Ziff Davis loses 37% of its Google traffic

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

This is Marketing Is Calling, the audio edition of Landline, the daily newsletter from PPC Land. It's Saturday, November 7th, 2026 This episode is read by an AI voice.

Today, Ziff Davis says it lost 37 percent of its Google traffic in a year. USA TODAY Co cuts $100 million in costs. Teads writes off its goodwill, and Cloudflare has its best quarter yet. Meta and Google sue California over its teen feed law, and ChatGPT builds a dashboard that shows businesses how often it mentions them.

We start with publishers. On Friday, November 6th, Ziff Davis' chief executive Vivek Shaw told analysts that organic Google referrals to CNET, IGN, PCMag, and the company's other sites fell about 37 percent in the third quarter, after a drop of about 23 percent the year before. Then he gave a second number. Search console data showed Ziff Davis' content appearing in AI overviews and AI mode about 2.7 billion times, close to 10 times the clicks the company got from Google Search. Shaw said plainly that the company isn't planning on a search recovery. It's moving towards social commerce, video, apps, and email instead, and it's cutting headcount by 10 percent by the end of the year.

USA TODAY Co, the company once called Gannett, put a price on the same trend. Revenue fell 7.4 percent to $519.2 million in programmatic and recommendation revenue that depends on visitors from search fell 32 percent. The company launched a $100 million cost reduction program. Chief executive Mike Reed called search visitors the lowest value users by price per thousand impressions, and said the shift is happening a little faster than he'd like. Its antitrust suit against Google goes to trial on April 5, 2027

Publishers with loyal audiences did better. News Corp's group revenue rose 6 percent, and Dow Jones Advertising rose 9 percent. But profit in the unit that holds The Sun, The Times, and The New York Post fall 40 percent to $18 million. BuzzFeed's revenue fell 44 percent to $26 million in Byron Ellen's first full quarter in charge, with affiliate revenue down 71 percent. The companies that sell ads around publisher content felt it too. Teads' revenue fell 26 percent, and a $272 million write-off pushed its net loss to $325.5 million. Chief Executive David Cosman blamed AI search summaries, which he said cut publisher page views by 20 to 60 percent. Teads now has a stockholders deficit, is in talks with its lenders, and its filing mentions the risk of a NASDAQ delisting. Yelp reported its seventh straight quarter of falling ad clicks, with ad revenue down six percent. Its chief operating officer said he doesn't expect the local advertising market to turn anytime soon.

Now, the other side of the ledger. The companies underneath AI traffic had a great week. Cloudflare's revenue rose 39 percent to $782.5 million, its fastest growth in nearly four years, and it now expects to turn a profit years ahead of plan. It booked its first revenue from products that sit between AI agents and websites and charge for that traffic. Chief executive Matthew Prince said OpenAI already pays for some of these signals, and called agent aware advertising a future opportunity. Daily AI agent requests on Cloudflare grew more than 17-fold in a year. The midterms filled other tills. Magnite's net income rose 70 percent to $34 million.

Political ads brought in about 12 million in the quarter, and Magnite now expects more than 40 million for the year, nearly three times its forecast. Chief executive Michael Barrett said political spending clearly crowded out other advertising in some states. Elsewhere in TV, Xpery's ad revenue nearly quadrupled from a small base, but was flat on the previous quarter. MNTN cut its 2026 revenue forecast by 11 percent, after what it called sales execution problems. And former Duncan marketing chief Tony Weissman took over as chief executive. And HubSpot's growth slowed, with chief executive Yamini Rangan saying buyers want to see the proof of AI before they buy.

Social platforms are leaning on subscriptions and fans. Snap's ad revenue grew only 4 percent, while subscriptions supplied about three quarters of its growth. Evan Spiegel admitted that 4 percent ad growth is below his ambitions.

YouTube expanded paid hypes to the US, the UK, and seven more markets, letting fans spend virtual currency to boost videos, with creators getting a share.

And Digiday reported that Instagram now accepts videos up to 90 minutes long, but has no payment model for them yet. In one survey, 93 percent of creators said Instagram would need to change its revenue policies before they'd post long-form videos there. Now to the courts. On November 4, Meta and Google each sued California to block a law that bans personalized feeds and autoplay for users under 16 from January 1