By Tonka Radisch
Head of Editorial at Opinary
The traffic is gone. Google’s algorithm updates and zero-click search have quietly drained the referral streams publishers relied on for years. The publishers surviving the shift aren’t chasing the next platform. They’re building communities where readers feel seen, heard, and part of something worth paying for.
For a growing number of people, reading the news has become an experience that leaves them feeling overwhelmed and powerless. According to the 2025 Digital News Report, a record 40% of people now avoid news altogether, of whom 39% cite news fatigue and its negative effect on their mood as their reason for tuning out.
This crisis of engagement coincides with a collapse in platform referrals. Google’s pivot to AI overviews, Meta’s news retreat, and X’s dysfunction mean publishers can no longer rely on external traffic for growth. With declining reader traffic from platforms, retention and loyalty are becoming even more important. As INMA’s “Beyond the Funnel” report makes clear, sustainable growth no longer comes from acquisition alone, the real engine is retention, loyalty, and habit formation.
Community Is What Platforms Can’t Sell You
People are hardwired for belonging, and yet reading the news can be a lonely experience. You finish a piece on inflation, conflict, or political crisis and close the tab, alone with your thoughts. Meaning is something we construct together: through interaction, through being heard, through recognising yourself in others. Social identity cannot form in a vacuum. So why not start that process within the article itself? A newspaper’s readership is already a natural peer group — united by shared concerns and a common civic world. As Marcus Mabry, SVP at MS Now, puts it: “Community will increasingly replace audience as the driver of engagement.” The question for publishers is how to build it.
The commercial case is clear. Research from Michigan State University’s Esther Thorson reveals that identifying with a newspaper’s community is the single strongest driver of willingness to pay, even stronger than trust in the journalism itself. “People pay for news because it helps maintain and promote their social status among peers,” she concludes.
Why Interactive Formats Work
Traditional community formats have failed to deliver this sense of belonging. Comment sections rarely reach the critical participation threshold needed for interaction to feel genuinely collective since they are dominated by a vocal minority with whom most readers simply cannot identify. AI chatbots offer interactivity stripped of any human connection. Neither builds the shared social reality readers need to make sense of the news or to feel less alone in doing so.
The answer lies in simplified, high-participation formats. Polls succeed where comments fail because they achieve critical mass — enough readers engaging to make the interaction feel genuinely collective. By lowering the barrier to participation, Opinary drives engagement rates of up to 20% and turns one-time visitors into returning community members.
One publisher has already turned this theory into practice: The Economist. In October 2025, they launched The Economist Insider, a community built around polls. Readers vote on the week’s biggest issues in the newsletter, and the next day their responses are discussed live by editors on the Insider show.
The result is a feedback loop between publication and reader that makes subscribers feel seen, heard, and more likely to return.
Want to see how it works in practice? Read the full case study on how The Economist used polls to turn their audience into a community.
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