Category: Engagement

This article distills key takeaways from The Rebooting’s first online forum of 2025, hosted by Brian Morrissey, featuring Mark Zohar, President and CEO of Viafoura, and Bharat Krish, Chief Product Officer at Newsweek. The discussion explored how publishers can adapt to a fragmented media landscape dominated by alternative media, AI, and shifting audience behaviors.

The Rise of Alternative Media and Fragmentation

The media industry is undergoing a seismic shift, with traditional outlets facing competition from alternative media—creators, Substack writers, YouTubers, podcasters, and even anonymous X accounts. Brian Morrissey highlighted that these players aren’t just capturing attention but wielding significant influence, as seen in the 2024 election where X-based discussions shaped narratives and even policy. Viafoura’s data underscores this trend: 40% of adults now get news from influencers, with figures like Joe Rogan commanding audiences twice the size of CNN and The New York Times combined. Social referral traffic has also declined, compounded by third-party cookie deprecation and AI-driven search changes, pushing publishers to prioritize direct, owned audiences.

Building Trust Through Authenticity and Interaction

Trust in traditional media is eroding, with terms like “fake news” amplifying skepticism. Mark Zohar emphasized that publishers must shift from one-way broadcasting to two-way engagement to rebuild trust. Interactive features like live Q&As, polls, and comment sections foster authenticity by connecting journalists directly with audiences. Newsweek’s “Fairness Meter,” where readers rate article impartiality, exemplifies this, driving engagement and brand loyalty. Zohar noted, “The more you open yourself up to questions from an audience, the more authentic, the more trust you’re building.” This approach aligns with audience expectations shaped by social media’s interactivity.

Community as a Business Driver

Community engagement isn’t just about connection—it delivers measurable ROI. Viafoura’s data shows active community members visit sites 6.5x more, are 30% more likely to subscribe, and churn 2.5x less than anonymous users. Newsweek’s strategy reflects this: their Fairness Meter and upcoming personalized mobile app aim to convert search-driven traffic into loyal communities. GB News in the UK illustrates this further, with a “Watch Live” page integrating broadcast and digital through real-time audience interaction, driving 2.5 million conversations and habit-forming engagement.

Leveraging AI for Engagement and Scale

AI is reshaping how content is created and consumed. Newsweek’s AI-powered search, built on 600,000 articles, has boosted daily searches from 1,000 to 30,000 by offering personalized, question-driven experiences. Bharat Krish emphasized AI’s role in scaling engagement without breaking the bank, enabling publishers to meet modern audience expectations for tailored content. Additionally, AI-generated community pages are gaining traction on Google Discover, as they offer authentic, expert-driven content that counters AI “slop.”

Product-Led Publishing: A Consumer-First Approach

Bharat Krish highlighted Newsweek’s shift to a product-led model, prioritizing consumer needs over content alone. By hiring product managers from tech giants like Uber and Amazon, Newsweek integrates tech and business strategies to enhance user experiences. Features like feedback-driven search and community tools inform content pipelines, ensuring relevance. This approach treats publishing as a consumer-first business, balancing editorial, tech, and commercial goals to drive growth and retention.

Reclaiming Audiences in 2025

The forum underscored a clear imperative: publishers must reclaim audiences from social platforms by building direct, interactive relationships. Community-driven strategies, powered by AI and authentic engagement, offer a path to loyalty and revenue. As Zohar noted, legacy brands like Newsweek retain strong value but must adapt to a two-way, creator-inspired model to stay competitive. By fostering communities and leveraging AI, publishers can navigate fragmentation and thrive in the evolving information space.

This article summarizes key insights from ARC XP’s community webinar, hosted in partnership with Viafoura, where industry leaders discussed strategies for transforming audiences into loyal, engaged communities.

From Audiences to Communities: Key Insights from ARC XP’s 2025 Webinar

In a media landscape marked by fragmentation and declining traditional traffic sources, publishers are redefining audience engagement, highlighting the urgent need to shift from passive audiences to active, loyal communities. Mark Zohar, President and CEO of Viafoura, shared actionable strategies and data-driven insights on how publishers can drive engagement, loyalty, and revenue by prioritizing community. Here’s what stood out.

The Imperative to Own Your Audience

The webinar underscored a critical challenge: audience acquisition is under pressure. Social referral traffic, once a reliable driver, has plummeted by over 50% for many publishers. Third-party cookie deprecation, Google’s generative AI overviews, and the rise of alternative platforms like podcasts and Substack are further fragmenting media consumption. These trends are pushing publishers to focus on direct, owned relationships.

Viafoura’s data shows that community members – users who actively participate through comments, Q&As, or chats – are far more valuable than anonymous audiences. They generate 5x more revenue, spend significantly more time on site, and are 31% more likely to subscribe. By fostering direct traffic and reducing reliance on third-party platforms, publishers can build sustainable, loyal audiences that drive long-term growth.

Community as a Driver of Engagement and Revenue

Community engagement isn’t just about connection – it’s a measurable business driver. Viafoura’s platform, integrated with ARC XP, empowers publishers to transform casual visitors into active participants. Features like article commenting, live Q&As, polls, and community chats create participatory experiences that align with modern audience expectations. These tools deliver results: community members double registration rates, reduce churn by 2.5x, and contribute to 30-40% of monthly registrations for Viafoura’s clients.

The Toronto Star’s success illustrates this impact. Initially hesitant, the publisher leaned into community by integrating Viafoura’s tools across its site, including polls, AMAs (Ask Me Anything), and native app features. Over 12-14 months, they moved from low engagement to industry-leading metrics, with community driving significant increases in time on page, page views, and subscriptions. Editorial teams now actively participate, embedding community into newsletters, mobile strategies, and subscription funnels.

Bridging Broadcast and Digital Through Community

For publishers with broadcast roots, community serves as a powerful bridge to digital audiences. GB News, a fast-growing UK broadcaster, launched a “Have Your Say” page that pairs live-streamed broadcasts with real-time community interaction. Viewers comment, ask questions, and engage with hosts, who pull community contributions on air. This strategy has driven over 30% of site registrations, with three million conversations fueling a habit-forming digital experience. Similarly, Corus Media Group’s Breakfast Television uses live chat to connect broadcast and digital, creating second-screen experiences that boost retention.

These examples highlight how community can unify audiences across platforms, fostering loyalty and creating new monetization opportunities, such as membership models or ad revenue from highly engaged users.

Strategic Community-Building: Intention, Cultivation, Operation

Viafoura’s approach focuses on three pillars:

• Intention: Align community efforts with clear KPIs, such as registration growth or subscription conversion. Engage stakeholders across editorial, product, and commercial teams to ensure buy-in.

• Cultivation: Define community guidelines to maintain brand safety and civility. Use personalized notifications (e.g., “someone replied to your comment”) to build habits and drive return visits.

• Operation: Develop playbooks for initiatives like live Q&As and leverage first-party data to enhance personalization, ad targeting, and subscription models.

This structured approach ensures community efforts deliver measurable ROI, from increased dwell time to diversified revenue streams like tiered subscriptions or premium micro-communities.

Community as a Competitive Edge in 2025

The webinar made one thing clear: audiences crave connection, not just content. Younger, digitally native users, in particular, are drawn to interactive experiences like live Q&As or comment sections, often prioritizing community over content itself. A 2024 FT Strategies study, NextGen News, found that these audiences value connection with peers and brands, making community a key driver for attracting and retaining new readers.

Community also offers a buffer against AI-driven disruption. While generative AI can produce content, it can’t replicate the authenticity of human interaction. By investing in community, publishers differentiate through trust, engagement, and first-party data, which fuels personalization and subscription growth amid tightening privacy regulations.

Taking Community Back from Platforms

As Mark Zohar noted, media brands once “outsourced” their audiences to social platforms, but 2025 is the year to reclaim them. The Toronto Star’s live Q&A series, sparked by a high-profile investigative podcast, drove 2x site-average registrations and 16x higher engagement. Newsweek’s homepage now features top community contributions, boosting discoverability and participation. These examples show how community can transform audiences into collaborators, driving loyalty and revenue.

Publishers ignoring community risk falling behind. Platforms are unpredictable, but owned communities offer a sustainable path to engagement and growth.

Communities far outperform standard audiences

Publishers that successfully activate a community strategy are seeing measurable impact. According to data from Viafoura, community members generate 5.3x higher dwell time, are 45x more likely to subscribe and make 3x more site visits compared to standard audiences.

Community members contributing user-generated content like comments, questions and reviews go even further. They visit publisher sites 6x more often per month, produce 3x more page views and spend 40x more time on site. Publishers can double their registration rates by fostering direct relationships with readers, unlocking deeper engagement and valuable first-party data.

Personalized community notifications, such as “someone replied to your comment” or “you gained a new follower,” also significantly outperform traditional alerts. These messages generate click-through rates up to 10x higher than standard notifications, making them a powerful tool for reengagement and habit-building.

Publisher shifts lead to deeper relationships, greater loyalty and long-term monetization

Traditional audience development strategies are losing effectiveness. A recent study by The Rebooting found 50% of publishers reported a decline in search traffic over the past year, with organic social media now ranking as a secondary priority for most publishers.

To compensate, publishers are shifting to direct, owned relationships with newsletters (62%) and direct traffic (57%) as the backbone of audience growth. The same study identifies attracting new audiences and building community as top audience development priorities in 2025.

Community engagement is proving to be a critical counterbalance to these trends. As outlined in the Mather article, “The Power of Community: Meeting User Needs to Build Lasting Value,” user needs like “update me,” “connect me” and “keep me engaged” are best met through interactive experiences such as comment sections, live Q&As and community chats. Publishers integrating these features foster deeper relationships, leading to greater loyalty and long-term monetization.

One standout example is The Telegraph, which has made community central to its editorial and audience engagement strategy. Through its newly launched  “Your Say” community section, the publication showcases readers’ comments and contributions, highlights articles inspired by reader comments and features journalists answering questions and engaging directly with the community. In essence, The Telegraph is turning community into compelling content and featuring it in a dedicated, high-visibility part of their site. Furthermore, as highlighted in a recent article, community is a driver of engagement and positively impacts SEO, due to the amount of time users spend on content that includes community elements.

Community also protects publishers amid AI disruption

Generative AI is accelerating shifts in traffic patterns, pushing publishers to differentiate through trust and human curation. While AI can produce content, it can’t replicate the authenticity or real-time interaction that community engagement offers. According to this survey, 52% of publishers are prioritizing engagement depth alongside audience breadth. By investing in community-building, publishers create a buffer against algorithmic volatility and AI-driven content aggregation.

A community-driven future requires publishers to own the audience relationship

By owning the audience relationship, publishers can activate a successful community strategy. That means shifting away from rented distribution on third-party platforms and focusing instead on direct channels like newsletters, memberships and on-site engagement.

Community members generate valuable declarative data that fuels personalization, improved ad targeting and subscription growth. This first-party data becomes increasingly important as traditional data sources decline and privacy regulations tighten.

Community engagement also opens the door to diversified revenue streams. Publishers cultivating active user participation can unlock new business lines, including paid subscriptions, live and virtual events and sponsorship opportunities beyond standard display advertising.

Integrating community features, such as comment sections, live Q&As, exclusive forums and personalized content recommendations, directly impacts retention and loyalty. Publishers tracking and optimizing these efforts see higher dwell times, stronger conversion rates and more meaningful reader relationships.

As the industry shifts toward more direct, owned relationships, publishers failing to invest in community engagement risk leaving audience growth and revenue on the table. Platforms are unpredictable, but communities offer a sustainable path to building highly engaged, loyal audiences. The question is no longer whether to invest in community, but how soon publishers can begin.

This article was originally posted on Digiday.

At the end of every year, my team conducts planning sessions with some of the brightest minds in publishing from all over the world. We work in an emerging and increasingly vital sector of the industry – community building- and we’ve honed in on being the best at our craft. What we see time and time again is very simple: publishers that go all-in on community see the return in spades.

At Viafoura, we’re capitalizing on user habits and behaviors formed over the past decade on social media. Think of us as the Apple of community engagement for media organizations. In this context, the iPhone moment for media is now: publishers are uniquely positioned to reclaim audiences from social media and drive direct user relationships on their owned and operated properties.

Zooming out, social media landscapes are changing quickly: X (formerly Twitter) slashed global moderation staff and has paid the price with traffic and advertising revenue and what may be an exodus of publisher engagement (see Guardian). Meanwhile, Reddit is consistently ranking higher on SERPs, above affiliate and publisher rankings meaning the Google Gods are beginning to prioritize UGC.

So what does this all mean? My team’s been busy.

2025 is going to bring a big shift into community-centric operating models for publishers. Here’s what I’m keeping an eye on:

1. Publishers are getting really good at defining the value of user-generated content (UGC) to the business.

When discussing community-centric approaches with execs, I often bring up my favorite FT Strategies piece showcasing Der Standard super-users (top commenters). It covers 2 main points:

• Der Standard did the math: their highest value user segment are community- engaged members
• They centralized their operations to have business units focus on funneling users into community engagement (aka: study them, talk to them, design with them).

I love this piece because the organization doubled down on attributing a $ value to the community, and for a numbers nerd like me, this is the north star of our ‘why’and single most important number in rallying the many teams it takes to make a community strategy successful.

Here’s the baseline of ROI of community engagement:

• Attributed registration & subscription conversion
• Direct ad activation dollars
• Downstream impact of engagement defined by additional Time on Site and PV’s generated by community contributors and those who spend time consuming their content

The new expanded impact areas:

• User Generated Content (UGC) as a story idea generator
• Editorial Engagement sponsorships (Think: commercial teams selling sponsored AMAs)
• The effect of the flywheel of UGC on your unknown audiences and their propensity to register and subscribe

An anecdotal thought: It’s interesting to me how quickly publishers are beginning to see ROI from community on day 01 of launching community and how naturally user behaviors gravitate toward community (the uptick is almost immediate). The appetite for community is there, and users genuinely enjoy engaging with one another, when the community is well managed and stays within brand community guidelines. In the same breath, moderation at scale and duty of care to your editorial team is more important than ever and that needs to be acknowledged and recognized.

2. Journalists are becoming rockstars again.

This is hands down my favorite highlight because we are deliberately repairing a decade-long rip and divide caused by the cesspool of social media. It’s baffling to think how we got here given publishing at its core is a product of the communities we serve, so how can publishers, by virtue, hate interacting with communities?

My gut says they don’t, and my gut says they’re scared from their experiences on social media.

The good news is this is a simple fix but requires a high degree of change management – let the AMAs do the heavy lifting here. This past year, we’ve had a record-breaking % of publishers dip their toe into community engagement, and we’ve had a 100% success rate (defined as repeat initiative).

From an engagement perspective, the results are a pretty clear win: AMAs drive 2x more registrations, 3x more first time commenters, 24x more engagement & 16x more time in comments.

Pretty slam dunk but that’s not the purpose of this highlight- it’s actually the softer side:

• Every time we’ve run a first time AMA, journalists have requested to stay longer because they genuinely had FUN
• Commenters opened their questions with “Thank you so much for doing this” – a little goes a long way
• 100% re-engagement rate by newsroom staff

Next year, this is going to take center stage in many newsrooms for a couple of key reasons:

1. This is a low-lift experiential interaction for your community with a high reward.
2. It’s safe. Turning on a full pre-moderated approach builds trust with newsrooms and lets journalists step into their fandom 🤘

Customer Spotlight: People.com has started leaning into AMAs and going all in with targeted invites, social recirc, and onsite discoverability during the event.

3. Editorial KPIs: “First Time Commenters” will have a seat at the table.

You’re going to hear me talk a lot about this in the year to come. Knowing the $$$ value of a UGC contributor, your First Time Commenters should be reported in your dashboards, right beside your conversion numbers.

This should be volumes, time to first comment, and % of all new registered users. Here’s what it looks like in practice with a real customer:

• Average of 9,295 first time commenters per month
• 10.6% of all new registrations interact with the community in the same day
• Average of 14.1 minutes for first comment action post registration

Once you’ve got this in, start digging into the mechanics of what prompted your conversions. What drove users to comment? What user ideas drove the most engagement and was there a debate sparked? Was there anything very sentimental that drew people together?

Out loud: This is a slam dunk for GenAI if you’re looking to automate the sentiment of highly-commented conversations and delivering ideas for follow ups to spark ideas in newsrooms.

4. The homepage will be the community page.

Homepages are transforming with more interactivity for users and a big part of that is the concept of active conversations/ top quality comments/ hot takes. You’ve seen these trending on social and you’ll see it transformed on publisher pages as well- again not recreating the wheel, but doing it better.

The concept of bridged discussion, unlike divisive, engagement-driven trends, is poised to be a key player here.

What’s bridging? An academic approach for countering destructive divisiveness across ranking, recommenders, and governance. We’ve partnered with our good friends at Jigsaw, a division of Google, to apply bridging attribution qualifiers to develop a comment quality ranking. We’re able to apply this mechanism at scale and completely reshape the perceived comment quality.  The goal here is fairly substantive—arguably beyond just the comment section—as it tackles a broader conversational divide that has emerged, largely due to social media algorithms pinning people against each other.

Here’s what our data shows when we apply bridging qualifiers to shape quality commenting:

• Perceived Comment Quality is up 101%
• Perceived Comment Toxicity is down 36%
• Community-Led Registrations are up 20%
• First Time Commenters are up 6%
• Editors Interaction in the comment section is up 122%

What does all of this tell us? By deliberately promoting higher quality comments (personal storytelling, nuance, compassion, & others) not only do our perceptions of community change for the better, but our interactions become more meaningful.

With confidence in the mechanisms and technology, publishers are using this to highlight quality community as a credit-worthiness of trust on their highest traffic page: home page, baby.

5. Publishers will chip bigger pieces of traffic back from social.

By no means do I hate social media- in fact, some of the largest publishers in the world have built a social-first strategy for growth and holy shit it worked (at least for a while). But building your business model on the current state of social algorithms, which can change at any moment, is very risky, and the only path to stability is owning that audience and the relationship with them.

Publishers are leaning into some really cool recirc initiatives in capturing new audiences on moving over to O&O, and while it’s a little early to share wins, I’m keeping my eyes on targeted audience acquisition for X, formerly Twitter, and Reddit.

One to watch: Rachel Duffy at The Telegraph.

Parallel, I’m also excited to see the big shift toward the creator economy and how that can look for local media. With elections closing out, and a retro on the Kamala campaign, there’s a big highlight on reach with podcasts and the influence creators have over traditional media.I’m wondering if we can see a collab for both next year.

To wrap my musings, I want to settle on the concept of “brands are moats”. If our brand is aging, and by virtue our audiences too, brands get smaller and the word of the brand moves on.

So what makes publishing brands successful and competitive in today’s day-in-age?

First will always be your core offering: trust from your core market.

But second and emerging is the power of your community: a parallel of trust.

Communities are moats.

Feeling hopeful for 2025, watch our space.