Rest of World, the six-year-old nonprofit that covers technology outside the West, will stop operating as a standalone publication at the end of January after its web traffic collapsed thanks to rising AI generated journalism and social media news distribution, with its founder seeking an institution to absorb it.
Founder and primary backer Sophie Schmidt told donors in an email that the outlet will “cease publishing as a standalone entity” at the end of January.
Schmidt, the daughter of former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, called the outlet her “life’s project” shortly after its launch and said she would commit $60 million to it. Now, a late-January wind-down date has been set so staff can receive exit packages and look for new jobs, even as talks continue with several large institutions.
Rina Chandran, the outlet’s deputy editor, confirmed the closure in a LinkedIn post. “Yes, it’s true: Rest of World is shutting down,” she wrote. She said leadership is searching for a new home for the publication and that it “will continue to publish till end-Jan.” Freelancers and columnists already commissioned will have their work preserved and accessible, she added.
In an email to supporters, the organization said it had reported on more than 100 countries and worked with over 400 in-region freelancers. It said the site and its stories, just like Digital Frontier after its closure, will remain available after January, and that recurring donors’ contributions will help support staff through that month.
A Mission Built Outside Silicon Valley
Rest of World launched in 2020 as a nonprofit, funded largely by Schmidt rather than advertising or subscriptions. It hired dozens of journalists and built a network of freelancers to tell stories that, in its own telling, sit beyond the usual Silicon Valley lens. Its reporting on Uber Eats in South Africa and mapping in rural Borneo prompted policy changes.
The model depended on readers finding its work through search and social media. Traffic fell sharply around the start of the second Trump administration.
Leadership responded by prioritizing Western readers, focusing on regions such as China that it expected to appeal more to Americans, and requiring registration to read articles. None of it stopped the decline.
The Platform Squeeze
Insiders blamed Meta’s downranking of news links and the rise of chatbots and AI summaries. Meta has said news makes up less than 3% of the content users see in their Facebook feeds. It retired the Facebook News tab in the UK, France and Germany in December 2023 and later did the same in the United States and Australia.
Search is eroding too. Google organic referrals to more than 2,500 news sites fell 33% worldwide and 38% in the United States between November 2024 and November 2025, according to the Reuters Institute.
Chartbeat data showed that web search fell from 51% to 27% of publisher referrals between 2023 and 2025, and that small publishers lost 60% of search traffic. Publishers surveyed by the Institute expect a further 43% drop in search traffic over three years.
AI summaries are part of the shift. A Pew Research Center survey found 65% of U.S. adults at least sometimes see AI summaries in search results, and only one in five of those who have seen them find them extremely or very useful.
The Reuters Institute’s 2025 Digital News Report found 7% of respondents used an AI chatbot for news weekly, rising to 15% among 18 to 24 year olds. By 2026 that share had reached 10% globally. The 2026 report also found trust in news at 37%, the lowest since the research began in 2015.
Registration walls carry their own risk. They can build direct relationships with readers, but they add friction for casual readers arriving from platforms that already send fewer visitors.
A Decade of Closures
Rest of World joins a list of digital news ventures that have folded or retrenched. BuzzFeed News shut down in 2023 after a 12-year run, Gawker closed for a second time in May 2023, and Vice said in February 2024 it would end its website and lay off hundreds.
The Messenger shut after only eight months having launched with $50 million but brought in about $3 million in revenue. Among those struggling, in early 2024, BuzzFeed sold Complex Networks for a third of its purchase price and cut another 16% of staff. Quartz is also struggling to do original journalism, having dedicated most of its reporting to AI.
The pressure runs through the wider industry. Medill’s 2025 report found 136 U.S. newspapers closed in a year, bringing the total lost to nearly 3,500 and 270,000 newspaper jobs over two decades, and 213 news desert counties.
A newer Medill report found traffic to 100 of the largest local newspapers is down almost 50% since 2022. U.S. media employers announced 17,163 job cuts through November 2025, up 18% from 2024, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Limits of Donor-Funded Journalism
The case also tests philanthropic news. Donor money can sustain reporting that advertising would not, but it does not remove the need for an audience, and an outlet reliant on one backer is exposed when that backer reassesses.
Schmidt has privately conceded the audience decline lessened the outlet’s impact. Licensing deals with AI companies and referral products may open new revenue, though their scale and durability remain uncertain.
The outlet’s struggles are not unique as publishers of expensive, infrequent stories find it more difficult to penetrate audiences with changing preferences in a global shift to video and creator-led formats.
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