This media briefing covers the latest trends in media for Digiday+ Members and is distributed via email every Thursday at 10:00 a.m. ET. More from the series:
The Media Briefing this week looks at Reddit as a top referral source for some news publishers. (Although the audience from the social media platform doesn’t replace the declining search referrals.)
- Reddit is becoming a major referrer.
- Google. Discovery splits into two and more.
Warner Bros. offers buyouts for search employees.
Reddit traffic is quietly increasing
As generative AI takes over search traffic, publishers are increasingly turning towards platforms like Reddit to attract audiences to their websites.
“Reddit is often the most popular referral channel for Reach U.S. operations,” said Donna Ogier. Reach owns U.S. and U.K. news sites such as Mirror, Express Daily Record, and Daily Star. Comscore data shows that the U.S. audience for these publications was approximately 37.5 million unique users in April 2025.
According to executives at The Atlantic and The Hill publications, Reddit is also the second-highest referral traffic source from social platforms. They declined to provide specific numbers.
Although Reddit is still a small portion of total traffic, it is growing rapidly. According to desktop data from analytics firm Similarweb, some news publishers are experiencing notable increases in referral traffic coming from Reddit. Reddit referral traffic to The Daily Beast, for example, is up 115% over the past year, reaching 457,000 visits in April of 2025. According to Similarweb, Men’s Journal has increased by 106%, to 7,000 visits. Axios has increased by 90%, to 192,000, HuffPost is up 55%, to 356,000, and The Hill is up 55%, to 309,000. The Atlantic is also up 48%, to 134,000, year over year.
Sarakshi Rai is The Hill’s Director of Audience Development and Head of Social Media. She said, “We have seen steady growth since January 2024 when we first started using Reddit.”
As an example, the Supreme Court allowed President Donald Trump to use his Twitter account. She said that the platform was the second most popular referrer to their sites on that day. Chartbeat’s data on 4,500 sites shows that Reddit referral traffic increased over the past year. Chartbeat data shows that Reddit sent 34.4 millions pageviews to these publishers’ websites in May 2025. This is up from 29.9 Million in May 2024. This represents a 15% year-over-year increase.
To put that into context, Reddit represents less than 1% in terms of publisher referral traffic.
Reddit, unlike Google, has spent the last year rolling out resources and products designed to help publishers increase their presence on the platform.
Reddit has added two new features to Reddit Pro this year, the free dashboard available for brands and publishers. Reddit launched the Trends tab in January to track keyword mentions within Reddit communities. In May, Reddit announced tools for developing brand and publisher profiles. Reddit presence.
Reddit Pro’s tools and analytics have helped Reach’s staff get the insights and analytics they need to report higher-ups on how much traffic and reach came from the platform. Rai, from The Hill, said that it helps her team to develop a Reddit strategy because they can see which content is performing well on the platform and what’s trending. David Carr, senior insight manager at Similarweb, said that Reddit was a “big winner” in Google search traffic. The traffic from Google organic searches to Reddit has more than doubled over the last year. Google started Reddit, a forum site, was able to increase its visibility in search results by 12% last year.
According to Similarweb, Reddit received about 1.2 billion referrals in April 2025 from Google Search, up from 600 million in April 2020. Reddit did not build its Google deal in order to boost publisher links, but the fact that Reddit’s threads appear more frequently in search results may end up as a positive side effect for publishers whose articles have been successful on the platform.
Reddit doesn’t yet have a formal program for publishers, but has a dedicated team that works with them, led by Gabriel Sands. He is the head of news and lifestyle partnership. Rai pointed out that Reddit’s publishing team does not share any specific strategies or ideas for helping content gain visibility. She said that it’s up to the teams to figure out how to do this through trial and error.
What we’ve heard:
When people knock on the front door, we answer. We have a duty to do so. When asked if Yahoo is in talks with buyers of its demand side platformRob Wilk, Yahoo’s CRO, replied, “Yes, we are.”
Numbers to Know
Google AI Overviews cites 1 in 5 news sources BBC, NYT, and CNN are the top three news sources with 31%.
Spotify has laid off 15 people in its podcasting business to focus on its video podcast push.
According to WPP Media Research, the expected increase in ad revenues for content creators is 20%. This is more than the ad revenues forecasted by traditional media companies.
What we’ve covered:
How you can survive Cannes Lions.
- From June 16 to 20, thousands of marketers and advertising executives will brave the heat of the French Riviera to attend the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
- Cannes Lions veterans Jim Cooper (Digiday’s editor in chief) and Seb Joseph (Digiday’s executive news editor) join the Digiday Podcast hosts to share the best tips for navigating the chaos. Listen to the latest Digiday Podcast here.
Lifestyle publishers rewrite SEO playbook for AI driven search
- Lifestyle Publishers are at risk of losing a large portion of their audience due to the generative AI features Google has added to its search engine. Digiday reported that four publishers had seen Google Search referral traffic fall between 30% and 50 percent since May 2024.
- Rather than panicking, they are doubling down on content that is still performing well in search and abandoning the rest.
Read on
Epic Games’ CEO Tim Sweeney wants to surpass YouTube in terms of growth
- Could Fortnite be the next YouTube? Epic Games may have higher aspirations.
- At Unreal Festival 2025, Digiday spoke with Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, and evp for the Fortnite ecosystem SaxsPersson, for an in-depth discussion about Fortnite’s evolution, the platform’s approach to creators monetization, and how Epic’s legal battle against Apple paved the way for Fortnite’s future as a platform for creators.
Read our Q&A here
ProRata has added a new group of publishers to its revenue-sharing program
- Boston Globe, Vox Media, Future, Fast Co. and Inc, as well as Fast Co. and Inc’s owner Mansueto Ventures have all signed up for the revenue-sharing program. Their content will power Gist.ai – an AI-powered search tool. Read more here
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WPP Media reduces 2025 ad spending predictions
- WPP Media downgraded their forecasts for growth in global ad expenditure by 1.7%.
- This decision was made in response to the massive response from clients to President Donald Trump’s ongoing war on trade.
Read on orto learn more.
What we’re Reading
Google offers buyouts for search and advertising employees.
The Information reported that Google is offering voluntary purchase agreements to U.S. workers in its search and ads groups.
Warner Bros. Discovery splits into two
Warner Bros. CNN reports that Discovery is splitting up into two publicly traded companies. CNN will be grouped together with the other television networks owned by Warner Bros.
Reddit Sues Anthropic.Reddit claims that Anthropic is illegally “scraping”or using the comments of Reddit’s users, to train its chatbot, Claude. The Verge reported. Reddit claims that Anthropic’s bots have accessed its platform 100,000 time since July 2024.
The Washington Post creates a new C-suite position for AI
The Washington Post promoted Sam Han to the newly created C-suite position of Chief AI Officer. It also created a product incubator.
The Guardian unifies its programmatic team
The Guardian, under the leadership of Dave Strauss (vp, revenue operations and strategy, Guardian US), has unified their programmatic advertising team, which spans U.K. markets, U.S. markets and Australian market.
