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Book a demoSuccess story: How Hello! rebuilt traffic after losing 24% of its UK audience to Google Discover changes
Inside the story of a media turnaround success story as Hello! emerged from industry-wide Google Discover downturns stronger than before.
What do you do when Google whips the rug from under your traffic figures overnight? It's a question which arguably every publisher worldwide has been asking for the last year, since Google Discover started behaving as unpredictably as a popcorn kernel on a hot plate.
Celebrity and royal magazine Hello!, users of Glide CMS, saw nearly a quarter of its UK website audience stop visiting in summer 2025 after changes to the Google Discover algorithm - a massive change for any publisher. But in a rapid recovery, chief content officer Sophie Vokes-Dudgeon revealed to the Press Gazette podcast how the brand repositioned and rebuilt to reach more readers than before, all while Discover continues to be so turbulent. Listen to the full podcast and read about it here.
Vokes-Dudgeon said the brand had been "riding a Google wave", but the big drop came in August 2025, when Google shifted its Discover priorities toward social media posts, YouTube, and local content. At the time Hello! had risen to around 40 million unique visitors a month, but the Google whiplash saw its UK website audience alone fall 24% in a single month, to 4.7 million.
Syndication fills the gap
Hello!'s response was to look at content syndication as a serious revenue stream. The brand already had relationships with Apple News, MSN, Yahoo, and Newsbreak, but had not been packaging content specifically for those platforms. It started doing so, optimising headlines and images for each platform individually, and it quickly paid off.
Page views across the aggregators grew between 33% and 102%. Revenue from syndication has "pretty much plugged the gap" from the Google decline, Vokes-Dudgeon said, exceeding the original 10-15% growth target. Beating your own target by that margin, in the middle of a crisis, is some feat.
Hello! manages this distribution through Glide CMS’s multichannel publishing capabilities, packaging content for each platform from a single editorial workspace without duplicating articles or maintaining separate systems.
A data dashboard from analytics firm Maro helped drive the change, pulling data from the website and all syndication platforms into one place, with a traffic-light system showing whether each piece of content met its target.
This system made it easier to spot what was working across all the channels, and what to focus on more intently. As a result, Hello! increased the share of content in its top-performance bracket by 12% and cut its worst-performing stories by 11%.
Building a direct audience
The syndication revenue helped free up resources to grow a direct paying audience - the thing every publisher wants more of.
Hello! VIP launched as a soft offer several months ago at £4.25 a month, giving subscribers digital access to the weekly magazine, its archive, special editions, and on-demand video from live events.
Around one million people have registered for the free tier, which includes newsletters, commenting, Q&As, a WhatsApp community, and a daily puzzle. A million registrations is fantastic, and Vokes-Dudgeon said, the conversion from free to paid is "very strong".
Opinion content has been a surprise hit. Hello! historically presented much of its content without editorial comment, assuming its audience preferred to draw its own conclusions. But Vokes-Dudgeon said the addition of comment in the right places turned out to be exactly what the audience loved.
Live events have also worked well and indicated strong appeal within the audience, with a single live podcast recording of The Right Royal Podcast in London drawing 70 subscribers paying £75 each. Vokes-Dudgeon explained: "Bit by bit, we are going to figure out how to scale and how to make these meaningful revenue lines.”
From platform-dependent to audience-owned
The Google Discover changes hit countless publishers and media brands hard. Hello! had leaned into Discover strongly, and Vokes-Dudgeon said the brand does not regret the golden Google years, but the reset has pushed it toward an audience it owns - one that is keen to be part of the Hello! Community rather than arriving via an algorithm.
Total content reach is now higher than it was before the Discover drop, and Hello! has a more resilient business closer to its audience and, as Vokes-Dudgeon says, is much more fun to write and create for.
Bravo!
Hello! runs its editorial operation on Glide CMS. To see how the platform supports publishers building direct audience relationships, connect with a Glide product specialist.
