.png)
.png)
The new reality is not one model but a portfolio, diversified, flexible, and resilient across borders and contexts.
September is always the time to take stock of whether the strategy for the current year has been successful or not as budgets close and most strategies are written. For publishers, this fall is more than a symbolic fresh start: after a usually calm summer (August’s slow news cycle is real, despite what’s happening in the world), it is the last window to act before next year. And we all know 2026 is going to be pretty interesting on the content strategy side.
The questions are not new, we wrote earlier this year about the decline of referrals from platforms and about AI’s disruption of news discovery, but the urgency has only grown sharper (and it’s a good thing).
The model that sustained digital media for the past decade is no longer viable. Free distribution through platforms once delivered reach (traffic share was king for years), and advertising plus a fraction of paying subscribers made up the difference. That balance is gone.
Traffic from search and social media has weakened. Audiences face paywalls they cannot or will not cross. Journalists produce work that circulates in AI summaries without ever touching the publisher’s servers. And a new kind of platforms announce “compensation programs” with big numbers but few guarantees.
It is tempting to see AI purely as an existential threat, another layer of disintermediation, a machine that rewrites and redirects attention elsewhere. Left entirely in the hands of platforms, it will be exactly that.
But AI can also serve publishers, if integrated on their own terms: surfacing archives, creating context, matching the right content with the right audiences, even powering new forms of compensation. The line between erosion and amplification will depend on whether publishers reclaim control of the distribution layer.
What replaces the old system will not be a single silver bullet. Subscriptions remain essential, but they cannot stand alone. Sponsorship and institutional support can widen access. Micro-compensation can give value to individual pieces of content that resonate beyond a core subscriber base. Advertising still plays a major role, but not as the sole foundation. Licensing deals are on the rise. The new reality is not one model but a portfolio, diversified, flexible, and resilient across borders and contexts.
Fall is not a time to wait for others to solve the problem. By January, publishers need models that are not only on the drawing board but live, tested, and iterating.
Those who pilot new approaches now, whether through hybrid compensation flows or cross-border syndication, will enter 2026 with evidence and leverage. Those who delay risk starting the year further behind.
At Nordot, we see our role as clear: to be the neutral access layer that enables this balance. We help publishers distribute globally and monetize flexibly, combining multiple revenue models. Distribution is only half the battle; compensation is the other half. And both must evolve together.
Bertrand de Volontat is VP of EMEA at Nordot, where he helps publishers make the most of their content across platforms and borders. With a background in both journalism and media business, he led editorial operations at upday and launched several digital media ventures in the past.