Hi SODP community,

Let’s recap on what’s been happening, the new content, industry updates, tips, and more.

TIP OF THE WEEK

If you wait until the season starts, most advertisers' budgets are already gone.

Seasonal sales periods, such as end-of-year holidays, Black Friday, back-to-school, or local events, are when publishers see the sharpest spikes in audience demand and advertiser spend. However, these opportunities are often locked in months earlier, when advertisers are still finalising their budgets. Many large retail advertisers plan campaigns two to three quarters in advance (IAB, 2024), meaning publishers who delay outreach until the season is underway often lose access to the most lucrative deals.

Publishers who consistently maximise seasonal revenue do three things well:

• Secure commitments early: locking in longer-term deals before competitors enter the conversation.

• Align editorial calendars with advertiser goals: making content naturally complement planned campaigns.

• Back pitches with audience data: showing advertisers not just reach, but intent.

Practical steps for publishers:

1. Forecast seasonal demand with data: Use historic traffic, keyword trends, and audience engagement to identify peak periods. Turn these insights into forward-looking projections so advertisers see exactly when your audience is most active.

2. Package seasonal content with inventory: Combine proven formats like buying guides, reviews, and deal roundups with premium placements. Advertisers should clearly see how their campaigns fit into your seasonal narrative.

3. Demonstrate audience relevance: Present clear audience segments tied to seasonal behaviours, e.g., gift buyers, bargain seekers, travellers. Go beyond demographics to show advertisers your audience overlaps directly with their target buyers.

4. Publish seasonal timelines early: Share a seasonal media kit months ahead. Include booking deadlines, creative submission dates, and campaign flight windows. This makes you a reliable partner rather than a last-minute option.

5. Layer evergreen with seasonal: Position evergreen content, such as buyer’s guides, as always-on entry points. Then use seasonal activations to capture urgency and higher conversion. Advertisers value funnels that deliver both sustained and time-sensitive performance.

Seasonal advertising success is built months before campaigns go live. Publishers who prepare early, align editorial with advertiser needs, and provide data-backed opportunities are the ones who consistently secure stronger partnerships.

SODP POSTS

Glide Nexa Review for 2025

Managing digital audiences has become one of publishing’s toughest operational challenges. Nearly 70% of major publishers now run paywalls, yet only 17% of consumers actually pay for a subscription when they see a paywall.

Referral traffic from search engines and social media too has steadily declined since 2024, just as Google’s phasing out of third-party cookies has hit ad revenue hard.

To compensate, publishers are doubling down on first-party data, which not only makes ads more valuable, but also enables publishers to implement dynamic paywalls, cleverly varying offers to customers, offering personalized bundles, and smarter retention strategies.

In fact, many publishers are now experimenting with hybrid or dynamic models, managing free readers, trialists, premium subscribers, and corporate accounts, each with different access rules, entitlements, and personalization needs.

This complex balancing act is possible only by leveraging first-party data. The challenge, however, is that this data typically lives across scattered and often ill-matched systems.Traditional CMSs were never built to handle this kind of identity and entitlement complexity, while CRMs are geared toward sales, not editorial workflows. Paywalls can manage content gating, but fail on identity management or other integrations.

As a result, publishers end up patching together half-measures: an access rule here, a paywall plug-in there, without ever achieving a unified view of their audience.

The result is a patchwork view of audiences, rising costs as you try and fill the gaps in the patchwork, and missed opportunities for personalization and growth.:

Glide Nexa claims to close that gap.

By consolidating what’s usually spread across multiple systems, Nexa helps publishers simplify operations, to reduce friction and better focus on growing engagement and revenue.

Join us as we review Glide Nexa, and evaluate whether it lives up to its claims.

READ MORE

JOB BOARD

➡️ Telegraph Media Group is looking Politics News Editor who will be primarily responsible for working with the lobby team to identify and develop the main news stories of the day, and to generate ideas for and oversee the delivery of exclusive news stories. (London). SEE MORE

➡️ Mamamia is on the lookout for a Social Producer who will be at the forefront of creating, curating, and publishing engaging content across various social media platforms, ensuring it resonates with their distinctive Mamami tone. (Australia). SEE MORE

COMMUNITY BUZZ

Industry News

➡️ Can AI lead to uncovering an AI scandal? This might not have been the primary goal for a Norwegian newsroom, iTromsø. But it’s what happened. When I saw posts earlier this week from Lars Adrian Giske , I knew I wanted to know more. The story he told me sheds light on a potential new phenomenon — what I’d call AI political slop. We’ve heard a lot about AI slop and AI work slop. This is a new type. Everything started almost a year ago, when the newsroom of iTromsø began an ambitious investigative project, My School. READ MORE 

➡️For years, technical SEO has been about crawlability, structured data, canonical tags, sitemaps, and speed. All the plumbing that makes pages accessible and indexable. That work still matters. But in the retrieval era, there’s another layer you can’t ignore: vector index hygiene. And while I’d like to claim my usage of vector index hygiene is unique, similar concepts exist in ML circles already. It is unique when applied specifically to our work with content embedding, chunk pollution, and retrieval in SEO/AI pipelines, however. This isn’t a replacement for crawlability and schema. It’s an addition. READ MORE 

➡️ Google Search Labs has a new experiment you can opt into that turns on some Agentic capabilities within AI Mode. This allows Google to help you make a reservation at a restaurant and will soon give you the ability to book local service appointments and event tickets. Agentic capabilities in AI Mode. The new labs feature works for users in the US who are signed into their Google account. You can opt in and review the features over here. AI Mode in Google Search now has agentic capabilities to help with your everyday local needs. “We’re starting with restaurant reservations, and expanding soon to local service appointments and event tickets,” Google wrote. READ MORE 

Social Media Discussions

➡️ Jes Scholz on LinkedIn:

Dear publishers who migrate: It's not you. It's Google.

I helped a client migrate domains earlier this year. Smooth move, no visibility loss, except for Google News. Traffic plummeted to almost zero.

We tried everything to recover: News sitemaps, RSS feeds, faster indexing, structured data title optimisation. Nothing worked.

I was all out of ideas.

28 days later, News traffic returned overnight.

Exact same story on the other domains that followed.

So if you’re migrating a brand with Google News presence, know there's a sandbox.

CONTINUE READING

These are the highlights for the last week.

Until next!

Vahe Arabian and the editorial team at SODP