NewsArc, Rage-bait, and Traffic

Really great interview in the Press Gazette with NewsArc’s product lead, Jason Holtman. It starts by focusing on the key feature of NewsArc: how we use agentic AI to rank and deliver news in a way focused on quality and resistant to outrage.

Jason Holtman, senior vice president of product at SmartNews, told Press Gazette: “We basically built it to be the antidote for the news platforms that are out there now that rely on outrage and polarisation and attention reinforcement.

“It’s just not built that way… instead of looking for signals of what will make you click, or what will make you angry, it’s looking for signals of what’s right, what’s interesting, what’s long, what’s surprising.”

I found it quite telling that it immediately pivoted into a traffic discussion.

Chartbeat data shared with Press Gazette showing monthly page views from aggregators to 1,300 global sites that opted in to share anonymised data continually between 2019 and 2025 demonstrates that even Google News is down significantly compared to 2023.

Given the rate of news avoidance in the US — 42% of Americans “often or sometimes” avoid the news, per Reuters — it’s not surprising that referral traffic is down. As Jason notes in the article:

He said it could also help counter news avoidance, with 42% of people in the US actively trying to avoid the news sometimes or often according to the latest Reuters Institute Digital News Report. (News avoiders are however much lower in Japan, the home market of SmartNews, where just 11% said they do so.)

Holtman said: “There’s a real problem with news avoidance. People talk about that as, like, I just want to click quickly, or I want a summary, or I don’t like the news. I don’t think anything could be further from the truth.

“I think humans and groups of people and friends, they really like the news, they want to like the news, they just don’t like how it’s presented right now…”

I think betting on referrals broadly is a really challenging model. The best possible user experience is to stay on NewsArc, not pop out to an embedded web view, navigating all the quirks of the mobile web experience. As Axios noted, NewsArc is built on direct relationships with publishers. We pay for their content so we can ensure the best possible user experience.

Between the lines: SmartNews relies on direct relationships with more than 3,000 publishers to supply content on its free app. It pays those publishers through a revenue-share agreement to have access to that content.

It’s incredibly exciting to watch NewsArc grow and get feedback. If you haven’t checked it out, it’s available now on the Apple App and Google Play stores!