Source: Digiday
The Independent's shift reflects a broader reshuffling of how publishers monetize traffic: social platforms' algorithmic feeds now route more high-intent shoppers than organic search, collapsing the historical SEO-to-sales pipeline that dominated publishing economics for two decades. Publishers now face a choice between investing in search optimization (increasingly commodified) and building direct relationships on platforms they don't control. The latter trades long-term resilience for short-term revenue that platforms can reverse overnight.