2025 Niche Media Conference: Building the owned audience is top priority
At the 2025 Niche Media Conference, audience expert Melissa Chowning, head of Twenty First Digital (TFD), told attendees that they should start measuring their audience in a different way than the old model of counting visitors and impressions.
“What is your total owned audience as a percentage of web traffic?” she asked.
“If it is 20% now, can it be 50% next year?”
She was not alone. Eric Shanfelt, CEO of consulting firm Nearview Media, recommended paying for email-capture with ads on LinkedIn and Facebook, with rates of $1 to $5 or more per email sounding profitable considering the lifetime value of a subscriber. NichePublisher’s founder and author of this article noted in a break-out session how all of over-performing publishers interviewed for the 2025 Niche Revenue Survey were “ruthlessly building the owned audience. They are not pecking away at it with a pop-up.”
So what’s the rush?
According to Chowning, while most publishers have not seen a drop in overall traffic, disturbing trends are cropping up in the data, and 74% of publishers are worried about the effect of AI on traffic (Reuters).
As everyone has seen, Google is actively moving away from providing a list of search results in favor of displaying a short AI-generated summary above the ads and search results. These AI summaries no longer require users to click through to original content.
Early studies show that on a per article basis, this reduces clicks on search results by 35%. However, others think the future impact on media traffic may be devestating. In an earlier report on this website, Kate Hand, EVP of Gardner Business Media, who participated in the BETA test said of the early version, “It delivers virtually no clicks.” In response, her company decided to gate all content for at least one of their manufacturing oriented magazines.
Fortunately, the overall number of searches is increasing at a rapid rate, from 6% in September 2024 to 11.4% in March 2025, Chowning reported, masking some of the diminished traffic from AI summaries.
But then there is an increasing number of direct queries into ChatGPT to worry about. They avoid search entirely, and already deliver less than 1% CTR. In 2024, approximately 15 million out of 350 million U.S. adults used generative AI as their primary search tool, Chowning said. This number will more than double to 35 million by 2027, (Future Publishing and The Verge).
Making things more precarious for publishers is how social media traffic delivered to media companies has already dropped off on X and META as algorithms no longer push journalism-based news content.
Plus, 40% of Gen Z users now prefer platforms like TikTok and Instagram over Google when searching for recommendations and reviews for restaurants and products (TechCrunch).
Finally, there is “dark social” traffic growth: an increasing amount of traffic now coming from private messaging apps and channels that typically appear as “direct” traffic in analytics, making attribution more challenging.
In short, media traffic driven by third party sources is being pecked to death by ducks.
“Publishers who rely heavily on platforms they don’t control are essentially ‘renting’ their audience,” Chowning said.
The key to sustainability lies in first-party data collection—driving the owned audience so that its size grows closer and closer to search and social-driven traffic numbers.
The good news is that owned audiences provide a significant competitive barrier to entry in a media ecosystem populated by anyone with a computer, and this can make existing niche media with historic companies increasingly valuable.
In addition, prices are much higher for first-party data-influenced ad inventory and email advertising. Serving ads to these hyper-targeted data sets can increase CPMs by 50-200% (Nieman Media Labs). Other publishers who attended round-tables attested to getting $35 to $100 CPMs for ads on newsletters, an example of these targeted, highly engaged audiences.
Personalized emails driven by first-party data also show a 14% higher click-through rates and a 10% increase in conversion rates, studies show.
So what’s a niche publisher to do that addresses these new realities?
Chowning recommended four core strategies:
- Make capturing emails the most important purpose of the website design, optimizing each page with forms and compelling offers.
- Create great, explainer-based discoverable content now, while there is still time. That means developing evergreen explainers and guides that build topical authority over time, and which can serve as entry points for newsletter sign-ups.
- Build a community. Brands with online communities see an average 19% increase in customer lifetime value (Khouras 2024) Consider dedicated platforms like Slack or Discord to foster engagement.
- Leverage strategic partnerships: Collaborate with aligned brands or creators to reach new audiences and provide social proof.
- Yesterday’s focus on pageviews, open rates, and social follower counts is giving way to more meaningful engagement metrics: engagement rates on website and in email, conversion rates for specific actions, subscriber retention, and lifetime value (LTV) of audience members.
Chowning also advised publishers to turn the editorial team into micro-creators with their own voices. Support them by adding bylines, profile photos and landing pages, and switch the tone of newsletters to first person voices. 63% of consumers already trust individual creators more than brands (Edelman Trust Barometer, 2023), and this trend will continue as AI advances, she said.
Some brands are even writing openly about management choices in real time, even when they make a mistake. Authenticity is the new black – a hard-to-define part of the equation for engaging audiences who want to connect with creators.
But first, capture their email.
