The top of the funnel used to be free. Organic search brought readers in. Social platforms amplified reach. Paid media closed the deal. That model is broken and, for news publishers, the clock is ticking on finding a replacement.

At The Washington Post, we stopped waiting for organic to recover. Instead, we turned to the one asset AI cannot replicate: our journalists.

AI-powered search tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google’s own AI Overviews are fundamentally changing how readers find information. Instead of clicking on the link for a news article, readers are increasingly finding answers directly from AI interfaces.

A 2025 Pew Research Center study mentions tracking 68,000 real search queries, in which users clicked on results only 8% of the time when AI summaries appeared, compared to 15% without them. This marked a 46.7% relative reduction in click-through behaviour. The readers that arrived organically now obtain answers before they ever reach the site.

The scale of this shift is significant. As mentioned in the Reuters Institute’s journalism and technology trends and predictions 2026 report, news executives now expect search engine traffic to fall by more than 40% within three years, with one-fifth of respondents expecting losses above 75%. Chartbeat data cited in the same report shows organic Google search traffic already down 33% globally and 38% in the United States between November 2024 and November 2025.

At The Washington Post, we saw this erosion in our own traffic data before the industry conversation fully caught up. Organic discovery, once the reliable engine that fed our acquisition funnel, became less dependable.

This created an urgent question for our paid media team: If readers are no longer finding us organically, how do we reach them at all?

The old “DR” playbook isn’t working for paid teams

One of the counters to combat declining organic traffic would be to invest in a full-funnel paid media strategy. That is exactly what many publishers, including us, have done. Scaling paid spend against a traditional direct response (DR) playbook, led with a price offer, optimised toward cost per acquisition (CPA), measured on last-touch attribution, quickly ran into its own wall.

DR creative assumes a reader is already brand-aware and purchase-motivated. It works as a nudge. What it cannot do is manufacture demand from scratch, which is precisely what paid media increasingly needs to do as the organic top-of-funnel shrinks.

Before The Washington Post tested upper- and mid-funnel tactics, we thought DR campaigns drove ample reach. However, the performance data bore a more complicated story. Broad prospecting targeting consisted of audiences that had not built a relationship with the brand and were not responding to offer-led creative the way our models predicted. Click-through rates (CTR) were low. CPAs were rising. We were spending more to acquire less.

The next frontier did not lie in the mechanics of the execution of our paid DR support, but in how we approached messaging to different audiences across the marketing funnel.

Building on a foundation: from content promotion to video

Earlier this year, my colleague Janie Curtis, associate director of paid media at The Washington Post, wrote about how our team developed a journalism-led content promotion strategy. This moved away from traditional creative production toward leveraging our own award-winning reporting as paid media assets.

Her work established something significant: Article-based content promotion, when done right, is a powerful and efficient tool for reaching new audiences and driving subscriptions. Cost-per-click (CPC) came in 24% more efficient than our target. Articles with paid support drove a 31% lift in conversion rates compared to organic alone.

Janie’s piece closed with a note about the team beginning to test a new frontier within that strategy, promoting video content from our journalists, with early results already showing encouraging conversion numbers. This blog post picks up on the same thread.

What started as an early-stage experiment has since produced data that has meaningfully changed how we think about creative strategy. Furthermore, given the AI search environment publishers are now navigating, the implications feel timelier than ever.

The asset we were sitting on: boosting organic content

Here is where news publishers have an advantage most subscription businesses do not, and one that many paid media teams are not yet fully deploying.

In the near term, we aim to build on the success of our initial efforts by scaling platform-native investigative video across social channels. Early traction has reinforced the value of authentic, platform-native storytelling.

When we started boosting organic video content in paid media, the results were immediate. One of our initial tests, in early 2025, of a journalist-led video post, boosted on a major social platform, generated 350% more engagement than any other content format we had run on that platform.

This was not a marginal lift. It was a signal that audiences’ response is fundamentally different when the content feels human, credible, and native to the feed rather than engineered for conversion.

This matters for a specific reason. As mentioned in a 2025 consumer survey cited by Vera Content, 83% of consumers said they believed AI would oversaturate their social media feeds, and 80% said it could increase the spread of misinformation. In that environment, a journalist’s face, a real person, a known voice, a trusted byline, is a credibility signal that no AI-generated creative asset can replicate.

And, as mentioned in Meta’s October 2025 algorithm update reported by Sprout Social, Meta’s refreshed recommendation engine now surfaces around 50% more Reels from creators who published content that day, giving recent, creator-native video a structural visibility advantage in the feed. Organic content boosted as dark posts or post-boosting campaigns in paid media lands squarely in that sweet spot.

We started taking this organic content — the videos our editorial and newsroom teams were already producing — and running it as paid creative on Meta, targeting cold and warm audiences who had never subscribed. Instead of leading with a subscription offer, we led with the journalism itself.

What the data showed

The results challenged our assumptions in the best possible way. Over a six-month period, we ran organic content-led video campaigns alongside traditional direct response creative simultaneously on Meta, targeting comparable audiences. The gap was significant and consistent.

On CTR (all), video creative delivered more than 4x higher engagement than our direct response campaigns running at the same time.

But the more important finding was what happened further down the conversion funnel: Video didn’t just outperform DR on upper-funnel metrics, it outperformed it on subscriber acquisition too.

The creative that led with the story was doing what DR was supposed to do. And it was doing it more efficiently, with audiences that DR was struggling to convert at all.

Why this works: attention is selective, not short

A common assumption in performance marketing is that Gen Z and younger audiences simply cannot hold attention long enough to convert through video. The data suggests otherwise, and the nuance matters.

As mentioned in a 2026 analysis by ContentGrip, Gen Z’s attention span is commonly cited as around eight seconds, but this number oversimplifies how younger audiences actually consume digital media. In reality, Gen Z attention is not limited. It is selective. They will scroll past anything that feels like an ad. But they will stop for something that feels real.

As mentioned in Attest’s U.S. Gen Z Media Consumption Report from February 2026, Gen Z spends more than two hours per day on short-form video platforms, with 43% watching more than two hours daily, and only 5% watching no video platform at all.

This makes short-form video not just a preferred format but the default, native language of how this generation consumes information. The format is not the barrier. The creative approach is.

This is exactly what boosting organic content delivers. Content that is native to the platform, interesting, and relevant to what audiences are already engaging with is not processed as an advertisement; it is processed as content.

This type of content earns the stop by giving viewers a “reason to believe” by showing through example the breadth and depth of reporting our journalists cover through their preferred format — and can more easily translate into driving conversions as a result.

Where we go next

The results have opened up a broader conversation about how our paid media team operates.

We are deepening partnerships with editorial, brand marketing, and audience strategy to identify and scale the journalism that travels furthest in paid channels. We are also working more closely with editorial to understand what is resonating organically before we amplify it, and exploring our existing video library as a largely untapped paid asset.

The goal is not more content production. It is getting smarter about surfacing what already exists and putting it in front of the right audiences at the right moment.

The broader implication

AI has not just changed where readers come from. It has changed what paid media needs to do.

Paid is no longer the closer at the bottom of a funnel that organic fills. It is increasingly a full-funnel lever working alongside every channel to drive different business goals at different moments.

As mentioned in the Reuters Institute’s 2026 trends report, publishers combating AI and referral traffic challenges are most likely to say original investigations and on-the-ground reporting will be increasingly important, not just editorially, but as a competitive differentiator. The publishers who figure this out first will have a structural acquisition advantage.

The good news is the asset already exists in your newsrooms, your video libraries, and the journalists your readers already trust. The question is not whether to use it. It is how fast you can build the infrastructure to do so.

The most effective performance marketing may no longer begin with an offer. It may begin with a story. And for news publishers, that story is already being told. Every single day.

Banner photo: Adobe stock image by Ljustina.

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