Homepages for NBA Analysis and United In Focus
A UK-based sports website publisher has cut 60 staff since September as a result of falling Google referral traffic.
But the publisher is fighting back with the launch of its own community commenting platform.
In January, Vic Daniels, co-founder of UK-based sports website publisher GRV Media, told Press Gazette the site was aiming to create 100 new jobs and reach two billion page views in 2025.
The company publishes more than 40 sites including: Bloody Elbow (about Mixed Martial Arts), The Boot Room, United In Focus, The Chelsea Chronicle, The Tennis Gazette and Rousing the Kop. It sold several entertainment sites in 2024 to concentrate on its sports brands.
Despite June being the best month “in terms of revenue” across the brand’s history, the company has cut one-third of staff and costs in around four months following Google algorithm updates and the rollout of AI-written summaries in search results.
[Read more: Major US publishers see Google search traffic fall by 10% – Press Gazette ]
In the first six months of 2025, GRV Media saw “significant growth”, but has “more or less given that back”, said Daniels.
“In September we had the Google spam and Google Discover updates , which clearly have decimated an awful lot of the internet.
“I think there has been a disproportionate impact on small to medium-sized businesses, and a disproportionate impact on companies that were specialising in sport, and in particular football.”
“Everyone I’ve spoken to… they’re talking typically around 50 to 65% of page views [have] disappeared following Google’s updates,” said Daniels.
Sports websites such as those in GRV Media’s portfolio may have been impacted by a drive to reduce the visibility of content that appears across many outlets, such as templated match reports, previews and reaction posts.
Google Discover’s update saw the app add social media posts from Instagram, X, and YouTube Shorts, leaving less space for traditional articles.
Impacts on staff, revenue and investment
GRV Media has cut its team from around 156 to some 94 since September.
“We have let go around 60 people since September,” said Daniels, describing these roles as content creators. “So we have let go around about a third of our staff, and we’ve cut costs by around the same amount.”
The company has also seen around five staff resign as they “don’t like the way the industry is going”, and its “Writer Lab” initiative (a team supporting those doing work experience) has disbanded, resulting in two redundancies.
Of the 94 staff that remain at GRV Media, 89 are working full-time and the remainder work part-time.
“We were investing in a lot of new sites for the future, and we’ve had to cancel that investment,” Daniels added. “And as a result of that, some of the staff went… we’re not investing in the future at the moment.”
GRV Media has mothballed around 12 sites as they were “no longer financially viable”.
Daniels added that since peak pre-tax profit in June of more than £500,000, “we’ve seen that number almost disappear”.
“And we haven’t actually sustained a monthly loss yet, but it’s quite conceivable that we may see losses if things stay the same in Q1, which I think is consistent with what other people are seeing that we’ve spoken to.”
GRV Media’s revenue stream is 100% derived from programmatic ads.
Why Google’s updates have significantly hit GRV
Daniels said Discover had effectively “become a Google PR machine for YouTube” and X in September 2024.
“As things stand at the moment, the data that we’re getting, the intelligence we’re getting, is saying that readers are put off by the current iteration of the Discover changes.”
He added: “The amount of real estate now available to publishers from Discover is significantly reduced. That’s why, across the board, a number of publishers are now seeing significant falls in Google Discover referrals.
“We knew that it would only be a matter of time before Google started to bring AI Overviews and ads and all sorts of other stuff into Google Discover, and we didn’t do enough to ensure that we had other sources of referral traffic.
“You’ll see some publishers are reporting up to 90% of their search traffic has gone as Google becomes an answer engine rather than the search engine.”
While GRV Media still gets “some” traffic from Google, it has seen its monthly unique users fall by around 65% to 15 million since September.
One of its most popular sites, United In Focus, saw a 19.8% monthly drop in traffic in November to 1.87 million visits, according to data from Similarweb.
Rousing the Kop (505,300 visits) and NBA Analysis (533,000 visits) both declined by 45% and 42% respectively in traffic.
Daniels added that publishers seeing traffic gains through Google Discover was an “old story”, and publishers can no longer rely on “any referral traffic from the likes of Google or X or Facebook”.
“At the end of the day, these are huge companies with the power to move markets and to move positions very quickly, and they do so changing their algorithms, and the impact that that has on the online publishing ecosystem is profound.”
GRV Media is working towards building up communities and traffic through its new initiative: Talking Points.
Soft-launched two weeks ago, Talking Points is GRV Media’s editorial-led fan engagement platform that allows users to chat via a sidebar while on the site.
While sites have been mothballed due to lacking financial viability, these may be “reinvented” under Talking Points, which already more than 2,000 sign-ins without paid marketing, said Daniels.
“We’ve taken the best of some of the social media networks,” said Daniels, “and put it in our own walled garden.”
“We will build large communities for tennis and golf and Formula One and football.
“We’re going to focus on this. I’m probably going to raise some money… I want to partner with a third party who can maybe put in some investment so that we can get to scale much more quickly and share the rewards.”
GRV Media’s Talking Points, a chat sidebar for fan chat featured on United In Focus.
Preparing for Google Zero
Daniels is expecting a potential “bloodbath in Q1, and not just for online publishers, but for the whole of the ecosystem that supports that”, with a 30% hit to GRV Media revenue in January that is usually expected among publishers, he said.
The company remains hopeful in the face of expected challenges of 2026, however, especially as it is in a “strong cash position”, according to Daniels.
“We are preparing for Google Zero… we are preparing… for all our interactions to take place within our own network, so that we will not be relying on Google anymore, or indeed any big tech to the extent that we were before,” said Daniels.
[Read more: Future takes action on ‘Google Zero’ as revenue declines – Press Gazette ]
Daniels added: “I think it was Darwin who talks about the strongest of the species aren’t the ones who survive, [nor] the most intelligent, it’s the ones that are most adaptable to change.”
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