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Social commerce edges past SEO at The Independent for the first time
The Independent’s social-commerce revenue edged past its SEO-based commerce revenue for the first time in September, CEO Christian Broughton said at Digiday’s Media Strategies event in London this week.
He described the gap as narrow, but said the trend was shifting toward social.
The company doesn’t publicly break out the figures, so the milestone offers a directional signal rather than a measure of how far social commerce has pulled ahead. But it illustrates the broader shift Broughton argued publishers need to make: build revenue around trusted brands and audiences across platforms, rather than depend on search to bring readers to their websites.
The search-and-social model that powered digital publishing for years is over, and AI referrals or purchased traffic won’t fill the gap. “The business model of the 20-teens, early 2020s” – built on abundant traffic, social referrals and programmatic advertising – is “dead,” Broughton said. The response, he argued, has to be more than a series of experiments layered onto the existing business. Publishers need to change how the business works.
Broughton identified four areas the company is building for: AI, creator-led studio work, e-commerce and membership. Together, he said, they are expected to account for nearly half of Independent Media’s revenue in 2026, with those areas growing at close to 30% year over year.
The Independent generated £55.1 million ($73 million) in revenue in 2025, up 4% from 2024. Profit before tax rose 9% to £3.5 million (£2.5 million post-tax), marking the company’s ninth consecutive year of growth and profit, per its most recent earnings. The U.K. generated £36.4 million ($48.3 million), while the U.S. and Canada were at £13.3 million. The company said that the results came despite a difficult year for digital publishers, with global trade disruption affecting advertising budgets and changes to Google search creating pressure. It currently has 368 staff, up from 332 in 2024.
For Broughton, AI productivity is valuable partly because it could create capacity to invest in that broader business: more podcasts, newsletters, video and documentaries, alongside membership. He pointed to the Independent’s eight-part podcast series SAS: The Shadow, developed over roughly a year, as an example of original, relationship-based journalism he says the company wants to invest in.
The argument is not that AI alone can repair publishing’s economics. It is that AI, paired with a willingness to reorganize the business, can help create room for work audiences value, and for new ways to earn revenue from it.
At the Independent, that change starts with putting AI against measurable economic goals. Broughton described the company’s AI-powered news app, Bulletin, as an early step, and pointed to a broader overhaul of editorial workflows. He said the app, has accrued 12 million monthly users since its launch last April.
Under U.K. editor Barney Henderson, who joined in April, the company is restructuring the editorial team around AI-enabled workflows. Broughton said the company didn’t want to simply plug AI tools into existing work practices; it needed to rethink how the team operated.
“He’s creating a new live news team, which is based around tools… And before anyone asks, yes, the live news team is run by humans. It’s not just AI. Real human editors,” he told delegates. “We’ve created about 15 roles, more than that actually now in that department. They’re using the tools and the workflows built and thought through by Barney and his team, and the outcomes have been really dramatic.”
Editors using its AI tools are now “six times” as economically productive as colleagues in comparable roles who aren’t using them, he claimed.
“I think we’ve all seen too many nice-to-have little experiments that people have done with AI,” he told delegates. “Some of them don’t always kind of really build up audiences. They don’t really drive business success. They’re not rocking the CFO’s world. So my advice is to put really hard economic targets behind what you do with AI.”
The tools he described take on work such as applying the Independent’s style guidance, surfacing relevant reporting from its archive and monitoring organizations for potential news. The aim, Broughton said, is to give journalists time back for reporting and original work – not to automate journalism itself.
He stressed that AI has been deployed beyond solely an efficiency tool internally. He cited its conversational AI feature Eva, which answers questions users ask on the site, by drawing on the publisher’s previously reported stories, using its tone of voice. He said Eva has reduced bounce rate by 10%, lifted user journeys by 20%, though he didn’t reveal what baselines.
“The purpose of AI at the Independent,” Broughton said, “is not to replace journalists. It is to make the economics of investing in exceptional journalism work again, and to make it work better than ever.”
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