Puneet Gupt of Times Internet gave the INMA South Asia News Media Festival its epitaph for an entire era: “We built stadiums to fill them with people, but we didn’t take phone numbers of people who came in.”

Hold that sentence, because everything that happened in news media this week — in a New Delhi ballroom, in a California courtroom, in the board rooms of America’s largest publishers, in a virtual Latin America summit, and in a one-hour INMA master class beamed from Amsterdam — was a variation on it. The traffic era rested on a 20-year bargain nobody signed: Google took the content, and in exchange it sent back the audience.

This was the week that bargain visibly, measurably died. Not in one market. Everywhere, simultaneously, with numbers attached.

This blog post represents the past five days of the “INMA conversation” — dots connected, discussions distilled.

To fully comprehend those five days, consider the arithmetic that landed:

• Publisher ad supply fell as much as 40% in the second quarter — while Google’s own search advertising grew 17% to US$63.3 billion.
• Google Search referrals to major UK publishers will halve by Q3 2027 if current trajectories hold, according to the Association of Online Publishers’ analysis of 10.8 billion pageviews across eight publishing groups.
• America’s biggest publishers are weighing a Google exit. The Wall Street Journal reported that USA Today, Politico, The Economist, People Inc., Reuters, and Reddit are openly evaluating whether to cut Google off entirely — a move considered commercial self-harm for two decades and now considered a negotiating position.
• News Corp countersued Brave for scraping and reselling its journalism to AI companies, with Robert Thomson branding the company “content crooks and brand brigands.”

And Gabe Dorosz, INMA’s Advertising Initiative lead, was quoted across the trade press making the structural point underneath it all: 15 years of programmatic strategy built on the fiction of infinite supply steadily drove CPMs into the floor — and AI-driven traffic declines have now killed the fiction. There is no infinite supply. There never was.

Here is what I find remarkable: The most sophisticated responses to this rupture came not from New York or London, but from New Delhi and Latin America — in the same week.

What Delhi understood

Across four days at the South Asia News Media Festival — a two-day study tour through innovative Delhi media companies followed by 196 delegates from eight countries in conference — the region assembled what I would argue is the clearest post-traffic playbook any INMA event has produced this year. Nobody on the study tour argued the traffic was coming back. HT Digital put a decade of numbers behind the candour: publishers’ share of India’s digital advertising spend has fallen from 18% to 7%, with news media closer to 3%.

What emerged instead was a repricing — of trust, of habit, of legacy assets, and of the units by which this industry measures itself.

Trust was priced, not professed. Matiur Rahman of Bangladesh’s Prothom Alo, who has weathered 79 court cases, advertising blockades, and an office set ablaze, delivered the line of the festival: “There is one thing algorithms cannot replicate and no one can destroy, and that is credibility. Audience trust is our only currency.” What gave the New Delhi conversation its commercial edge was Mohit Jain of Times of India arguing that. And HT Digital showed trust monetised all the way to the transaction: 10 million users acquired in its personal finance business in a year, three million credit applications, roughly US$155 million disbursed. “If you are able to acquire users on the basis of trust, they will trust you to take care of the complete end point of the journey.”

Habit displaced reach as the operating metric. Nalin Mehta of Moneycontrol offered the proof: Newsletter stories that generate almost no traffic, yet whose absence — during a single missed edition — produced a flood of angry reader emails. “That is never going to be captured in data.” JioStar’s Siddharth Sharma, whose platform hit 72.5 million concurrent viewers, compressed the lesson into a sentence for every newsroom wall: “Habit is the business. Live is just a spark.” On the study tour, the same logic showed up as metrics:

• NDTV has made total time spent its north star, with day-30 retention for organic installs at about 60%.
• The Indian Express rejected views for engagement — “not the number of views they’re getting on cat videos,” as Sayoni Aiyar put it.
• News Corp Australia, Gabe told Delhi conference delegates, has recreated its primary KPI as ”engaged reach” — on the theory that not all traffic is good.

The archive emerged as the defensible asset. This was the study tour’s most concrete convergence. A publisher’s own content, properly indexed, is the thing competitors cannot copy. NDTV built an answer engine that deliberately cannot reach beyond its own reporting — “the only unique value we’re trying to give is one: it’s grounded,” said chief product officer Rohan Tyagi. Times Internet’s Answers feature, drawing only on the Times of India archive, holds readers three times longer and three articles deeper. Tyagi also offered the sharpest formulation of the unlearning ahead: after “almost a decade of extensively writing for algorithms,” the question is now “how do we have more empathy for the readers and start writing for them?”

Print was re-valued, not defended. L V Navaneeth of The Hindu Group reframed the region’s legacy strengths — rather than trenches, and issued a charge I intend to repeat: “It is time to export our thinking, not to import thinking from outside.” The research backed him: Newspaper readership in the studied markets grew from 16 million to 18 million while advertising expenditure fell anyway. DB Corp made part of the case this week with quarterly profit up 25% and advertising revenue up 10%. And Brut India showed the youth flank of the same trust argument: 8 billion video views, 89% of the audience under 34, built not on speed but on the promise that “if it’s on Brut, it must be true.”

The successor economy. Criteo’s Medhavi Singh told South Asian publishers the market has moved from selling attention to selling intent — and that publishers own more intent than they realise, having simply never built the measurement. Gupt argued a supply squeeze is coming to the open Internet, with eCPMs potentially rising 30% in India. HT Digital’s Puneet Jain confirmed double-digit CPM growth already, declaring “there has never been a better time to build the news media business,” with the caveat that “reach without relationship is a depreciating asset.”

Note the inversion. The very scarcity that terrifies the traffic-era publisher — fewer impressions — is the pricing power of the relationship-era publisher. Gabe’s verdict after the Delhi site visits: India is extraordinarily unique, but the playbook does not change. “The window is still open, but the clock is ticking.” He said that on the big INMA public stage and in 14 private meetings with Indian publishers across four days. 

What Latin America is already building

If Delhi supplied the diagnosis, last week’s INMA Latin America Media Summit supplied the proof that the successor model can be operated — because the region was pushed off the open Web earlier than everyone else, and built alternatives first.

Gabe’s summit keynote laid out the market logic. Display revenue tracks traffic roughly one-to-one, so when pageviews fall, so does the old model. Meanwhile the advertising market itself is growing towards US$1.6 trillion by 2030 — but look at where the growth actually sits:

• Creators: US$44 billion in 2026, growing roughly four times faster than the ad industry overall.
• Digital video: On track for 44% of the entire global ad market by 2028.
• Generative search advertising: A category with no prior baseline, projected at US$101 billion by 2030.
• Retail media, CTV, social video, digital audio — all up. “Other than podcasts, none of those are traditional publisher channels.”
• Meanwhile, global news brand ad spend has fallen 33% since 2019.

His conclusion was the week’s bluntest: “We have to stop competing on undifferentiated reach. We will lose against the platforms.” Rebuild instead around premium, machine-legible, outcome-oriented products anchored in first-party data — which, he said, “is the moat for publishers.”

The case studies showed the moat being dug:

• Editora Globo now derives 60% of its advertising revenue from projects — branded content, custom publishing, and above all events, which alone account for 32% of total revenue. Rio Gastronomia draws 120,000 attendees and out-prices global competitors precisely because it belongs to a media company. “We are not migrating from media to events,” said Tiago Alfonso. “We integrated events into media solutions.”
• Milenio — Mexico’s most-visited and most-trusted news brand — built Puntos Milenio on the principle of loyalty before the paywall. “We don’t reward clicks; we reward behaviours that create value,” said Juan Manuel Nava. Members now consume seven times more pages than registered users outside the programme.
• Clarín — 600 stories a day, 400 million monthly uniques, 750,000 subscribers — replaced the pageview with a 1-to-10 article score blending engagement, conversion, and retention that now drives the home page and the dynamic paywall in real time. Its governance framework exists, said Leonardo Dalera, because “the best results come when journalism leads and AI executes.”
• La Nación built its entire AI ecosystem in-house, in a secure environment, with a semantic archive search that now beats Google for its own editorial retrieval — the archive-as-moat argument, made in Spanish.
• Grupo RBS built a social-first video operation to reach audiences the open Web no longer delivers, while Estrategia y Negocios reinvented itself as a profitable 360-degree business platform.

What Jodie mapped (and Kerstin confirmed)

If Delhi and Latin America supplied the playbook, Jodie Hopperton’s Webinar this week — 211 members from 33 countries — supplied the map of where the ground moves next. Three arguments deserve the widest audience.

First, the behavioural sequence is search, then ask, then act. Consumers have already moved from typing keywords to asking questions. The next shift is AI taking action on their behalf. Chat required no new hardware and no new habits, which is why this adoption curve is steeper than the internet’s or mobile’s.

Second, we now serve three audiences: agents, bots, and consumers. AI acting on behalf of individuals, crawlers consuming content at scale, and the humans we have always known. Jodie’s most unsettling exhibit was a millennial friend who spent an hour with Claude Code building her own personalised daily news digest — powered by a US$400-a-year news subscription. She wants to pay for journalism. She simply does not want our products. That sentence should keep every product leader in this industry awake.

Third, agentic AI is becoming the operating layer, not a feature set. HT Digital reports 70% faster development cycles with 95% of code AI-generated — having changed the question from “can AI help employees?” to “which parts of the company should operate autonomously?” Ippen Media in Germany is building an entire editorial operating system atop a verified archive. The echo across Delhi was exact: Times Internet’s Siddhant Satsangi demonstrated live products built on the insight that AI belongs in the publisher’s operating layer, and Scroll’s Sannuta Raghu went furthest of all, arguing the article is no longer the unit of value — her “news atoms” architecture makes editorial logic explicit to machines, because liquid content is an infrastructure choice, not a front-end gimmick.

And here the week produced its quiet convergence. On Kerstin Hasse’s “No One’s Reading This” podcast, Dmitry Shishkin — the mind behind the User Needs framework — answered Jodie’s agents audience with what he calls the “Agents Readiness Layer”: publishers signalling, at paragraph level, exactly which need each piece of content satisfies, so that when an agent assembles someone’s personalised digest, it picks the right material rather than flattening “your nuances of reporting into a single sentence.” His warning was blunt: Agents abandon ambiguity for clarity, and “I don’t want somebody in Silicon Valley dictating how our content is going to be treated. We need to be on the front foot editorially.” Now count the voices: Gabe told Latin America and South Asia to rebuild around machine-legible products. Raghu told Delhi to atomise editorial logic for machines. Shishkin told Kerstin’s listeners to make value explicit at paragraph level. 

Three continents, no coordination, one architecture. When that happens in a single week, it is no longer a prediction. It is a specification.

Shishkin’s deeper point ties the whole conference season together. Newsrooms spent decades optimising for volume, and “volume defaults to update me” — the commissioning-desk version of filling stadiums without taking phone numbers. The Digital News Report he and Kerstin dissected confirmed the cost as social has overtaken TV and news Web sites as the primary news source globally for the first time, and 27% of people now get news from creators weekly — creators who, as he noted, get the package right before they press record. His definition of the remedy could have been spoken from the Delhi stage: “Trust is nothing but regular usage — you proving on a regular basis that your content is worth somebody’s time. You can’t have trust by default.”

The synthesis

Step back and the week resolves into a single thesis, and it is the one I have been pressing all year: AI is commoditising content while making verified relationships scarce — and markets eventually reprice what is scarce. The impression, the pageview, and the article are dying as units of value. What replaces them — intent, habit, outcomes, structured trust, brand as the operating system of the enterprise — must be built deliberately, because none of it accrues by accident the way traffic once did.

There were even glimmers of what the new settlement might look like:

• OpenAI renewed its bet on local news with US$5 million more for the American Journalism Project.
• Knight Foundation and Village Media are launching 15 US newsrooms on a community-first model.
• Publishers are treating AI platforms as a distribution layer rather than a referral source — a world where citations matter more than clicks.

And there were warnings about how not to do it. Nieman Lab reported this week that outlets including The Wall Street Journal, Wired, and NJ.com are using algorithms to set individualised renewal prices from subscriber data — and a new New York law now forces them to say so, in prescribed capital letters: “THIS PRICE WAS SET BY AN ALGORITHM USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA.” The same relationship data that can serve a reader can also be used to squeeze one — often charging loyal subscribers more than newcomers. Trust, remember, is the only currency. Spend it carefully.

Perhaps the purest expression of the relationship era came from the smallest story of the week. A journalist at Stavanger Aftenblad in Norway had long been struck by a New York ritual: After the marathon, people buy The New York Times not to read the news but to find their own name in the results — some frame the page and hang it on the wall. Her newsroom asked whether that feeling could be built as a digital product, and the answer was RUN: a real-time results-and-photo service covering every recreational runner in its region, not just the winners. Every time there is a race, RUN rises to the top of Aftenbladet’s subscription charts. A newspaper that makes its readers part of the story, one finish line at a time. That is what taking the phone numbers looks like.

For 20 years, we filled the stadiums and congratulated ourselves on the turnstile count. The turnstiles are being removed. The stadiums, as Delhi reminded us, are still full.

This time, take the phone numbers.

What is new with INMA this week?

South Asia Media Festival in Delhi. INMA wrapped our South Asia Media Festival this week in New Delhi – a combination of conference and study tour – drawing 196 delegates from the top publishers in the region. Click here for editorial coverage, with more distilled insights to come next week. Click here for all photos from the week.

Gabe Dorosz visits with 14 companies in Delhi. Over the course of four days, INMA’s Gabe Dorosz visited corporate members Times Internet, HT Media, Dainik Bhaskar, and Indian Express – while, in total, logging 14 briefings for INMA members.  

Distill the South Asia conference with Ask INMA. If you’re more interested in the key insights from this week’s INMA New Delhi conference, try the “Ask INMA” answer engine. All audio and transcripts are uploaded and ready for your Delhi conference question.

Kerstin’s podcast with Dmitry Shishkin. Another episode of Kerstin Hasse’s “No One’s Reading This” podcast has posted. Click here to Spotify to hear Kerstin in conversation with Dmitry Shishkin on user needs, creators, and the AI era. All over a cup of coffee.

Mentoring session with Elevate Africa Scholarship recipients. INMA held a mentoring session for our Elevate Africa Scholarship recipients on the always popular subject of navigating the corridors of power in news media – notably on how young African media professionals build careers. Ken Ngaruiya, CEO of MediaMax Network (Kenya) and INMA Africa Advisory Board chair, outlined the qualities behind reputation and promotion — integrity, curiosity, dependability — plus handling criticism, conflict, pressure, and mistakes. Sandy Naudé, former CEO of Africa Community Media and INMA Africa pioneer, addressed workplace flexibility and neurodivergent inclusion. Mapula Nkosi, former City Press editor now with Arena Holdings, tackled political pressure, cyberbullying, and journalist mental health. Rahaman Abiola, editor-in-chief of Legit.ng (Nigeria), discussed balancing access, ethics, and truth when navigating power.

Another membership milestone. INMA just surpassed 27,000 members last week – not that we’re counting. Among the many new members this year: Asahi Shimbun, CNN, The Economist, AWS, and more. 

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