• by Laurie Sullivan , Yesterday

That's according to John Nardone, CEO of JWX.

Nardone, credited for placing the first paid internet ad in 1994, believes that percentage of search traffic to publisher sites will continue to fall.

The "search era is over," he wrote in a blog post. 

With no click required, "it's not "a temporary dip; not a cycle; but a structural shift," he wrote. "That traffic is not coming back."

Google for years sat at the center of the open web as search pulled audiences through one point and spun it back out to publishers, he wrote.

Today, things are different. Reaching the same audience now means transforming and distributing content across many more surfaces, each with its own format, cadence, and rules, he wrote.

"Social used to be a long-tail source you could cover with a small team and a scheduling tool," Nardone wrote. "Now it's the main event, and most publishers still run it on infrastructure built for a sideline."

Nardone, appointed CEO after the merger of video monetization platforms JW Player and Connatix in March 2025, described a "post-search era," and how the advertising industry is going through a turning point, especially for digital publishing, where engagement rules have permanently changed and audiences must be earned where they live, rather than lure them to the brand.

JWX uses AI technology to automate the entire process through what it called the "JWX Content Hub," a unified platform for publishers that can monetize video from one library to many media channels. The hub was announced Monday.

The content library becomes the publisher's "engine," because with help from automation and AI, horizontal videos can convert to vertical. Long-form videos become short social clips. Written works in articles become video, and any content can be translated and dubbed.

Then intelligent distribution scores every asset, matches it to the right media channel, and posts it at the optimal time, automatically, Nardone described.