People Inc.'s non-session revenue grows 16% as core web traffic falls 22%
Non-session revenue at People Inc. grew 16% year over year in the second quarter of 2026, chief financial officer Tim Quinn told investors on a recent earnings call. That category, which includes social and native ad campaigns, events, sponsorships, email, the D/Cipher ad targeting tool and content licensing, made up 43% of the publisher's total digital revenue, up from 39% a year earlier. Session-based revenue fell to 57% of the total from 61%, though it held flat year over year as ad revenue stayed steady. People Inc.'s core sessions dropped 22% year over year in the same quarter, including a 40% decline in Google search traffic, a trend that executives at Forbes, Raptive and Future say is reshaping the economics of the open web.
Campaigns bought purely against page-view scale increasingly compete for attention with inventory that behaves differently than the search-driven traffic advertisers are used to buying. Publishers are steering more of their sales effort toward integrated packages that bundle events, sponsorships, custom content and social extensions. They are also building direct audience relationships through email and owned apps. Forbes chief innovation officer Nina Gould said the industry still lacks "a unified way for publishers to set pricing" on AI content licensing, so those deals remain ad hoc and have not scaled fast enough to offset lost impression-based ad revenue for some publishers. Buyers assessing publisher partners should weigh brand strength and owned-audience reach alongside traffic metrics, since Raptive chief strategy officer Paul Bannister said brand and content quality now separate the most resilient sites from the most vulnerable ones.