Programmatic: Is Social Publishing a Lifeline... or a Trojan Horse for Publishers?

A few days ago, I was chatting with a publisher who told me: "Social publishing is giving us a bit of breathing room given the current context..."

The context is indeed complicated for OpenWeb publishers:

• Social media networks show +15% growth in H1 2025 💵💵
• Meanwhile, "Publishing/News" publishers are seeing their ad revenues drop by -5% (source: SRI LES REGIES INTERNET) 💸💸

For several years, publishers have been in open conflict with social networks (Meta and X leading the pack). These platforms rely partly on publishers' content—shared by users—to fill user feeds while selling ads to brands without giving anything back to the creators (the whole issue of the famous french "neighboring rights").

To compensate for this revenue drop, more and more publishers are betting on social publishing (sponsored posts, stories relayed via their Meta, YouTube, X, or TikTok accounts).

The Benefits of Social Publishing
Social Publishing brings its fair share of advantages for publishers:
✅ Increases their reach,
✅ Improves media performance, thanks to social media formats and the effect of media "endorsement",
🟰 Generates additional budgets 💵💵

But is it really worth the gamble? 🎲

What will happen the day platforms decide to deprioritize content from professional profiles? 🤔

It already happened in January 2018: back then, Meta decided to deprioritize business pages in favor of personal pages, causing traffic drops of -28% on average, with plunges reaching up to -70% on certain pages (source: Marketing Charts) 📉📉🤯

What if, instead, publishers bet on alternative strategies?

🧐 Re-engaging audiences to visit their sites directly by focusing on quality—and why not add a touch of social features to their own sites, like comment sections?
👀 Improving the ad experience for brands (like skippable sticky formats with good screen share).
👨‍👨‍👧‍👧 Increasing their audience reach on the OpenWeb thanks to Curators.
⛔ Blocking all LLM bots that scrape content without financial compensation.
📱 And why not create a Spotify for the press? 😉

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