In most newsrooms, a decrease in traffic triggers a familiar assumption. If traffic is declining, ad revenue must also be declining. That belief is driving media companies to explore alternative revenue models, including subscriptions, events, e-commerce, and mobile apps. These are smart strategies because they are built to drive revenue, not just volume.

But the same logic should apply to advertising. If you're still chasing traffic as a solution to increasing your ad revenue, you're spinning your wheels. Some articles and writers will earn more for your business than others, even with a smaller audience.

When you focus on content that drives revenue instead of content that drives pageviews, you start to see opportunities you couldn’t see before. This shift is how publishers will continue to grow, even in a market where traffic seems harder to come by.

Media companies have long ranked content and writers by traffic

The idea that more traffic means more ad revenue didn’t come out of nowhere. It was inherited. You know the story—when publishers sold physical papers and magazines, circulation numbers had a direct effect on ad sales. More readers meant higher rates. So when those businesses moved online, they brought that same logic with them.

For a while, it worked. The New Yorker recently reported that Gawker, one of the early digital pioneers, famously had a public leaderboard in its office showing which writers had the most pageviews. But as the internet scaled, the value of a single click began to fall. By 2008, Gawker was making half the revenue per page that it earned in 2004.

Still, the race for reach continued. BuzzFeed built an entire business model around it, tuning content for virality across Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. This example from 2016 shows a Facebook post with over 16,000 shares. When Andreessen Horowitz invested $50 million in the company in 2014, his guidance was to prioritize growth over monetization.

The Messenger followed a similar playbook. Launched by Jimmy Finkelstein, the former owner of The Hill, the site promised 100 million monthly visitors and $100 million in annual ad revenue. It hired hundreds of journalists and went live with a broad mix of content across politics, sports, and entertainment. But as Jim VandeHei told Puck, the projections were unrealistic from the start. “It was business malpractice,” he said.

Despite these familiar stories, the assumption that traffic equates to ad revenue still lingers in too many newsrooms. Writers are still evaluated by pageviews, and editorial budgets lean toward high-traffic categories while an entirely different team reviews ad performance.

The New York Times, on the other hand, has grown into a ten-million-subscriber powerhouse by building a portfolio around content that’s easily monetizable, like games, recipes, product reviews. Meanwhile, its high-quality journalism drives loyalty and long-term value.

Editorial performance should be tied to revenue, not reach

A spike in traffic doesn’t always mean a story is valuable to the business. A celebrity piece might attract millions of clicks but earn very little if the content isn’t brand-safe or monetizable. At the same time, a quiet, low-volume guide or review might consistently bring in high RPMs and loyal, returning readers.

Many of the highest-traffic articles in a newsroom can’t be monetized at all. They might deal with political controversy, war, or sensitive social issues—important reporting, but not usually the kind of content advertisers want their name next to. That inventory often gets flagged or blocked altogether. Meanwhile, a simple recipe or seasonal guide might earn strong returns for months with minimal updates.

You can see this strategy in action on the New York Times Cooking site. On the homepage, a Wordle game—one of the company’s highest-engagement products—is sponsored by Heinz.

The Times knows what content drives its revenue and which builds long-term trust and loyalty. But most publishers lack this clarity because they lack the necessary data.

Editorial success is still judged by volume in many newsrooms because they’re still using solutions like Google Analytics or working across several disconnected dashboards from ad tech partners that aren’t taking a holistic view of their monetization strategy.

That means high-value topics and the writers who cover them get overlooked. A 2024 report from Digiday and Piano reinforces the gap. Based on a survey of 76 publisher professionals, the top challenge in their total revenue optimization efforts was developing content strategies that balance monetization with user experience—named by 91% of respondents.

Most teams still view content creation and audience development as their primary optimization levers. But the issue is a disconnect between content and business outcomes.

As Harry Fawkes, head of digital subscriptions at dmgMedia, put it in the report, many newsrooms are only now starting to move from raw session counts to what he calls “quality sessions” and “quality pageviews.” The goal isn’t just more traffic. It’s the right kind of traffic, tied to monetization, retention, and business value.

This shift will require the editorial team to connect their content directly to revenue in real-time.

How to connect content to revenue

To shift from reach to revenue, you need more than a pageview counter. You need to know which articles generate the highest RPM, which categories underperform, even when they bring in traffic, and which writers consistently produce monetizable content. And you need that information in real-time, not at the end of the month when the story has already run its course.

That kind of clarity requires consolidation. Most publishers are using a patchwork of tools—Google Analytics for audience data, a handful of ad tech vendors for revenue reporting, and maybe a spreadsheet or two to tie it all together. But when those systems aren’t connected, the insights don’t mean much. You can’t optimize what you can’t see.

This Actirise dashboard, in comparison, gives you a real-time view of partner revenue broken down by traffic source, so you can track where revenue is actually coming from across the day. In the example shown here, Facebook traffic accounts for the largest share of revenue at nearly 35%, followed by a mix of Google channels, direct traffic, and others.

With this level of detail, you can identify which channels are the most lucrative. If Facebook sessions consistently bring in more revenue than Google Discover, that’s a signal that tells you where to promote, where to invest, and how to prioritize editorial and distribution decisions in a way that supports the business.

The view is updated every five minutes, so your team doesn’t have to wait for end-of-month reports to understand what’s happening.

Actirise also helps teams drill into specific articles to see what’s actually driving performance and what isn’t. In this example, several articles have comparable traffic, but their revenue outcomes are very different.

One publisher, FUTURA, using Actirise saw exactly this dynamic in action. Their second-best article of the day had an RPM more than twice as high as the top performer. With Actirise surfacing the discrepancy, they made two quick editorial changes to add second image and updated the headline.

As a result, RPM per pageview increased 45%, visible slots improved by 13.5%, and average time on page jumped 35%.

One piece with over 170,000 pageviews is bringing in strong returns and has a long average time on page. Another with nearly the same number of views is earning far less, with users spending under a minute on the article.

With this view, the problem becomes easier to spot. Maybe readers are bouncing early because the piece gave away the answer too quickly. Maybe the layout didn’t support ad density. Either way, you’re not guessing. You’re looking at the actual inputs like RPM, session length, ad slot visibility and understanding why an article underperformed despite the traffic.

Editorial strategy should work like a business strategy

When you treat content as a business asset, you start to run your newsroom more like a product team. You experiment. You measure. You build on what works. And most importantly, you bring everyone—editors, analysts, ad ops—into the same conversation, using the same data.

That kind of alignment isn’t just more efficient. It leads to better decisions, fewer wasted resources, and a shared understanding of what success actually looks like.

Sparteo helps make that shift possible. If you want to see how Actirise can bring real revenue clarity to your team, get in touch.