Good Housekeeping MD: ‘The language of the internet is video’
The Media Leader Interview
Liz Moseley speaks about Good Housekeeping‘s strong digital growth, why modernising its commercial strategy requires gaining back some mojo and what the predicted death of search means for publishers.
“We, as publishers, need to think about what our business looks like in a world without search.”
Liz Moseley, managing director at Hearst UK’s Good Housekeeping, has been preparing for what publishers have quietly referred to as “Google Zero” — the possibility that referral traffic from search dries up in an era dominated by generative-AI search results and changing digital consumption habits away from the written word.
“We think a lot about YouTube and video, and known-and-named customers,” she tells The Media Leader. “That’s why membership is our North Star.”
Moseley joined Hearst from Tortoise Media, which subsequently rebranded to The Observer following its purchase of the Sunday title this year, in 2023. She credits the startup with teaching her a strong understanding of the difference between a subscription and a membership offering — as well as the importance of newsletters, audio and live events for contemporary publishers.
“If you’re going to work in any business that might be described unkindly as a ‘legacy business’, you have to operate with a startup mentality,” Moseley insists. “You have to operate as though you only have this month or next month or the month after, because nothing is fixed and customers will determine your success or failure.”
The change brief
Moseley was hired by Hearst with “a change brief”; there was an expectation when she joined that, despite the fact Good Housekeeping was already a diversified business with print, digital and product recommendation verticals, the title “could grow faster than it had been”.
Her first year’s focus began with data. A “marketer by trade”, Moseley prioritised insight work on Good Housekeeping‘saudience, finding that it was not in fact limited by age.
“That was really the catalyst towards realising this could be really big,” she says. “We don’t need to be pigeonholed as a sort of midlife brand. We have a fully diversified, multiplatform product suite; we can deliver content that appeals to women across the generations, wherever they might be. That was a bit of an a-ha moment.”
‘Death of the website’: Publishers wrestle with the need to reinvent in AI era
According to the latest Consumer ABCs, released in February, Moseley’s efforts have already begun paying off — digital circulation grew 59% year on year, while print circulation dipped just 3%, with total circulation growing to reach 370,395 (+2%).
Despite the slight dip in print readership, Moseley tells The Media Leader that print ad revenue is up by “double digits” so far in 2025.
Much of the growth is coming from direct sales with advertisers rather than via agencies, where publishing more generally has become “a difficult buy”.
“There is a real appetite to engage in print, often as a blended proposition with something live and some kind of direct-response mechanic,” Moseley explains.
According to her, agencies are not “sitting there waiting for us as Hearst to walk up and showcase our wares”, as publishers today are a “rounding error” on media plans amid a long-contracting publishing market.
“If we want to get in there as individual brands or as Hearst UK,” Moseley continues, “then we have to operate in a way that is different than how we did 10 years ago or 10 years before that.
“Brand owners are looking for trusted, quality environments in which to spend money to tell their stories. I think people are accepting now that a website is not always the best way to do that.”
Running faster at video
Hence the turn, like many other publishers, towards in-house multimedia production.
Good Housekeeping is currently constructing a studio in its office, set to finish by mid-September, that will allow the title to more easily create short- and long-form videos.
“Understanding that the language of the internet is video, what does that mean for a brand like ours and how quickly can we adapt to produce in that world?” Moseley asks. “Where are those platforms for content serving?”
Moseley’s primary focus here is in producing long-form videos for YouTube. She sees it as a key growth area “because YouTube is on your telly”, unlike competitor platforms that make use of smaller screens and retain lower attentive watch times.
She adds: “Your reach advertising play may well be on YouTube; it might not be on your own website.”
On the other hand, short-form video on social platforms like Instagram Reels, TikTok or YouTube’s Shorts function offer “totally different” opportunities in shoppability and require unique productions. While Good Housekeeping‘s TikTok shop is “not making us all rich yet”, Moseley boasts that it’s the largest such shop among Hearst brands.
“We’re in the foothills, but it’s about landing on a format that is scaleable, repeatable, ownable — not relying always on external talents,” she notes. “And just trying stuff. We’re in a mode of just put everybody on camera and see who’s any good and then work from there.”
ABC adopts new ‘streamlined’ standards to reflect publishing’s digital shift
Site traffic no longer the strategic goal
As part of the transformation, Good Housekeeping has remodelled its editorial culture away from that of a traditional magazine and towards the mould of a newsroom. Under editor-in-chief Jane Bruton, a former editor at The Daily Telegraph and Bauer Media’s Grazia, the editorial staff have held daily 10am news meetings, with a daily publishing strategy.
As a result, UK digital traffic has doubled since February, according to Moseley, although she is wary to consider such growth a strategic win.
“It’s an opportunistic win,” she says. “It’s almost a Trojan horse to facilitate a shift in editorial behaviours.”
An understanding of site traffic leads to greater awareness of and sensitivity to “content impact”, as she calls it — something that is useful for Good Housekeeping to test “content pillars” to see what resonates with readers. But the ultimate goal remains “known-and-named customers” (Moseley prefers the term “customers” to “audiences”).
The growth in web traffic has seemingly bucked the trend at a time when many publishers’ referral traffic has been negatively impacted by the development of generative-AI search results.
“We’re doing well despite the AI Overviews taking out, whatever it is, 10% [of referral traffic] or whatever,” Moseley observes. She calls another Google product, Google Discover, a “friend today” that is not necessarily “our friend tomorrow”.
“Search referral isn’t over; we are still doing pretty well on SEO-led traffic — better than 2023,” Moseley continues. “But we’d be daft not think we are nearing the endgame of that model.”
What is a magazine in 2025?
Google Zero, should it eventually come, presents a direct threat to ad-supported publishers, whose biggest challenge, says Moseley, is time.
“The world without search, I think, is quite close. The question for me is not what we do; it’s how quickly we can do it.”
Moseley’s startup mentality may thus serve her and Good Housekeeping well as it jumps around multimedia efforts and focuses intently on direct audience (and commercial) relationships.
Do the changes — a pivot to video and an increased focus on commerce — make Good Housekeeping any less of a “magazine”, in the traditional sense of the term? No, according to Moseley.
“Customers still think of Good Housekeeping as a magazine, regardless of where their entry point might be. We’re not trying to shake that off,” she says. “A magazine can be a podcast. It can be a long-form video. It can be a newsletter. And, of course, it can be a print product.”
Publishers, Moseley adds, must brush off their defensive postures: “In the old days, in the 90s and 00s, we magazine companies were really good at talking about our customers, presenting the value of our product, engaging with and delivering interesting creative solutions that really made people feel a certain way, which brands really responded to.
“I think that maybe we lost our confidence a little bit, as an industry, at doing some of those things that we used to do, because we were all scared of digital disruption.”
Embracing digital disruption today, it’s still worth remembering what makes publishing special in the eyes of consumers and brands.
“If you have great brands, and you believe in your customers, there are stories that you can tell to those customers and to brands that are valuable and that you can do in a way that nobody else can — still,” she concludes.