2024: A massive year for sports publishers

2023 saw sweeping change in the media space, but it is set to be nothing compared to next year.

It was a year that started with ChatGPT and ended with a flurry of Google updates. It’s been a tough year for the sports publishing industry to attempt to navigate.

But is it possible to look towards 2024 with any kind of confidence? That really depends on your mindset.

Google in 2024

Google’s biggest challenge in 2023 has been to respond - some might say, badly - to the creeping influence of AI produced content.

Next year, AI generated search is almost certain to increase in influence, particularly in the e-commerce space, while news publishers will be watching intently to see how news content is impacted.

The end of the year saw a series of Google updates which ravaged a number of publishers in ways not seen this decade. This has put publishers on wait-and-see mode; Google largely sees itself as an ally of publishers (certainly much more than pretty much any social media organisation) but that relationship is likely to be tested to its absolute limit in 2024.

Google, if they were being honest, are trying to navigate the content/AI space as much as the rest of us, and they haven’t got the answers yet. Whether those answers are positive or negative for the news publishing community will be one of the key talking points of the year.

The dying breath of social referrals

Depending on the ability of your sites to adapt to the increasingly specific sets of demands placed on content that gathers traffic - the shorter and more video-led the better - your social media teams may require a strategic rethink in 2024.

FACEBOOK (META) remains a totally baffling business and effectively sidelined in Zuckerberg’s ongoing race to the Metaverse. Anecdotal conversations about their operations showcase a total mess, with a senior marketing individual saying off the record that ‘Even if they wanted to help a publisher, they wouldn’t even know where or who to ask’.

The once prime product is now a domain of nothingness, trying to mimic TikTok and failing miserably. From a publisher perspective, one thing is clear - it’s virtually unimaginable you’ll ever get an increase in link traffic from there ever again, so act accordingly.

TWITTER, while never a huge referrer of news even in its peak, was formerly a reliable source of news for your own platforms. But alas, it’s a disastrous mess of users literally earning money to game the algorithm and it’s now effectively useless.

What happens when - not if - Musk is forced to relinquish control for driving it into the ground remains to be seen. But for publishers there’s little to be gained from what is now a glorified comments section filled with the type of people you’d cross the street to avoid.

INSTAGRAM has been in a holding pattern as it, like most other Meta products, try desperately to remain relevance by slipping into TikTok-style algorithms. As a branding exercise it remains useful but, again, it’s never going to be a news driver. THREADS, too, while finally launching in Europe this week, simply won’t fill the gap left by Facebook.

All roads for the younger demographic still lead to TIKTOK and perhaps more than ever. While it’s important for established news brands to have a presence there, it remains the bastion of the individual influencer and they have enough issues attempting to monetise the audience they have, let alone the big news publishers.

So that might be where the young kids hang out, but it’s not going to contribute to the bottom line in any meaningful way if you are producing news.

The departure of the third-party cookie

Over and above everything else that should be stressing out editors across the landscape, the removal of the third-party cookie, while years in the making, could shake out conventional programmatic revenue models.

Google have delayed this for years to allow publishers and advertising agencies time to get with the program, but until we are in a post-cookie world we won’t really know how the full situation will shake out.

The deconstruction of content

Where and how content is surfaced is has always been a problem for sports news publishers. But the question of what content is, is more pertinent than ever before.

The influencer culture and the way content can be disseminated outwith the control of a mainstream newsroom - and with all the checks and balances - is at the same time liberating and also concerning.

The same platforms that helped publishers to build an audience around their content are now seeking to restrict you from using it unless you pay for the pleasure; Facebook has boosted posts, Twitter has Blue, and soon TikTok will have a paid equivalent in its ‘For You’ section. Influencers are navigating this now - but what happens to their audience if the platform itself fails?

The descent into opinion being classified as news is already well into the mainstream but there’s also been a marked flip - the influencers themselves are now beginning to dominate the mainstream news discourse.

How newsrooms understand this - while maintaining a position of authority and clarity of news - will come to the fore in 2024.

AI will write your basic news

As the spectre of AI grows ever stronger the threat for newsrooms being able to make ends meet is equally apparent, it is safe to expect, if not completely, then certainly aspects of newsroom publishing will be handed over to the machine.

For basic, breaking news or factual copy, the web is flooded with 250-word facsimiles of the story, providing little additional context or useful information.

If we’re being honest, the news production at that level is archaic and needs modernising. But how this will interact with what the existing staff will be employed to do - for example are they freed up to produce more thought-provoking content - and how this interacts with the gatekeepers of the internet will be something we’ll watch develop in real-time.

Which also means…

Owning your own audience

News publishers have been actively looking to capture their own audience data for some time now and it’s a smart move.

Whether it’s via newsletters, push notifications or specific content apps, publishers are attempting to circumvent the algorithms that dominate the centralised platforms, and build a bridge directly to their own audience.

That’s definitely a way to ensure that no matter how the landscape changes, there is still a way for your users to find you regularly without being distracted by videos of cats or whatever viral meme they are being served. That could prove more important as we descend deeper into the 2020s internet, whose future remains hugely unclear.

Conclusion

We are entering unchartered territory for news publishing. The conventional methods of reaching users are in a state of flux, as is the very content which is being ingested.

2024 might provide more challenges than answers.