Nowadays, it’s conventional wisdom that search and social platforms aren’t as generous with referral traffic. As a result, news sites are looking elsewhere for new readers.
The good news is you don’t have to feel around in the dark. Successful news sites of all sizes are finding new traffic today through strategies like working with news aggregators, buying traffic from trusted sources, and making editorial decisions based on massive datasets.
The decline in traffic to news sites is slowing down as the industry adopts new strategies to acquire readers
In the early 2000s, news sites like Yahoo and MSN were among the most trafficked worldwide. By 2010, the landscape had changed dramatically. Google and social media platforms had usurped them.
News sites had to work harder to attract new readers, relying a lot on referral traffic from search and social media platforms. In those days, Google, Twitter, and Facebook were much more generous with traffic, but that trend has reversed dramatically. Plus, a rise in social media platforms that have never been interested in sharing traffic, like Instagram and TikTok, have grown in popularity.
As a result, traffic to news sites declined. The average monthly unique visitors to the most visited digital news websites in the world—those with at least 10 million unique visitors per month in the fourth quarter of a given year—have dropped by 3% in the past two years.
But this period of decline is already slowing and will quickly reverse as the industry abandons its reliance on search and social platforms and adopts new strategies for attracting readers.
3 Ways to Attract News Readers Outside of Search and Social
Some news sites are already succeeding at reversing their traffic decline. Their strategies are founded on attracting new readers in high volume where they congregate outside of search and social platforms—namely, their devices and other news sites.
1. Work with news aggregators
News aggregators have two major benefits: They curate personalized experiences for readers and can reach people on their devices before they open a social app or web browser.
These benefits are a huge boost for news sites, which have struggled to provide the personalized experiences people have come to love from social media apps and search engines.
Plus, news aggregators like Taboola News, Apple News, and Google News allow publishers to reach readers on their home screen feeds before they unlock their phones.
For example, we work with The Independent in the UK, the US, Singapore, and other countries. They use Taboola News to increase traffic and revenue by diversifying referral sources. It quickly became a top-three Taboola traffic referral source for The Independent Singapore, generating 3% more views per visit.
Taboola News drives 6% of overall traffic for the HuffPost Korea. They were an early adopter of the technology, which distributes their content in premium placements across Samsung smartphones in the Korean market.
You want to be picky with the news aggregators you work with. You should be confident their audiences are engaged and clicks aren’t accidental. You’ll always be more successful working with a platform incentivized to help you grow, like Taboola. Our growth directly correlates with our partner’s growth.
2. Buy traffic
Buying traffic can be tricky when budgets are tight, but profitable traffic buying is still an essential strategy for many news sites. But, their success depends on the platform.
Ads are getting more expensive on platforms like Meta and Google at a time when new privacy legislation makes it harder than ever before to tell if those ads even work. In comparison, many publishers find that buying ads on other news sites is a profitable way to drive new traffic. It makes sense why: it’s a natural journey for readers to transition from reading news content on one site to another instead of jumping from an ad to an article.
Our partners consider Taboola Ads an affordable way to drive traffic to pages that generate the most value, such as branded campaigns, underserved ad campaigns, newsletters, or e-commerce pages.
MoneyWise, a digital personal finance publication operated by Wise Publishing, simplifies complex financial topics for readers. The site is operated by real people from all financial backgrounds—homeowners, recent graduates, parents, newlyweds, and investors saving for retirement—and has a growing readership of seven million unique monthly readers.
Moneywise uses Taboola Ads to generate traffic from high-quality readers and increase click-through rate (CTR) by using optimization strategies like Maximize Conversions.
Buying traffic isn’t just about volume; it’s about targeting the right readers more likely to engage and stay on your site. Successful news sites often employ a mix of paid traffic strategies, including retargeting past visitors and reaching lookalike audiences that mirror their most engaged readers. This approach drives immediate traffic and fosters long-term growth by focusing on high-quality audiences that convert into loyal readers.
Another key strategy is allocating budget and editorial effort toward content with the highest potential for reader engagement and revenue generation. Taboola Newsroom shows Taboola’s partners which articles have the most engagement, using a definition that’s custom to their publication. For example, pushing traffic toward articles already performing well organically can amplify their reach, turning popular content into even bigger traffic drivers. Smart bidding strategies, like those used by Taboola, let publishers optimize their spend in real-time, adjusting bids based on performance metrics to ensure that every dollar spent works toward acquiring valuable readership.
Some news publishers also find success in buying traffic to high-converting pages like newsletter sign-ups or subscription offers, effectively using paid traffic as a gateway to deeper engagement and monetization opportunities. Buying traffic can be a powerful tool in a news site’s growth strategy by carefully managing ad spend and focusing on engaged audiences.
Incentives come into play here, too. The more resources you allocate to channels owned by publishers that aren’t incentivized to help news sites grow, the less likely you are to be successful long-term.
3. Make data-driven editorial decisions
High-quality content is the best way to attract new readers. If you’re going to acquire them at scale, you need to base editorial decisions on insights that dictate what those readers consider quality reporting.
Our network of partners generates a massive dataset from over 500 million daily active readers. Taboola Newsroom helps writers, editors, and special-interest teams make sense of this data to make informed decisions to increase their audience.
Newsroom monitors real-time and historical data about content performance across your news site and other sites that partner with Taboola. We track page views, the speed at which traffic is being acquired, and engagement. We can segment that data by referral type, section, or author.
This data helps our partners discover news angles they haven’t already covered for trending topics, see which topics are currently the most widely covered across all channels, or zero in on search and social traffic.
FOX SPORTS Australia uses Newsroom to make sports coverage decisions across its subscription television sports channels and the country’s number one multi-sports website and app.
The editorial team can see real-time snapshots of trending topics and what content users are searching for, which helps writers decide which stories to focus on.
Summit Media, Filipinos’ leading digital media network, has a similar story. Using data from Taboola Newsroom, they create valuable, entertaining, and inspiring content that helps readers lead better lives.
The Summit Media team acts on at least 50% of Taboola Newsroom’s alerts. These alerts help them act quickly to produce more relevant content and maximize pageviews from their articles.
“If we get an alert about a particular story gaining traction on social media, we usually prioritize that for optimization. The alerts also help us identify which stories to highlight on our home pages. There’s very little guesswork, and it speeds up decision-making for busy editors,” said Jillian Gatcheco, Deputy Editorial Director, Operations and Product Development.
You can’t just rely on data from social media and other channels to predict site readership—those audiences have completely different mindsets. To make the best content decisions, you need data directly tied to how people engage with a news site.
You also don’t want to neglect Google Discover, which powers recommendations on Android devices and Chrome browsers. But knowing how to grow traffic from there can be tricky. Newsroom provides reliable referral traffic data from Google Discover based on your site’s traffic patterns.
Gain a Unique Advantage Attracting New Readers and Growing Your Audience
News sites can’t rely solely on traditional sources like search engines and social media for traffic anymore. These platforms are inclined to keep readers for themselves. Now’s the time for news sites to attract readers and grow their audiences elsewhere.
News sites will do this in 2025 by working with news aggregators, investing in paid traffic, and gathering the right insights.
Taboola offers a unique advantage— we connect our partners with readers across our network of over 500 million daily active readers across other sites and devices, supporting traffic acquisition and content monetization strategies. Our tools, like Taboola Newsroom and Trends, empower publishers to make informed editorial decisions, optimize content performance, and drive higher engagement.
You want to attract new readers, but you ultimately want to be set up to retain them. The larger percentage of reader you can get to come back even one more time, the more you’ll see sustainable growth long-term.
Stay tuned for the next article in our series, where we’ll dive into strategies for keeping users on your site once you’ve captured their attention.