Charged with leading INMA’s newly relaunched Advertising Initiative, Gabriel Dorosz faces a problem that changes as you look at it.

The association’s New York World Congress of News Media was not without its “sobering wake-up calls” – the starkest challenges perhaps those facing news media advertising – but Dorosz says the urgency has only intensified since. He cites Google’s US AI Mode rollout – accelerating a shift that promises to further reduce publisher traffic – and Business Insider citing traffic changes as the reason behind layoffs of 21 per cent of its workforce.

At INMA New York, executive director and chief executive Earl Wilkinson spoke of what he called the “post-search traffic era”, where search traffic is projected to reach nearly zero within two years and platform referrals continue a dramatic decline.

“This threatens multiple components of the news media business model but none more than advertising,” says Dorosz.

Results of a survey of companies represented at the congress showed 52 per cent saw “maintaining or growing advertising revenue” as their biggest challenge for the year ahead, higher than AI implementation (44 per cent) and revenue diversification (43 per cent).

Dorosz says that although digital advertising is now estimated at three-quarters of the more-than-US$1 trillion (A$1.54 trillion) global advertising market, news publishers capture only about five per cent of the massive opportunity, despite serving and engaging valuable audiences.

“Meanwhile, Google, Meta and Amazon control approximately 60 per cent of all digital advertising revenue globally, with their dominance even stronger in the US market, leaving publishers fighting for scraps in an increasingly commoditised ecosystem,” he says.

The congress inspired, whether for the likes of Ukraine’s regional news publishers – honoured in the Global Media Awards – or the successes of the Post and Courier’s unified analytics, Condé Nast’s product sales success, or Media24’s Tinder-like ‘swipe cards’.

Dorosz points to examples from Bloomberg – “selling advertisers the value of context” and the New York Times’ following the audience, as well as “creator economy insights” from freelance Noor Tagouri and the Boston Globe’s B Side initiative. And from the awards, United Daily News Group’s AI-powered strategies, Mediahuis Ireland’s first-party data retargeting, and Russmedia’s emotional storytelling approach.

As Wilkinson noted, “We kept hearing from some of the tech companies: News is a problem. We hear it from advertisers: News is a problem.”

The perception problem, combined with the platform decline and AI’s disruption of traditional web search, along with the data disadvantages of low conversion signals, creates what Wilkinson described as a fork in the road, where publishers must decide whether to “fix news” or “work around news”.

The relaunched advertising initiative names eight critical primary areas – four primary and four secondary – from first-party data to premium ad products to AI, measurement and brand safety, and follows meetings with 12 INMA board members and news industry executives, from Mediahuis and Schibsted in Europe, to MediaNews Group and Hearst in North America, News Corp in Australia, the South China Morning Post and Hindu Group in Asia.

Dorosz is seeking feedback, shared challenges and innovations and “the post-traffic era” demands new strategies, fresh thinking and collective action. In his newsletter call to action, he adds, “Let's evolve news media advertising together”.

Pictured (top) Earl Wilkinson speaks at INMA New York, and (below, centre) Gabriel Dorosz joins delegates during a social moment