The News
The globally-minded tech news startup Rest of World is scrambling to find a new home — or faces the prospect of shutting down.
The six-year-old digital publication has seen the social and web search traffic on which it depends evaporate. This sharp decline has prompted the organization’s founder and primary financial backer, Sophie Schmidt, to explore other options for its future.
In recent months, Schmidt has held conversations with what one person familiar with the situation described as several large institutions about potentially absorbing Rest of World. But while conversations with potential partners are ongoing, the organization is also preparing for a grimmer outcome. Two people familiar with the plans told Semafor that the organization has selected a wind-down date for the publication in late January, a contingency intended to ensure employees receive exit packages and to give them a chance to look for new jobs if they so choose.
Schmidt wrote in an email to donors, in anticipation of this report, that Rest of World will “cease publishing as a standalone entity” at the end of January, according to The New York Times.
Schmidt declined to comment. One person familiar with her thinking told Semafor that while Schmidt is proud of the organization’s staff and journalism, she has privately conceded that the decline in audience has lessened Rest of World’s impact.
Rest of World launched in 2020 with an ambitious goal: to shift Western perspectives by telling global stories about technology often ignored by the mainstream US news outlets. A few months into its launch, Schmidt described the outlet as her “life’s project,” and told The Wall Street Journal that she would commit $60 million to it.
The outlet — initially organized as a nonprofit and funded at first largely by Schmidt, rather than advertising or subscriptions — hired dozens of journalists and built out a fast network of freelancers. Rest of World received some critical acclaim and broke several stories that prompted global policy changes, including its reporting on Uber Eats in South Africa and on mapping in rural Borneo.
But over the last 18 months, its fortunes began to shift.
Around the beginning of the second Trump administration, Rest of World saw a sharp decline in online web traffic, prompting concern from its leadership and a scramble to hold onto its audiences. The organization reprioritized Western readers in an attempt to sharpen its connection with the audience most likely to read its content, and chose to focus coverage on regions it believed remained true to its mission but would more easily appeal to American readers, like China. It began requiring visitors to register with the site in order to read articles.
None of the moves seemed to stop the publication from hemorrhaging readership.
Insiders cited broad industry-wide online traffic problems plaguing numerous online publishers, including Meta’s decision to deprioritize links to news articles and the rise of chatbots and AI summaries, which have decimated search traffic. It also wasn’t positioned to take advantage of increases in media attention tied to Trump and US politics.
But the organization’s leaders also attributed the decline to a deeper cultural shift to the right within the tech community. One senior leader at the organization said they believe tech news readers who previously expressed liberal values and an appetite for consuming global journalism have grown disillusioned with the news media, and now prefer an information diet of inward-looking podcasts, YouTube shows, and chatbot outputs.
Max’s view
Rest of World’s audience struggles are not unique. Media companies that previously largely produced written content have found themselves scrambling to adapt to a world dominated by short- and long-form video consumption. Many have reacted by retreating, focusing on cultivating niche audiences.
Nowhere is this audience fragmentation clearer than in tech media, which is increasingly dominated by largely sycophantic media outlets owned by the decisionmakers themselves. A new generation of tech news consumers have turned their backs on the likes of Wired and The Verge in favor of self-congratulatory or friendly podcasts, newsletters, and X accounts.
Outlets like Rest of World, that rely on expensive-to-produce stories published somewhat infrequently, have struggled. It is, however, darkly ironic that the news organization launched by the scion of the former Google CEO has fallen victim to the changes Big Tech brought to the internet.