Which news sites are surviving the death of Google optimisation?

3 good reads and some Linkedin news you can use

Sharing some good reads with you this week;

a good example of covering a smear campaign happening in #Aras25
an analysis of the TikTok schism through the lens of political campaigning
the startling decline of traffic to news sites (and the publications that are thriving)
and news you can use for anyone on LinkedIn.

How to cover a troll

This week we have had our first story on an online campaign against a Presidential candidate.

I wasn’t sure what to think when Jim Gavin came out publicly about a smear campaign against him; I wonder if sometimes highlighting these things can both draw attention to them, define you as a candidate, and also frankly feed the beast.

Which is why I was heartened to see the brilliant Conor Gallagher go and do the digging and write up the story for what it is.

Conor contacted the person spreading the claims (which have no evidence), but also did some proper digging into their background, how they ended up in Indonesia, other campaigns against the Gardai and other political figures etc.

A standout example of how to open an article about trolling: Conor writes -

“The main individual behind “malicious smears” concerning Fianna Fáil presidential candidate Jim Gavin is a right-wing environmentalist and “Trump loyalist” who wants to set up a new Irish political party.”

TikTok’s Reformation moment

Flagging a good read on the great TikTok schism seen through the lens of politics and campaigning, from friend of the newsletter Sam Jeffers of WhoTargetsMe.

He looks at what the birth of a new “American TikTok” might mean for politics in the US; will US TikTok go the X route and tweak algos so they favour more right wing content? And, perhaps more interestingly, will the reverse TikTok’s political ad ban?

As Sam says:

“Allowing political ads on TikTok gives the Democrats, who consistently raise and spend more online than Republicans and whose base will be very motivated for the 2026 midterms, a stronger foothold on the service. This would create some islands of blue in a river of (potentially) deep red content.”

A more interestingly question also comes from Sam over on BlueSky - once there are two TikTok, which one will we get here in Europe? In a choice between America and China, what do we go with in 2025?

Does the EU keep Chinese TikTok or get the American one?
— Sam Jeffers (@worklesshard.bsky.social) 2025-09-22T15:23:56.508Z

Good grief! A good graph on news on the web

There are reports this week that traffic is way down at key news publications, which hints at the future of the news web in the AI summary era.

Similarweb year on year data, visualised by these guys

Data from “Similarweb”, a site that estimates web traffic, is reporting that of the top 50 English language news website, 49 showed a decline in visits over the last year (monthly visits Aug 2024 - Aug 2025). (The graph above visualises July-July data which was only slightly better for news sites)

Press Gazette has covered the data, finding that:

“Of the top ten biggest sites globally, CNN saw the biggest year-on-year decrease of 31% to 416.9 million views. Daily Mail saw a 30% decline in site visits year on year and a 4.5% drop month on month, totalling 222.6 million views in August 2025.”

Yikes. As a result - some news orgs are suing. (Is anyone not suing AI companies?)

At the lower end of losses was The New York Times, down 6%, perhaps showing that their subscription / newsletter offering / push notifications strategy is paying off.

Further evidence that the Social / Google optimisation business model is over? The one ”news site” that grew according to this data was Substack, up 49% year on year.

And finally - opt out of being LinkedIn’s training data

If you’re on LinkedIn, and you don’t want your data and posts being used for LinkedI / Microsoft’s training data for the Gen AI - you need to opt out; you can do @so here.