Outset Media Index Goes Live to Bring Clarity to Media Performance as Discover Changes Hit Google Traffic for Publishers

On March 12, Outset Media Index (OMI) soft launched as a new benchmark designed to help media professionals understand how media outlets perform at a time when the news industry is undergoing rapid restructuring.

The initial release covers over 340 outlets with recurring crypto coverage, with further publications planned to be added as the platform moves beyond the soft launch stage.

Outset Media Index allows users to analyze outlets through 37 metrics that reflect different aspects of media performance. These include exclusive traffic indicators such as Unique Score and Composite Score, engagement signals like Reading Behavior, and distribution measurements such as Reprints and Reprints Score. 

The framework also features metrics that capture newer discovery channels, including LLM Referral Share, as well as operational factors that describe how publications work in practice: from Turnaround Time, Coverage Types, and Price per Post to in-house built Editorial Rigidity.

For users who want a quick and reliable overview instead of examining every indicator, OMI provides two summary scores. The General Score offers a snapshot of how an outlet performs overall, combining signals related to traffic stability, engagement, and distribution. The Convenience Score focuses on the practical side of collaboration, reflecting factors such as editorial flexibility, turnaround speed, and pricing. 

Teams can rely on the General Score to understand actual performance, while the Convenience Score helps understand how easy it is to work with a publication.

Together, these indicators form the basis for analyzing outlets building a clearer picture of how they perform across markets and audiences. At the same time, the index allows users to open a single outlet and review its metrics separately.

Inside OMI, the indicators appear in a table view, which makes it possible to filter, sort and prioritize the metrics users want to examine instead of reviewing the entire dataset at once. This makes it easier to scan large numbers of outlets quickly or focus on specific indicators depending on the type of analysis being carried out.

While the index serves as a tool where users can check how media outlets perform, Outset Data Pulse (ODP), its research branch, interprets that data and examines what it reveals about the media industry. 

Both belong to the ecosystem of Outset PR, a communications and research company focused on understanding how the media system works.

Mike Ermolaev, founder of Outset Media Index and Outset PR, puts the idea behind this ecosystem like this:

“People working with media already have access to plenty of numbers, but those numbers rarely sit in one place or speak the same language. Teams spend more time trying to interpret the data than actually using it, and we built OMI and ODP right out of that reason.”

The difficulty of reading media performance has become more visible in recent industry results. In some cases, platform udpates can quickly reshape how many readers reach a news site.

A Real Example from the UK Publishing Market

When UK publishing group Reach published its 2025 results, the company revealed that traffic coming from Google had dropped by roughly 46% during the second half of the year. For analysts who track media performance, developments like this are exactly the kind of dynamics tools such as the Outset Media Index are meant to help make sense of. Reach runs some of the UK’s best-known news titles, including the Daily Mirror and Daily Express, which means its changing traffic patterns tend to reflect broader movements across the publishing industry.

Company executives said the decline was not mainly caused by AI-generated answers appearing in Google Search. The bigger factor was Google Discover, the mobile feed that recommends articles to readers based on their interests. Discover had become a significant source of visitors for Reach. When the feed began showing its written stories less frequently, the company’s referral traffic collapsed.

According to Reach, the shift was tied to changes in what Discover chooses to surface. The feed has increasingly highlighted video and user-generated content from platforms such as Reddit and YouTube Shorts. As those formats gained more space in Discover, publishers focused primarily on written reporting saw their visibility fall. Reach responded by investing more heavily in video, adding more than 100 specialist video roles and increasing production across its newsrooms.

Cases like this show how quickly a platform decision can affect the flow of readers to news sites. When distribution changes overnight, raw traffic numbers can be misleading. A drop in visits does not always mean an outlet has lost its audience; sometimes it simply means a platform has reconsidered how stories are surfaced. 

Benchmarks such as Outset Media Index are intended to give media teams a steadier reference point, helping them compare outlets over time and see which publications continue to attract consistent attention even when platform conditions shift.