The Independent says social commerce has passed SEO commerce for the first time

The Independent's social-commerce revenue edged past its SEO-based commerce revenue for the first time in September, chief executive Christian Broughton told Digiday's Media Strategies event in London, a narrow gap he says points in one direction. "The business model of the 20-teens, early 2020s" built on abundant traffic, social referrals and programmatic advertising "is dead", Broughton said, arguing publishers must reorganise around trusted brands and audiences rather than search. Four build areas, AI, creator-led studio work, e-commerce and membership, are expected to account for nearly half of Independent Media's 2026 revenue and are growing close to 30% year over year. The publisher posted £55.1 million revenue in 2025, up 4%, with profit before tax up 9% to £3.5 million on its ninth consecutive year of growth. Broughton claimed editors using its AI tools are now "six times" as economically productive as colleagues who are not, and its conversational feature Eva has cut bounce rate by 10% and lifted user journeys by 20%, though he did not disclose baselines.

The crux

The Independent is formally retiring the search-and-social traffic model, betting that owned commerce, membership and AI-assisted journalism can replace the referral traffic Google and AI search are intercepting, a test of whether a mid-size news publisher can rebuild its economics around direct revenue rather than reach.

Sell-side read

The directional signal matters more than the milestone: if social and commerce revenue keeps outgrowing SEO, the ad inventory attached to search-discovered audiences shrinks in relative value, which means publishers should be reweighting commercial effort toward creator-led and commerce-linked inventory that travels on social.

Watch

whether the company discloses the actual size of the social-versus-SEO commerce gap in full-year results, and whether its AI productivity claims survive contact with the newsroom's union and output quality.