Media Trendlines — November 3, 2026
📰 Key Themes
- People Inc. kept digital revenue growing while visits to its biggest sites fell 26%, but the businesses that don’t need a visit are not yet big enough to cover the loss, and 195 people lost their jobs.
- Alphabet says AI delivered its fastest search query growth in five years, and it is taking AI Mode ads worldwide while publisher referrals keep falling.
- U.S. political advertising will pass $13 billion this cycle, and the growth is moving to streaming, where outside groups don’t have to say what they spent.
- Nobody has written rules for AI agents, so whoever controls the gate is writing them, and publishers are starting to pool their traffic data to catch scrapers.
- Election night’s data anchors have become their own product line, and two of the best known say they give prediction markets no weight at all.
Jump to: 📺 Big Media Moves · 💡 Business Model Innovation · 🎙️ From the Pods · 📎 Also Noted · 🧭 Takeaways
📺 Big Media Moves
Hollywood’s Layoff Wave Is the Bill for the First Streaming Era
Source: Axios Media Trends — Sara Fischer
Disney is planning to cut thousands of jobs in its third round of layoffs this year under new CEO Josh D’Amaro, according to Bloomberg. Netflix said last month it would lay off 1,000 people, up to 6% of staff, after engagement missed its targets. Hello Sunshine will reportedly cut half its staff after Reese Witherspoon and Mediawan bought it back from Candle Media at a fraction of the original price. Skydance is offering buyouts ahead of cuts tied to the Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery merger, and Comcast expects significant cuts in its cable and telecom units before it spins off NBCUniversal in 2027. About 30% of last year’s 17,000-plus media job cuts were tied to mergers, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The common thread is that the money spent winning subscribers in the first streaming era is now being paid back in headcount.
💡 Business Model Innovation
People Inc.’s Quarter Shows the Post-Google Publisher Can Grow, Just Not Fast Enough Yet
Source: A Media Operator — Christiana Sciaudone; additional detail from The Media Copilot (via Digiday)
People Inc., the publisher of People, Allrecipes, Investopedia and dozens of other brands, has lost nearly 70% of its Google search traffic in about two years, CEO Neil Vogel said, and AI Overviews now appear on more than 90% of the searches it tracks. Core sessions, its measure of traffic to its biggest sites, fell 26% in the third quarter, steeper than the 22% drop in the second. Revenue that depends on those visits fell 6% to $163.6 million. Yet digital revenue still grew 2% to $288.5 million, its 12th straight quarter of growth, because revenue that doesn’t depend on a visit grew 15% to $125 million. That is now about 43% of digital revenue, up from 38% a year ago, and CFO Tim Quinn expects it to reach about half by this time next year.
The off-site business includes more than 50 sponsored social video series, which Vogel called “very lucrative and very high margin,” plus connected TV ad targeting, paid app tiers and events. The fastest grower is licensing, up 49% to $52.7 million, led by Apple News, which pays based on time spent. The cost showed up too. People cut its 2026 digital revenue outlook, stopped forecasting digital profit growth, and laid off 195 people, about 6% of staff. Separately, chief innovation officer Jon Roberts told a Digiday event that People is building APIs that serve AI agents clean Markdown with author and date attached, because “if you are an agent and you’re reading an HTML page, 90% of the content is junk.”
Run the arithmetic and the year-over-year story is narrow. The off-site businesses added about $16 million in the quarter, and the site business lost about $10 million. That is a real result, and most publishers losing a quarter of their traffic would envy it. But the margin is thin, and the biggest off-site gain came from licensing, which Quinn says will slow to about 20% next quarter as People laps last year’s Meta deal. Much of what replaced Google is another platform’s check: Apple News, Meta, AI companies. Vogel was honest that “not all of [the new bets] are going to work really well,” and Chairman Barry Diller said he wants “substantial growth, not single-digit growth” next year. People’s quarter shows the post-Google model works. It also shows how much has to go right for it to outrun the decline.
The WordPress angle: Roberts is describing a problem every publisher will hit: the article and the web page are no longer the same thing. Most content management systems, WordPress included, already store the story, author and publish date as structured data and expose them through an API. What People is building on top of that is access control, a clean format and a license. Publishers that treat their CMS as a structured content store instead of a page builder will find that step much shorter.
Google’s Record Query Growth Is Happening Where Publishers Can’t See It
Source: The Media Copilot — Pete Pachal, citing The Verge and TechCrunch
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said AI drove the fastest year-over-year growth in search queries the company has recorded in five years, commercial queries included, though he gave no growth rate. Search revenue grew 12%, down from 17% in the second quarter, and chief business officer Philipp Schindler said Google is taking AI Mode ads international for the first time. Put those facts next to People’s 26% traffic drop and the picture is clear: people are asking Google more than ever, and more of the answers stay on Google. Google is now moving its ad inventory to where the answers are. For publishers, “search is growing” and “search traffic is shrinking” are both true, and only the second one shows up in their numbers.
Political Ad Money Is Growing Fastest Where Nobody Has to Disclose It
Source: Axios Media Trends — Sara Fischer and Stef W. Kight
U.S. political advertising is expected to top $13 billion this cycle, a midterm record, according to WPP Media; AdImpact, which leaves out direct mail and print, projects $11.6 billion. Spending has grown about 8.6% a year for a decade even as the number of toss-up races has fallen, which tells you competitiveness isn’t the driver. Unlimited outside spending, more issue fights moving to statehouses (about $700 million aimed at state legislatures, up 17% from 2024) and new digital channels are.
Streaming is where the growth is concentrating. Digital and connected TV now account for about 37% of the political spend AdImpact measures, and the top Senate Republican super PAC nearly tripled its streaming and social spending this cycle to more than $200 million. The reasons are practical. Outside groups pay several times what candidates pay on broadcast, because candidates are guaranteed the lowest rates; online, super PACs negotiate directly. And unlike broadcast, streaming carries no requirement to disclose who bought what, where and for how much.
For anyone selling video inventory, political money is the most dependable growth in the ad market, and it is shifting to the channels with the least oversight. That is good for streaming revenue and bad for trust. The broadcast disclosure rules exist because voters wanted to know who was paying to persuade them, and that reason didn’t go away when the screen moved to a TV app. Publishers and streamers taking this money should set their own disclosure standard now. The alternative is having one written for them after the first scandal over an anonymous streaming ad.
The Only Rule for AI Agents Is Power, and Publishers Are Finally Pooling Theirs
Source: The Media Copilot — Pete Pachal; additional detail from Press Gazette
Pachal argues that the fight over Meta’s scraping terms is less about scraping than about who gets to set rules when no lawmaker, court or standards body has. His examples line up. JPMorgan Chase now blocks outside AI agents at the login page, with Jamie Dimon calling them “just too risky for clients and for JPMorgan”; Schwab and Citi block them too, and Meta’s own Muse agent is among those shut out. Cloudflare delisted Perplexity as a verified bot after accusing it of using stealth crawlers, and Perplexity has since started blocking ads that Time served to AI agents, calling them “deceptive” without defining the term. “Whoever carries the biggest gun writes them,” Pachal writes.
Publishers are starting to organize. The SPUR coalition now has more than 80 publishers working on how content use by AI gets tracked and valued. A bipartisan Stealth Bot Prohibition Act in Congress would require crawlers to identify themselves, and New York has passed its own version. The most practical step comes from the UK. NLA Media Access launched a free service that analyzes traffic across participating publishers to find scrapers that look human on any one site. A visitor who reads 400 Telegraph articles might be a devoted subscriber, but one also working through hundreds more at Newsquest and The Guardian “almost certainly is a bot,” chief executive Henry Jones said. A pilot with Newsquest and three national publishers found companies in Eastern Europe and Asia-Pacific taking content, and some bought licenses once NLA contacted them.
The NLA model is the important one. One publisher acting alone has no bargaining power with an agent company, which is exactly why banks, Cloudflare and Meta keep setting the terms. A group of publishers comparing notes behaves like a gatekeeper. It can see patterns no single site can, and the pilot shows that detection turns into license revenue. Publishers waiting for Congress to settle agent rules will wait a long time. The ones that pool their data and enforce together will have a say in the rules before then.
🎙️ From the Pods
Election Night’s Data Anchors Show That Trust Now Comes From Refusing to Guess
Source: The Grill Room (Puck) — Dylan Byers with Steve Kornacki and Ali Velshi, “The Art of Election Night”; additional detail from Axios Media Trends
Byers recorded with the two best-known big-board anchors on Election Day. Steve Kornacki, now at NBC News, planned to switch between the NBC broadcast and an all-night livestream aimed at “the diehards who are into the real, in the weeds” detail, which Axios said would run about 13 hours. He said prediction markets factor into his analysis “very little,” because they mostly move with the polls rather than ahead of them. Ali Velshi, who took over the board at MS NOW, was blunter about prediction markets: they count for “zero” in his work, because they’re “just a guess with money attached to it.” He also said his team is “not trying to be faster than anybody.”
Around them, the data desk has become a product line. Axios counted CNN’s new Sightline tool, which opens up its Decision Desk to political junkies, CBS News’ “The Nerd Show” stream, Chuck Todd and Chris Cillizza hosting “The Projection” with Decision Desk HQ on Substack, YouTube and X, and C-SPAN simulcasting livestreams from The Young Turks and Patrick Bet-David on its second and third channels.
The two anchors’ positions are worth noticing because several networks, including CNN and CBS News, have signed partnerships with the prediction market Kalshi. The people whose credibility carries election night are keeping those numbers out of their own analysis and saying so on the record. Their value is method: what they will and won’t count, and how they explain the difference. In a night full of noise, the product people trust is the one that is open about what it ignores.
Anthropic’s IPO Filing Puts the AI Productivity Bet Inside Every Company’s Finance Department
Source: The Rebooting Show — Brian Morrissey and Troy Young with CJ Gustafson (Mostly Metrics), “Inside the Anthropic IPO filing”; additional detail from The Rebooting newsletter, “Age of instability”
Gustafson, a former CFO, walked through Anthropic‘s S-1: just under $20 billion in revenue over the past twelve months, $11.6 billion of it in the second quarter alone, and about $6.6 million in revenue per employee, against roughly $500,000 for the median public software company. His main question was whether “the use cases for AI can keep growing at the same pace that the cost of the tokens are falling.” Morrissey’s point was that the answer will be settled in finance departments of ordinary companies, not in coding. He is putting Claude at the center of The Rebooting’s own operations and estimates about 15% of the company’s spending can shift to AI, with the savings going into product rather than profit. His early finding: humans are “lossy,” but AI “has no chill” and will overturn a process minutes after putting it in place. Media companies are coordination-heavy businesses, which makes them exactly the test case the S-1’s bull case depends on. Morrissey’s experiment is a useful model: start with the coordination work, measure the error rate, and decide in advance where the savings go.
📎 Also Noted
- 🔹 Hollywood backs the Times: CAA, the major music groups, SAG-AFTRA and both Writers Guilds filed amicus briefs supporting The New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft, arguing AI use of creative work should be licensed, not exempted; the Times and other publishers also sued the Brave browser on Monday over scraping. — Axios
- 🔹 Trump disappears from GOP ads: he appeared in 66% of House Republicans’ primary ads but just 3% of their general election ads, and Senate Republican mentions fell from 77% to 22%. — Axios
- 🔹 Informa writes off Saudi Arabia for 2026: it halved its full-year underlying revenue growth forecast to about 3% after the Riyadh airport attacks, but moved its big shows to 2027 rather than canceling, while state-backed events like FII were postponed with no date. — A Media Operator
- 🔹 An events company skipping America: The Bench, which gets about 80% of its revenue from sponsors, says the U.S. hospitality conference market is too crowded and is expanding into Europe instead. — A Media Operator
- 🔹 Australia funds regional news: the government named 54 recipients of its News Innovation Fund, with regional outlets the biggest winners and ten organizations receiving more than A$1 million. — Mumbrella
- 🔹 Live sport still pulls: the Melbourne Cup drew 2.4 million viewers on Nine, its biggest audience since 2020. — Mumbrella
- 🔹 A holding company worth less than its cash: Enero, Australia’s only listed agency group, hit another low and is down 73% in a year. — Mumbrella
- 🔹 Status headlines: Mark Lazarus says there’s no “fatigue” at MS NOW, Netflix launches an AI discovery tool, and Reddit tests search ads. ⚠️ Paywalled, headline details only — Status
🧭 Takeaways
- Track the share of revenue that doesn’t need a visit. People Inc. is at 43% and aiming for half. Every publisher should know its own number, and how much of it depends on a single platform’s check.
- Search growth and search traffic are now separate numbers. Google’s query growth no longer predicts publisher referrals. Plan as if the clicks keep falling no matter how well Google’s search business does.
- Bargaining power comes from numbers. The NLA pilot shows publishers comparing traffic data can catch scrapers and convert them into licensees. Join or start a collective before writing more bot-blocking rules alone.
- Disclose before you’re forced to. Political money is moving into streaming because nobody has to report it there. Publishers selling that inventory should publish their own disclosure policy now.
- Method is the product. The anchors who own election night win trust by saying what they won’t count. Newsrooms adding data feeds, from prediction markets to AI summaries, should explain what they leave out and why.