The New York Post’s Pivot Plans After 32% Traffic Drop

The New York Post reached 85 million unique users in March 2025. That sounds pretty good until you compare it to March 2024 (when arguably the news was less newsy) when it reached 125 million.

Google’s search algorithm updates and artificial intelligence overviews are to blame for the precipitous drop, an issue many publishers have been struggling with. 

So what’s a News Corp property to do? Publisher and Chief Executive Officer Sean Giancola spoke to AMO about the paper’s strategies to rebuild readership, develop new revenue streams and push deeper into its coverage in the areas in which it maintains authority: 

• Local News: The Post reaches one out of two New Yorkers monthly and has a strong local market presence, with competitors like The New York Times failing to adequately serve the city’s needs. 
• Local Sports: The Post owns coverage of New York teams like the Knicks, Rangers, Jets and Giants. 
• Page Six: The paper’s 48-year-old Page Six has become an institution in celebrity gossip. More recently, Page Six has created a podcast dedicated solely to reality TV news and scoops. 

The Post is also leaning into its national political voice, helping attract an audience across the country, with a focus on New York-heavy places like Los Angeles and South Florida. It’s also very focused on its voice and branding.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

How do you counter the traffic declines from Google search and because of AI overviews? 

I don’t think there’s a silver bullet. You have to continue to look at your business and diversify in a couple ways. 

One, you have to diversify your traffic referrals. The main lifeblood of your business is your direct traffic. We’re focusing on identifying our high value users. We have done a lot of work on data. We’ve captured a lot of first party data on our users, and what we are trying to do is leverage that to create a better product, better engagement. 

You’ve got to create more efficacy for people to keep coming back. Your one and dones as I call them, they’re the ones that have the biggest fluctuation. When you have Google’s with the thumb on the scale, you still want them. But how do you turn them into a more regular user and deeper engagement? 

That starts with your UX and your UI, and we are in the process of doing some things around AI on personalization. 

People have very limited time, and discovery is a big part of that. How do we make discovery easy? That’s what Google’s doing on their front end with their summaries in Gemini, is making it easier, and that’s a challenge for the news industry, because if you make it easy and you get enough from the summary, do you go deeper? Not usually. And that’s where we’re going to have to work really hard to create even more loyal users. 

Who’s the loyal user? Why are they reading the Post?

We’re an authority on certain areas: local. We reach one out of two New Yorkers every month. We have a loyal audience, but also our competition is not serving this audience. So the Daily News isn’t serving it. The New York Times, they’re serving a lot of other things. They’re not serving the local market. The Wall Street Journal doesn’t serve the local market. So what are you left with? Local television, which is declining, and social media, and we think we fit into that authority, and we’re looking at even doing that better.

We’re an authority on local sports. If you’re a Knicks fan, if you’re a Rangers fan, Jets fan, Giants fan, you’re coming to the Post. Competition is MSG, SNY. You could argue that The Athletic from The New York Times has played in that space. 

It’s more of a national play, but we have an authority in celebrity and entertainment with Page Six and this great brand. We’re putting resources, and we’re expanding the coverage. 

Not only is it red carpet—dare I say the word gossip—but I would say celebrity news. We’re doing things like reality television.  

We launched a franchise called Y with two editors called Danny and Evan, and they’re great. And we’ve got a radio show on XM with them. Those are the three authority areas where we get direct audience coming from. That’s where we start. 

Where Keith Poole, who’s the editor in chief, has created a bit of an authority nationally, our national political business voice, which is very different than most other news publishers out there. We developed a loyal audience across the country in that respect. 

How do you monetize these things?

There’s two streams of revenue. Simplifying it, there’s subscription revenue—90% of subscription revenue is still the paper. We’re the third largest newspaper in the country. A small portion is a subscription product on our sports channel called Sports Plus. 

It’s about one-third subscription, two-thirds advertising. 

You have video, newsletters, audio and in the future events. We’ve also built a robust affiliate business where that’s a cost per acquisition, or flat fee deals, and we’ve built that over the last eight years.  

Is there a plan for subscriptions beyond Sports Plus? 

There’s nothing on the map scheduled that we’re gonna roll out for a paid paywall on any of the content. That could change depending on where the markets and our business goes.  

When I go to the Post, I don’t have to register. You ask me to register, but I never do. Do you think of changing that?

What we need to change is to better communicate to you the value of registering. We need to show that if you register, you’re going to get more personalized content, unique, exclusive content. We need to better our offering of why we’re incentivizing people to register because most people, if they don’t have to register, they don’t, even though, believe it or not, we’ve registered millions of people.

How else are you getting to know your reader and what they want? 

We have some reader panels for Page Six, the Post and sports. We do a lot of surveys, and we talk to them. 

We’re actually creating some unique testing groups to expose new products that we have so we could do research and better understand what the consumer desires are. We’re doing some outreach to our users, and then we are creating some unique panels as well for some user discovery and user access, efficacy on whether the products are being served the right way.

The local angle is huge because the city’s really not being served properly. There’s some local stuff that’s obvious, like covering the mayor. How deep do you need to go? Do you have the resources for that? 

We have the resources for it. We could obviously always use more. We’ve got to make sure we’re covering the right things deep enough, and then making it very accessible. We have a couple products that we’re going to roll out that are going to be keen to solving that problem, about AI, about personalization, about getting the information you want easier and quicker.

Do you do any events?

Events is on the roadmap. We think small, intimate, local events. We have a platform that we call NYNext, it’s led by Lydia Moynihan. We’re going to roll out our first Next event in June. We’ll have a salon, dinner type event.

NYNext is about innovation and about moving New York forward, the leaders, the businesses, the policy makers, and so we’ll probably launch with something that’s thematic around that, about how do we elevate New York? It’ll be invitation-only. It’s going to be intimate, probably less than 20.

Oh, wow. I want to go. 

Well, that’s my point. 

What [EIC] Keith has done the last four years is created even more authority that the Post has in many different areas like I was alluding to, and one of that is policy and the local and national agenda, and I won’t name the companies, but we’re getting more inbound calls of big corporations that want to work with us now because of the voice that we have nationally.

Home deliveries up year over year. How is that possible?

I have an amazing consumer marketing director who understands the marketplace, and there’s still a huge demand for our voice and with our competition leaving the marketplace— like New Jersey is a little bit of a news desert. Long Island is getting competitive in our space, we’ve been able to grow direct home delivery.

Can you say to what?

I don’t want to share numbers. We’re growing, which is probably the only paper in the country growing.

You have a lot of unique aspects, but you’re also in the consumer market and it is the hardest market. What else do you do to maintain your authority? 

One of my strategies has been to diversify revenue streams and distribution. The biggest asset we own is our brand. How does the brand play in video? How does it play in newsletters? How does it play in audio? How does it play in events? That is what you need to trade on moving forward to be successful, particularly with the headwinds that we’re facing with distribution of traffic.

Efforts to reach younger readers, how are you doing that?

I have a 20 year old, a built-in, one-person testing market. 

The challenge with young readers is you need to find them where they are, and we continue to evolve our social strategy and our distribution strategy on different platforms, YouTube, Instagram, Tik Tok. It’s not without its challenges, especially on the modernization standard side, but I do believe you need to expand your brand, and the best way to do that is meet them where they are.

Do you work with influencers? 

We don’t really work with influencers, except for the people that are on my team, who are by nature influencers, because they have a voice in the marketplace and they have followings and so forth, whether it’s sports, entertainment or news. We haven’t struck up any deals with outside influencers. That’s fraught with challenges. 

Is the challenge getting them back to the website?

100%.

How can you do that?

If you know, I’ll hire you. It’s like anything else. You have to expose people to your brand and to your content. And then you have to figure out how you can bring them into your product, whether it’s an app, whether it’s the website, whether it’s video newsletters.

We have a big internship program with Newhouse School in Syracuse. I was speaking to a bunch of students recently, and they said, “Is AI going to kill your business?” And I said, first off, I don’t know, but it’s like any other challenge that I’ve seen in my career. I started in the magazine business, before the internet. I’m old. Then we saw the internet come, didn’t kill news or publishing, or content. Then you had Google, then you had social and now you have AI.

AI presents a very unique challenge, as opposed to Meta, Google, Snap, but it’ll be interesting to see the evolution of what that means. There’s always going to be a need for information and news, what that looks like in the product, we’ll wait and see how that evolves.

I feel like, to some degree, we’re not replaceable. I could be naive, but sitting here talking to you, is something a machine can’t do. Maybe it can in the future. 

This is what I’m bullish on. There still needs to be a personality, there needs to be a voice.

I’m a huge sports fan. There’s certain people I like to watch on television. There’s certain people I don’t like to watch on television. Mainly, it has nothing to do with their expertise or their intelligence, their skill set. It’s my personal taste. When I read someone, it’s the same thing. I like their voice. I like the cadence that they write, or whatever that could be sports, it could be politics and that’s why we do have a wide swath of different content generators that have different voices.

I’m bullish on the Post voice. Our authority and our place in the marketplace is unique across those different channels. The challenge that we’re going to have is like, how do I take that voice and make sure it’s relevant, and make sure that people care and that’s why I need to expose people, and we need to make sure that people understand what they get from the Post.

How do I continue to expand to other markets? It’s uneven whether people understand what we do with the Post. Certain markets, yes, Florida, a little bit, in California. Middle of the country, not so much. How do we expand to make sure that the voice resonates everywhere?

It’s a tough one, especially if one of the pillars is local. I mean, Florida makes absolute sense.  

But could you take the model that we’ve created here in New York and can we replicate that?

We’ve invested in DC, because we have a voice now, particularly in the new administration. Why wouldn’t we lean into that? Florida is expanding, their population is going up. The sensibilities probably are a lot closer to our sensibilities. We don’t have an office, but we have increased our staffing in Florida.

We’ve got a decent amount of people in LA, not only in Page Six, but covering some of the news events, particularly what’s happened out there with some of the politics, the fires—we can expand our coverage.

What are you doing with YouTube?

We’ve got channels, we’ve got sports, Page Six and the Post, we’re going to be launching two new podcasts in the next 60 days, which will have their own YouTube. We’re going to have a daily podcast coming up, and then we have a weekly podcast. It’s mainly political and focused on the administration.

So The Daily would be sort of a quick rundown of what’s happened today?

From the Post’s voice. We’re gonna compete directly against The New York Times’s The Daily, and against the Journal, but with a different cadence.

The policy is Miranda Devine, she’s on staff, a well known columnist. We’ve hired a person on The Daily that’s going to be the host.

I know that there are probably newsletters, but I don’t ever see them. Maybe it’s because I look at the site so often that I don’t notice them.

We’ve got to do a better job of surfacing the right ones for you. Whether that’s, here’s the read of the day, and here’s what you need to know, or is it deeper, which is really interesting, which is a unique, one person newsletter that writes like Miranda has a good newsletter that’s her voice, and it’s opinion and it’s politics. We could do better, whether it’s sports, whether it’s entertainment, whether it’s news and politics, I think people like personality. They like having a relationship with somebody.

The only danger there being that you could lose this person.

You could, and hopefully you replace them with someone with a similar voice.

It’s been widely covered with, whether it’s Barstool and other things, they build up people, and then they take their ball and they go home. But the voice is the important thing.

Keith has been very consistent with everyone sharing similar voice, tenor to the content, in their own unique way. Overall, there’s a general voice to it.

Do you think that sports is an area where you could try to attract more female readers?

We’re hiring. We’ve already hired one, we’re already hiring another to cover women’s sports in New York. 

Those are the tactical things you have to look at. Where is the opportunity that you have authority? Who better to cover Gotham and the Liberty than us? The challenge is creating an audience.

You also have to find new ways to tell your story. We have, dare I say it, a little older columnist on sports, we’re trying to augment that with younger. They look at things a little bit differently, and also they read things differently, they view things differently. That’s why YouTube is important. That’s why Instagram is important.

We haven’t had a lot of success on X, but my son likes sports. He follows people. That’s what you need to do. You need to get people to follow people. We have to create that mechanism so that they have this engagement with us.