Launch Day: Finishing Your Website Migration

MEDIA NEWS ROUNDUP

ProRata launched an AI search engine that promises to pay publishers and creators. Prorata AI has been attracting investors (including the Daily Mail’s publisher) with the goal of compensating publishers for content used by AI search engines. Gist, the company’s new search engine, serves relevant answers from its collection of licensed content. The AI investing boom is not slowing down.

News Media Alliance asks lawmakers to look into Google’s affiliate-killing update. It’s looking more likely that Google is suppressing some publisher-owned affiliate businesses, including those of CNN and Forbes. In response, News Media Alliance published an open letter urging the government to look into Google’s opaque “Site Reputation Abuse” update. The open letter states that some Alliance members have seen traffic declines of up to 90%, resulting in millions in lost revenue.

In contrast, Future plc, “the global platform for specialist media,” reported 12% growth in affiliate revenue in the second half of 2024 (despite a 9% decline for 2024 overall).

Business Insider is using AI to boost audience satisfaction. In an interview with Press Gazette, BI’s CTO mentions the company’s consumer-facing GenAI search has helped drive a 75% boost in subscription conversions. The AI product lineup also includes txools that optimize ad placements and help identify topic gaps that need to be addressed by new articles. We have been reporting on a growing trend of publishers launching their own consumer-facing news chatbots. 

Autonomous (AI) Agents are getting more popular—and may introduce more bot attack risks. From bigtech agents like Gemini 2.0’s Project Mariner and Anthropic’s Claude Agents to smaller projects like Do Browser, many tech companies are using more Autonomous Agents to search, click, buy, and pay on your behalf. This may, however, disrupt traditional web traffic metrics and exacerbate bot-related issues, including CAPTCHA evasion and ad fraud. At Refact, we have had some experience battling bots when they attacked our clients’ email lists. These bot attacks can skew analytics, damage email deliverability rates, and lead to lost revenue. If you are a publisher, ensuring your first-party data gathering is in order is a good first step to avoid potential problems once these agents become mainstream.

HOW TO DISASTER-PROOF YOUR MIGRATION

Welcome back to our series on preparing publisher websites for a seamless, successful content migration. In part 5, we double-checked analytics and ads settings to ensure they were configured correctly, avoiding revenue loss, data gaps, and a lot of unnecessary stress. With that out of the way, it’s time for the big moment: going live with your new site.

Read the whole Disaster-Proof Your Migration series here.

Part 6: Launch Day and Followup

It’s time to walk through launch day. These final steps before resuming normal operations are critical for your site to operate smoothly in a new CMS…