March 12, the Outset Media Index (OMI) was launched as a new reference designed to help professionals understand how the media performs at a time when the news industry is undergoing rapid restructuring.
In brief
- New benchmark for media performance: The Outset Media Index launches with 37 metrics covering traffic, engagement, distribution and operational factors across 340+ crypto-focused media outlets.
- Two summarized scores for quick overviews: the platform introduces an Overall Score to measure overall media performance and a Convenience Score assessing collaboration factors like pricing, deadlines and editorial flexibility.
- Industry changes highlighted by Google Discover: Google Discover-related traffic swings had a significant impact on publishers like Reach plc, whose titles such as Daily Mirror and Daily Express saw referral traffic fall as the feed emphasized video and user-generated content.
The initial release covers over 340 media outlets with recurring crypto coverage, with more publications planned to be added as the platform evolves beyond the soft launch phase.
The Outset Media Index allows users to analyze media via 37 metrics reflecting different aspects of media performance. This includes proprietary traffic metrics like Single Score and Composite Score, engagement signals like Reading Behavior, and distribution metrics like Reprints and Reprint Score.
The framework also includes metrics capturing new discovery channels, such as LLM Referral Share, as well as operational factors describing how publications perform in practice: from Response Time, Coverage Types, Price per Article to internally developed Editorial Rigidity.
For users wanting a quick and reliable overview without examining each indicator, OMI provides two summary scores. The Overall Score provides a snapshot of a media outlet's overall performance, combining signals related to traffic stability, engagement and distribution. The Convenience Score emphasizes the convenience of collaboration, reflecting factors such as editorial flexibility, timeliness and pricing.
Teams can rely on the Overall Score to understand actual performance, while the Convenience Score helps gauge how easy it is to collaborate with a post.
Together, these indicators form the basis for analyzing media by building a clearer picture of their performance in markets and with audiences. Meanwhile, the index allows users to open a specific media outlet and review its metrics separately.
In OMI, indicators appear in a table view, allowing you to filter, sort and prioritize the metrics users want to examine, rather than looking at the entire data set at once. This makes it easier to quickly consult numerous media or focus on specific indicators depending on the type of analysis carried out.
While the index serves as a tool for users to check media performance, Outset Data Pulse (ODP), its research arm, interprets this 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 the Outset Media Index and Outset PR, expresses the idea behind this ecosystem this way:
“People who work with media already have access to a lot of numbers, but those numbers are rarely in one place or speak the same language. Teams spend more time trying to interpret data than actually using it, and we built OMI and ODP for just that reason. »
The difficulty in reading media performance has become more visible in recent industry results. In some cases, platform updates can quickly reshape the way many readers reach a news site.
A real-life example of the UK publishing market
When UK publishing group Reach released its 2025 results, the company revealed that traffic from Google had fallen by around 46% during the second half of the year. For analysts tracking media performance, developments like this are precisely the type of dynamics that tools like the Outset Media Index are meant to help understand. Reach runs some of the UK's best-known news titles, such as the Daily Mirror and the Daily Express, meaning its traffic developments generally reflect wider movements in the publishing industry.
Company executives said the decline was not primarily caused by AI-generated answers appearing in Google search. The major factor was Google Discover, the mobile feed that recommends articles to readers based on their interests. Discover had become an important source of visitors for Reach. When the feed began showing its written articles less frequently, the company's referral traffic plummeted.
According to Reach, this change was related to changes in Discover's content selection. The feed has increasingly featured video and user-generated content from platforms like Reddit and YouTube Shorts. With the rise in visibility of these formats in Discover, publishers primarily focused on written reporting have seen their visibility decline. Reach responded by investing more in video, adding more than 100 specialized video positions and ramping up production in 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 that a media outlet has lost its audience; Sometimes this simply means that a platform has changed the way articles are presented.
Benchmarks like the Outset Media Index are intended to give media teams a more stable reference point, helping them compare media outlets over time and see which publications continue to attract consistent attention even as platform conditions change.
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