn’t like today, when we’re bombarded with sleazy email promotions, propaganda, and misinformation.
But maybe email shouldn’t be the primary vehicle any longer for connecting with your audience, he told me. Today he is President/General Manager-Publisher Alliance @ 5x5. We recently reconnected in a media data group run by Johnny Levy of Data Joe.
Publishers should “surround the newsletter with other services to engage the user,” he says. His new venture, 5x5, aims to remove the middleman.
I will let 5x5’s website explain how it works, but basically it builds a more detailed profile of an individual — work, home, leisure, purchasing behavior, etc. — than is possible using cookies alone.
But Bradbury is worried about all the digital noise that prevents publishers from getting their messages to real people. Here he sounds like the two people mentioned above, Katie Drummond and John Dinkel.
In response to all the bots and ad fraud, Bradbury said 5x5 is testing a combination of AI tools and metrics, as well as Augustine Fou’s Fou Analytics, to create a “people-only” and “brand-safe” advertising environment for both publishers and advertisers.
Last word: Am I worried? Yes and no
As I showed in some links above, the digital media ecosystem today is flooded with malicious bots, automated disinformation, and political propaganda. All of this phony content is diverting revenue and attention from legitimate news and information providers.
Strong relationships with news consumers can overcome these challenges. And that’s why I wanted you to hear from our three experts today. They’re betting on the power of real people, authentic relationships, and valuable content. I’m betting on them too.
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Bonus: paying users in Ukraine and Spain
Here are two examples of news organizations the are showing how high-value, in-depth reporting can attract significant financial support from users.
Correction: In a previous version of this post, the headline gave an incorrect number for the Kyiv Independent’s paid circulation: it’s actually 20,000, a milestone they were celebrating.
Thanks, Jeremy!