News Without Readers. Why Media Are Losing Audiences Worldwide and How This Is Happening in Russia

According to last year’s Reuters Institute report, the share of users who consciously avoid news regardless of the source is almost 40% — the highest in the past eight years. Among the main reasons, men and women from 48 countries cite the negative effect of news on mood (39%), fatigue from the nonstop flow of information (31%), and an excess of reports about wars and politics (29% each).

This effect is especially strong today — in a period of prolonged turbulence: if news used to be seen as a way to understand the world and make decisions, now it becomes a source of anxiety, irritation, or a sense of helplessness. “Huge and horrifying events are happening everywhere. It’s simply unbearable”, explains a 51-year-old woman from the UK.

At the same time, media have become an additional source of cognitive load. This is not about “clip thinking”, a popular quasi-scientific cliché. Modern research offers a much less dramatic, and therefore more uncomfortable, explanation.

The basic limits of the human cognitive system — attention, perception, the ability to retain, organize, and understand information — have remained the same. But the volume of incoming signals has grown so much that the ability to process them consistently has become the limiting factor.

In American research, this is usually described through the concepts of information overload and attention fragmentation — information overload and attention fragmentation. This is not a lack of interest or a preference for the simple over the complex, but emotional exhaustion and boundless fatigue from an endless, often chaotic stream of information. The problem is not a worsening ability to think, but radically changed working conditions for the cognitive system, notes Professor Gloria Mark of the University of California.

The media economy has also undergone major changes. “Over the past ten years, the model of news sites as centers of the media ecosystem is dying, if it hasn’t already died”, notes a colleague who spent more than ten years in leadership positions at major Russian media outlets, including corporate publications. “I began to realize this while working at Life.ru”.

As a result, two interconnected phenomena emerged. First, there are news deserts (news deserts) — territories or subject areas where readers are practically deprived of access to reliable socially significant information. This was first discussed in the United States after the mass closure of small local outlets due to the global economic crisis.

Second, ghost media have appeared — outlets in which editorial teams continue to function and produce a significant volume of news content, yet almost no one reads them. Real traffic and audience impact are minimal.
This is especially noticeable in small Russian regions.

In Russia, this process is tied not only to external administrative pressure and wartime censorship, but also to internal structural features of the current news model.

Russian internet resources actively resort to clickbait headlines and aggressive SEO optimization in order to remain visible in search engines. Although SEO remains a necessary tool, its excessive use leads to the mass production of formulaic, superficial content aimed primarily at algorithms rather than readers. Algorithms do not care whether they promote tips like “how to choose a toilet for a country house” or a breaking news item — the main thing is that the material is “optimized”. This race for clicks delivers short-term metric growth, but inevitably leads to the erosion of audience trust and a decline in organic traffic.

In addition, after the platform was transferred to VK control and changes were made in the “News” section, Yandex and Zen algorithms increasingly keep users within the ecosystem rather than sending them to original sources. Some links now lead not to media websites, but to monetized channels within Zen, where the full text or summary is available without a click-through.

According to data from LiveInternet, in January–September 2025 many major editorial offices recorded a sharp drop in referrals from the platform. Thus, traffic at RBC fell by more than 38% year on year (to 72.4 million), while Vedomosti grew by only 1% to 17.5 million. At the same time, state and loyal media showed multiple growth: visits to TASS increased by 727% (to nearly 224.9 million), to Komsomolskaya Pravda by 227% (to 54 million), and to Russia Today by 76% (to more than 193 million).

Thus, outlets that actively rely on Yandex and Zen in pursuit of traffic face a classic example of cannibalization: while they produce content for the platform, it takes the main value — the user’s attention and time — for itself. This intensifies the effect of the outlets’ “ghost” existence:

editorial teams continue working, generating materials, and even collecting views within the ecosystem, but their real influence beyond it is steadily declining.

Quality journalism is giving way to mass production of content “for Yandex”, which only accelerates the transformation of outlets into ghost media.

This is especially noticeable in Russian regions. If in May of this year all Moscow-based internet resources in the “Media and News” category, according to the public statistics of the LiveInternet service, were visited by 12.3 million users (17.2 million a year earlier), then in the similar category of the Oryol region the figure was 530,000 (928,000 a year earlier), and in the Yaroslavl region 2.2 million and almost 4 million, respectively. The situation is most tragic in small regional centers: for example, the website of the “Oryol City Newspaper” was visited by 231 people in May 2026, while the online portal “Oryolskaya Sreda” had only 66.

A similar transformation is taking place in the Google ecosystem, although it works differently. If search used to be the main supplier of audiences for media, now a significant share of user attention is captured by Google’s own recommendation and “answer” interfaces. Google Discover — the personalized recommendation feed — plays a particularly visible role. According to data from Chartbeat and the Reuters Institute, in 2025 publishers’ referrals (more than 2,500 sites) from Google Search worldwide fell by 33% year on year, while traffic from Google Discover fell by another 21%.

The share of so-called zero-click scenarios is growing: a user turns to Google, gets a short answer, a summary, or a selection directly within the Google interface, and then there is simply no reason to click through to the source website. As a result, media find themselves in a situation where even high reach within the platform is converting less and less into their own audience.

For thirty years, Russian media have consistently mastered two key competencies: producing news and attracting traffic. Today it is becoming clear that neither guarantees success anymore — neither financial stability, nor audience attention, nor public trust.

This situation appears more serious than the simple closure of outlets. A dead media outlet can be buried and something new can be created. A ghost, however, continues to live formally: the editorial team produces content, collects the remnants of traffic, and the metrics are updated. But it loses the main thing — trust and the ability to influence social life.