Data-Labor-Technology

The referral traffic coming from links shared to X (née Twitter) to publishers’ websites has declined sharply in the past year.

Web publishing tech provider Automattic analyzed a random set of 25 large and small publishers and found that traffic from X fell on average by 24% from the first half of 2022 to the first half of 2023, according to Todd Blackmon, who oversees Automattic’s global marketing agency partnerships. That’s a significant drop from the 13% decline Digiday reported in January.

X throttling causes NYT traffic dip

This comes amid a report from The Washington Post last week that X was found to be slowing the page load speed of links to news organizations like The New York Times and Reuters, as well as other platforms like Substack. Publishers put a lot of resources into making sure their websites open as fast as possible, as people tend to abandon a website if it takes more than a few seconds to load.

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This week’s Media Briefing checks in with four media revenue chiefs about how the second half of 2023 is pacing from an advertising standpoint.

• Q3 is on pace but 2024 is top of mind
• Why publishers chose The Washington Post’s Arc XP
• Former Vice journalists start new tech pub, publishers are losing traffic from Facebook and more

Q3 is on pace but 2024 is top of mind

After a tumultuous start to the year, the second half of 2023 is looking pretty good by comparison — at least based on how Q3 is going.

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July may have been a blockbuster month for the movie industry, thanks to the odd-couple pairing of Barbie and Oppenheimer — and year to date, box office receipts are said to be tracking 23% ahead of 2022, according to National CineMedia (NCM), one of the two major firms selling ad time around pre-movie content in theaters. 

NCM just a few weeks ago emerged from a voluntary bankruptcy, shedding more than $1 billion in debt in the process. And both NCM and Screenvision, its main rival, are on the verge of closing their upfront deals with media buyers and brands. Cinema advertising, whether it likes it or not, stands at the end of the line for sellers of video ad time, behind linear, CTV, digital video and other digital out-of-home media. 

According to both, it’s been a good upfront given how soft the market has been for video sellers overall.

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Advertisers will not be able to run active shopping ads using Storefront after September 12. TikTok is urging advertisers to adopt the fully integrated “seamless” shopping experience.

He promises a new 10% border tax on anything made abroad.

X is offering a “one-time ad credit of $250 USD” to every small business that spends $1,000 or more on a new campaign over the next month, according to a recent company tweet.

The industry euphemism for theft disguises the rising cost of crime.

Ad tech firm Infillion will take possession of MediaMath, confirmed the filings of an August 23 bankruptcy hearing, bookending one of the ad tech stories of the year, so far.

Digiday has learned that AperiamVentures, the investment fund led by former MediaMath CEO Joe Zawadzki, advised on the winning $22 million cash bid for the company, a development that could rekindle the relationship between the ad tech veteran and the company he founded in 2007.

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Scene 1: A bathroom inside Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.