Destination news: Adapting to a disintermediated future

No one can say exactly how people will get the news five years from now. Consumer behaviour and the internet’s scaffolding are changing fast. News organisations are experiencing the consequences – declining referral traffic, the flight to news creators and answering news queries via AI interfaces – being just a few examples.

To intentionally oversimplify the options available to news organisations, they can:

1. Play Ostrich: Keep doing what’s worked for the past decade.
2. Chase Scale: Lean into popular distribution channels by pushing everything to social, letting the bots crawl and hoping for brand uplift and referral traffic.
3. Build a Destination: Protect scarce, highly differentiated content while selectively using new distribution channels only where they serve specific, stated goals.

In my opinion, the majority of news organisations should be trying to build a destination. I like Christian Lous Lange’s line, “Technology is a useful servant but a dangerous master”. News organisations need to welcome new technology and make use of it, but keep control of the reins (their content and audiences) to prevent others from dictating the rules. 

But how do you do it in practice? Firstly, you need to prioritise the right metrics. If I were a CEO, here are the metrics that I would keep an eye on in 2025 (some new, some very old):

• Owned Visits (#) - the total number of visits that come directly from to website or app (bypassing search / social / chatbots), newsletter referrals or push notification referrals. I would measure this over time and set a big target that encourages teams to redistribute referrals from indirect (social, search, etc) to direct ones. There’s no point measuring this as a % of overall visits because a decline in search visits will artificially increase Owned Visits %.
  
  
• Recognised Users (#) - the total number of users who you have an email address for, cookie consent and marketing permissions. This metric has been around for a few years at FT and encourages us to build direct relationships with users while also being able to bring them back to the site (via email) and monetise them effectively via advertising and personalised experiences. Again, I would set a big org-wide target and hope that teams can be inventive about data collection (like Aftonbladet asking for email in exchange for being able to ask custom queries to their Chatbot).
  
  
• Total Subscriber Lifetime Value (£) - the estimated lifetime value of your subscriber base (to date and projected into the future). While a lot of organisations talk about subscriber volume, these are often vanity metrics achieved by heavy discounting. By focusing on Total Subscriber Lifetime Value, teams should place greater emphasis on ARPU growth, retention improvements and product innovation. Ideally, this would encompass all kinds of revenue (subscription, advertising and events), but many aren’t there yet in terms of their data infrastructure.
  
  
• Protected Content (% of content) - the percentage of content that is behind your paywall and protected from web crawlers. Cloudflare’s recent announcement and the accompanying interview with their CEO go to show how important protecting your most valuable content will be in the future. If there isn’t scarcity, there isn’t value. If people can get access to the same or similar information for free elsewhere, then they will never pay for it and they won’t even bother going to the additional effort to find it (i.e. going to your website). The objective of this metric is not to get it as high as possible, but to get it to a level that leads to the best long-term commercial outcomes (allowing enough sampling to draw people in, while also justifying payment for content - either from a person, agent or crawler).
  
  
• Multi-Platform Users (% of users) - the percentage of users who are using two (or more) of the website, app or email. You could potentially include audio (if that is a separate app) and social (if you can stitch that data together). From our experience, the more owned and operated channels, the more resilient. This is important for engagement and reducing reliance on referred traffic.
  
  
• Frequency / Engagement (% of users) - some things just don’t change. It is vital to measure frequency segments (i.e. the % of users who fall within hyper-engaged, engaged and disengaged groups, at a minimum). An alternative is measuring and segmenting based on compound engagement scores (which is what we do at FT). Either way, we know these metrics correlate to higher conversion rates, lower churn and higher lifetime value.

As I alluded to at the beginning, the currents of distribution will keep changing, but the fundamentals remain the same:

• Deliver high-quality differentiated content 
• Make sure that the content meets the needs of a defined target audience
• Give your audiences a reason to come to you directly - make it scarce, deliver it in multiple formats, add features that others can’t (e.g. comments)
• Build relationships that put you in control of distribution
• Focus on driving maximum engagement and lifetime value.

Those who spend their time and effort doing those things will (I hope) be the ones we celebrate in five years time.