5 questions facing advertisers, publishers and creators heading into fall

**Kimeko McCoy** (0:10)
Hello, hello, and welcome to another episode of The Digiday Podcast, a show for anyone who's coming back from summer vacation and wondering to themselves what the hell happened summer 2026 I'm Kimeko McCoy, Senior Marketing Reporter at Digiday.

**Tim Peterson** (0:23)
And I'm Tim Peterson, Executive Editor of Video and Audio at Digiday Media. Kimeko, how was your summer?

**Kimeko McCoy** (0:32)
This is, I feel like, one of the first times in a while where summer did not feel like summer. Every summer, this just felt like a Monday, every single day. What about you?

**Tim Peterson** (0:40)
I agree on that. It feels, I mean, that's sad. I feel like the summer slowdown was a pre-pandemic thing that I fondly remember, but also wonder whether that is like a Mandela effect thing and was anything ever slow during summer. The summer was kind of weird because there were big things that happened, like Comcast announced it's going to spin off NBCUniversal, and Publicist announced it's going to acquire LiveRamp, Nielsen very recently announced that it's going to acquire DoubleVerify, YouTube decided to change up its revenue sharing program and its viewership methodology changes.
There's a lot of AI backlash, but it also feels like a lot of mid-major stories and developments as opposed to one seismic shift, which I feel like had, and again, this could be me just misremembering things. But it feels like in years past, there were more monumental developments over the summer.

**Kimeko McCoy** (1:47)
Yeah. The insane thing is that the fragmentation that happens in the marketplace, welcome to my buzzword, Jor.
The fragmentation in the marketplace has now hit us here in News Media, all of these different timelines and trying to make sense of what happened.

**Tim Peterson** (2:04)
Yeah. So we sat down and we came up with five areas of development, basically taking a bunch of the news that happened over the summer and organizing them to make sense of, okay, what has transpired over the past few months? And then what is that potentially set up? So for each of these topics, we kind of have a question of what's next?
So maybe the first one we should start with, because we kind of got into this with last week's episode with Sergi and Seb, is this Google Zero question, this question of are publishers going to actually cut off Google Search?

**Kimeko McCoy** (2:52)
Yeah, it's a question that's hanging above publishers head. I think long story short, you've got a lot of their traffic being absolutely decimated by Google and AI. So the question that's coming from publishers like USA Today and others, like, do we cut off these organic search crawlers? And if so, what happens then to our readership and whatnot? So I think it's a big question that they're having to tackle. And we covered a lot of this last week to your point with Sarah and Seb.

**Tim Peterson** (3:22)
But what do you think? The interesting thing is it seems like it's become more than just a question. Like publishers have been staring down the declining Google Search traffic for at least a couple years now. We hear about it at every publishing summit. We have, and we have at least two of them a year. We're about to have another one in a few weeks. And September 14th, we kicked that off in Miami, Florida.
But again, it seems like it's become more than just a question. Like you've had USA Today publicly say they're considering cutting off Google Search. You have The Wall Street Journal reporting that Reddit and Politico are privately considering it. Now, is that just Ratesaber rattling? Maybe. Probably.

**Kimeko McCoy** (4:15)
Well, the question to our point on the last episode that we had with Sarah and Seb is like, what's it going to take to actually pull the trigger?
And I think that's going to shake out, well, that should shake out if you keep staring down the barrel, at what point do you say, enough's too much and I've got to make a call here. And I think that'll be the thing that we're waiting to see that other shoot drop in.

**Tim Peterson** (4:38)
Yeah. I mean, at the least, we're going to be able to get a check-in on this question at, again, the Digiday Publishing Summit in mid-September in the US. And then we have our Media Strategies event in London in October to check in with the UK and the European publishers, especially the UK publishers, because they, thanks to the Competition and Markets Authority, have the opt-out, to be able to opt-out of Google's AI crawlers without opting out of Google Search, which is not something that has been made available to publishers in the US yet. So, whether publishers cut off Google, we'll see. But the UK publishers at the least seem to have been the best position to cut off Google without necessarily cutting off their own noses or more than just noses.