Welcome to your daily Press Gazette media briefing on Wednesday, 2 July, brought to you today in association with Admiral, The Visitor Relationship Management (VRM) Company.

Adblockers continue to erode publisher revenue, but the right recovery strategy can reverse that trend at scale. In today’s feature, Admiral shares how Paramount Global recovered over $13M in blocked revenue across major brands like CBS Sports, CBS News, and 247 Sports through a full-stack, multi-site adblock recovery rollout with continuous optimisation and real-time targeting.

There was big news yesterday in the fight for the future of journalism as a coalition of major online publishers backed technology intended to keep out AI bots.

Dotdash Meredith and Time in the US as well as DMGT and Sky News in the UK are among the companies backing the Cloudflare technology.

Cloudflare is an internet hosting network and online security specialist which believes it can keep out unwanted website crawlers. It also has plans to charge the AI bots for access to websites on a pay-per-crawl basis.

Dotdash Meredith is the biggest consumer publisher in the US with brands such People, Verywell and Investopedia. Chief commercial officer Jon Meredith said: "From today, AI companies can’t take our content for free.

"AI runs on chips, electricity, and information. Chips and power are table stakes. But if you have the best inputs, you’ll have the best outputs. We’re one of the biggest publishers on earth, and we believe great content is at the heart of the future of AI.

"So as a first step, no one gets to take it for free."

Without quality input, generative AI answer engines are just recycling and regurgitating worthless online sludge. Journalists and the publishers who employ them are the real value creators and they need to get paid. Full story here.

Today we also we also have the latest UK top-50 news websites data which shows Reach regional titles leading the growth charts.

Surrey Live, with its emphasis on health content targeted at Google Discover, grew 310% year on year and is now the 34th biggest news website in the UK with a monthly UK audience of five million according to Ipsos iris (about four times the population of Surrey).

In terms of engagement, Mail Online is the leading UK commercial publisher with 1.3 billion audience minutes in May compared with 785 billion minutes for The Guardian in second place.

Overall there is quite a lot of variability in performance between different sites.

But with two-thirds of news websites seeing year-on-year growth in May there is no sign yet that worst-case scenarios discussed at recent journalism conferences about Google zero and the death of the website are coming to fruition any time soon.

From our sponsor

Admiral helps publishers of all sizes protect their ad revenue, increase engagement, and future-proof their monetisation with zero dev lift required.

Case Study: Paramount Global

Facing rising adblock rates across its major brands like CBS Sports, CBS News, 247 Sports, MaxPreps, and others, Paramount implemented Admiral’s multi-site recovery solution with Smart Engage, time-based targeting, and real-time optimisation.

Highlights:

• Block rates reduced by over 70%

• $13M in revenue recovered since working with Admiral

• Recovery rates up to 50.4% in just 180 days

With tailored strategies for each property, Paramount turned adblock loss into sustainable growth.

Explore the full case study

On Press Gazette

UK and US publishers back move to block AI scrapers by default

“A game-changer for publishers and sets a new standard for how content is respected online. When AI companies can no longer take anything they want for free, it opens the door to sustainable innovation built on permission and partnership.”

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50 biggest UK news websites in May: Two-thirds see audience growth while half get engagement boost

Four Reach websites saw their audience at least double in the past year. The biggest of these sites was Examiner Live in Huddersfield, up 200.4% to reach 9.2 million people in May.

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