AI Is Eating Publisher Traffic. Sky News and Daily Mail Are Both Dealing With It.
Three publishers, the same collapsing traffic model, each at a different stage of replacing it.
SubscriptionX 2026 ran at Convene in London on Tuesday 17th June with a programme that was, at points, more precise about diagnosing the industry’s problems than resolving them. I have covered three stand out sessions from the day’s events.
The content value chain AI broke, and the coalition trying to fix it
Emma Cordano, Head of Propositions at Sky News, opened with a structural argument. The original exchange of value between publishers and platforms was imperfect, she acknowledged, but it was at least a functioning cycle: platforms monetised on discovery, publishers on attention, and users got the content. What AI has substituted is not an equivalent deal.
Publishers lose not only the revenue when an AI system summarises their journalism in response to a query. They lose the demand signal too. They cannot see what was asked, who asked it, or how the content was used. The intelligence that should be driving editorial investment is being extracted alongside the work itself. Cordano put it plainly: “The fastest growing part of the internet is the part that no one can see.”
Dominic Young, co-lead of the Spur Coalition, took the argument forward. Spur launched with six major UK publishers including the BBC, Sky News, the Guardian and The Telegraph, and announced more than 30 members at the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress in Marseille earlier in June. The coalition has continued to attract interest from publishers across Asia, North America and elsewhere.
Young was clear about scope. Spur is not a lobbying operation, and it is not planning litigation. It is trying to build a market, one structured around three things’ publishers currently lack: control over who accesses their content, workable licensing frameworks, and telemetry data, the signals that would tell a rights holder how their content is being used inside AI systems. A draft telemetry standard was published last Friday.
Young reached for streaming as the comparison. Those services generate revenue share for rights holders because usage is measurable, transparent and auditable. Licensing functions when it is conditional and verifiable. AI content extraction, now, operates on none of those terms.
“We don’t want anonymous access. We don’t want workarounds. We don’t want black box systems where once the content is inside an AI, you never hear from it again.”
Spur’s ambition is a market in which high-quality content keeps a commercial role inside the AI ecosystem instead of being absorbed by it. Whether it can be built before AI companies have taken enough to make the negotiation moot is the part the coalition cannot yet control.
Millions of readers and tens of thousands of subscribers: the gap in the funnel is the story
Where Sky News and Spur were arguing over the terms of supply to AI, the next session moved downstream, to the readers who still arrive in significant numbers. Andy Wilson, Head of Retention at Daily Mail, was notably candid about what the Mail’s freemium experiment has and has not yet resolved. Mail +launched in January 2024 and now counts over 40,000 subscribers. Wilson presented that figure as progress in a business that still generates traffic at a scale most UK publishers can only observe from a distance.
The tension is familiar to anyone in publishing. A business built on advertising revenue optimises for volume and velocity; subscriptions reward the opposite: depth of engagement, demonstrated recurring value, and a reader who has made an active decision to pay.
Wilson was direct about the forces accelerating the issue. Traffic from third-party surfaces, including Apple News, AI-generated summaries and changes to Google’s search behaviour, is in structural decline. Users who previously clicked through are no longer arriving. The advertising revenue those visits generated is going with them. This is not a Daily Mail-specific problem, but it is creating urgency to build a direct revenue relationship with readers that was not there when the traffic model worked.
Mail+ launched at a price point Wilson described as significantly lower than The Times or Telegraph, with a four-month free trial. The publisher maintains separate editorial leadership for Mail Online and Mail+, a deliberate structural decision. A single editor managing both free and paid content faces irreconcilable KPI conflicts between traffic volume and subscription quality. Separating the roles lets each product be optimised on its own terms.
What the data has taught them is primarily about product usage rather than pricing. The metric Wilson named as the strongest predictor of retention: 15 individual active days per month, engaging with two or more Daily Mail products. Subscribers who meet both criteria churn at dramatically lower rates. Users on a single product, particularly mobile-only, churn at a much higher rate. That makes multi-product usage a problem for the product team to solve before it is one for marketing.
The bigger gap, Wilson said, is a registration tier the Mail does not yet have. Between the anonymous free reader and the paying subscriber there is currently nothing: no email address, no declared identity, no relationship that could be used to build a conversion path. Most readers pass through without leaving any trace.
A new article format, multi-part scrollable pieces, is showing significantly higher engagement. Whether that engagement converts into subscriptions is the test the Mail has not yet run.
Bundling works when it is a product decision, not a pricing one
Louise Ioannou, Publisher of National Geographic Kids and National Geographic Little Kids, came at the same underlying problem from a different direction. Her starting point sat upstream of conversion entirely: how do you make a children’s magazine worth keeping for an entire month when a child reads it in a day?
The answer was bundling, understood as a product architecture rather than a commercial add-on. National Geographic Kids now delivers its magazine subscription inside a membership structure that includes:
Active Explorer events three times a year (currently online, costing approximately £2,000 per event to stage).
A partnership with the RHS (the Royal Horticultural Society), offering mutual discounts to each other’s subscriber bases.
Cross-promotion with National Geographic magazine, including free trial access for subscribers moving between the two titles.
Subscriber-only competitions, which also function as birthday data capture, used to move young readers between age-appropriate magazines as they grow.
A brand ambassador programme in development, built around a children’s content creator who will serve as the figurehead of the reader club.
The deliberate decision not to tier the membership, not to charge more for access to events and partnerships, was a communication decision as much as a pricing one. The bundle needed to read as included value rather than optional extras at a premium.
The pieces have started to feed each other in ways the original retention brief did not anticipate. Events generate word-of-mouth that brings in new subscribers. The RHS partnership introduces audience from outside the National Geographic brand entirely. Competitions capture data. An annual reader survey feeds directly into what appears in the magazine the following year.
Partner selection is disciplined. Ioannou described declining a partnership with a cleaning products brand, one with significant distribution and wide reach, on the grounds that it would not sit credibly with an eco-conscious audience. The RHS relationship works because the alignment is genuine, not just demographic.
The subscription base, running into the thousands, auto renews at a rate reflecting the membership proposition rather than just the magazine. Constant subscriber research and feedback, Ioannou said, underpins every editorial and commercial decision the team makes.
