To beat the AI squeeze, Newsweek is building revenue beyond traffic
Newsweek is launching more subscription products and expanding non-advertising revenue streams as it braces for a future where AI answer engines replace traditional search — and potentially siphon off the traffic publishers have long relied on.
While Google’s rollout of AI summaries and zero-click features is still in its early days, the writing is on the wall: the old SEO playbook is under pressure. Publishers are now reconsidering how they produce content, manage SEO and protect their data – all while exploring new revenue streams.
Newsweek generated $90 million in revenue in the last financial year, with a 20 percent profit margin. Of that, 63 percent ($57 million) came from digital advertising (70 percent of which was programmatic advertising and 30 percent direct). Naturally, search-driven traffic is a big part of that monetization model for the publisher, which had approximately 43 million monthly users on desktop and mobile in May 2025, up 8.8 percent year-over-year, according to Comscore. Events and subscriptions accounted for less than 1 percent of revenue last year.
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Related Knowledge Center: State of the business model
The traditional journalism business model has long since collapsed, and news organizations have shrunk or disappeared entirely. While a number of promising experiments are under way, the public has not shown a willingness to buy what news organizations are selling.
Related Knowledge Center: Artificial intelligence
On top of a failing business model, newsrooms must navigate the powerful — and not fully reliable — new capabilities of artificial intelligence and the deployment of large language models.
State of the business model | Copyright and intellectual property