Unless they outsource the task to an SSP - not recommended - every publisher needs a platform on which to trade their inventory programmatically. The challenge they face is whether to build their own, buy one made by a tech vendor, or “borrow”/lease a platform built by someone else, that they can access on a SaaS (Software as a Service) basis.

Each has its pros and cons. Build your own platform and you have ultimate control over what it can do, as well as the ability to update its capabilities in line with changing business needs and market trends. But building your own is also a long, slow, expensive process, not for the faint-hearted. In fact, it’s almost exclusively the reserve of bigger companies with the technical skills needed to build a trading platform in-house, or the deep pockets needed to support the development work.

Buying an off-the-shelf platform often looks like an attractive alternative. The development work is done, the vendor has use-cases of other companies that have successfully deployed the platform, and you can be up and running in a matter of weeks, if not days. But there are drawbacks too. When you buy a tech platform, it’s yours forever, and if it stops being able to do the things you need it to do, or can’t evolve in line with your changing needs, you’re stuck with it until you bite the bullet and rip and replace, usually at great cost.

Borrow your way to success

This is why the borrowing (SaaS) pathway has become so popular. Someone else develops the platform, you pay for access to it, and if you become unhappy with how it’s performing, you can get out the next time the licence renews, typically annually. Added to this, the company that developed the platform has a vested interest in keeping it fit for purpose, as they know that if they don’t, clients will vote with their feet and find another. In most instances, it’s the best solution for companies of all sizes.

But even this approach requires some caution, because borrowing can create hidden dependencies. The real risk is in committing to a path without understanding who benefits as the business grows. It is undoubtedly the best approach, so long as publishers understand how the tech they’ve licensed behaves, and whether its incentives are aligned with the publisher’s success or the vendor’s own commercial interests. In short, is the licensor more interested in your gains or theirs? These are the questions publishers need to ask.

When your supplier is also your competitor

Here are a few things to look out for when licensing sell-side programmatic technology from a tech vendor. The first is to satisfy yourself that their only interest is in licensing the tech - not in simply using it to get a front-row seat into your best-performing inventory, and then stealing it from under your nose.

Many tech vendors license technology while also trading media, enabling them to earn revenue twice: once from the fee they charge you, and then again, from the bid-spread they pocket when reselling inventory. Crucially, they don’t pay their own tech fee on those internal trades, which means they can resell your inventory at a lower price than you can, and still make more profit, thanks to the additional revenue they get from the licence fee you pay.

Secondly, ask yourself how much control does the licensed tech give you. If there’s one thing publishers need right now, it’s more control and more transparency. More data, more insight into the best demand sources, and more ability to experiment. When publishers have real control of their data, and the ability to analyse it – the sort of control offered by an independent white-label platform that steadfastly refuses to trade media and compete with its own clients – they retake control of their revenue streams.

They don’t just regain control of them; they actually retain more of the revenue too. Publishers who sell their inventory through SSPs reduce the value of that inventory, paying the ad tech tax levied by the SSP and all the other intermediaries who insert themselves into the bidstream. By dealing directly with DSPs via a white-label platform, publishers retain more revenue, and can see for themselves which demand sources perform best, and therefore which to focus on.

Automate to optimise

Automation is another key factor to consider. Programmatic trading happens 24/7. Optimisation shouldn’t stop because the guy that handles it is in bed. As one example, our platform - Limelight’s Adaptive Rules Centre - offers rules-based automation to continuously monitor and optimise supply and demand based on predefined KPIs. That enables you to instantly act on under- or over-performing inventory and demand, improving yield, without delays caused by human intervention.

It enables publishers to build and apply their own optimisation rules, aligning monetisation strategies with specific business objectives and inventory priorities. It gives them granular controls over things like QPS (Queries per Second) in order to ensure balanced demand allocation, preventing any single partner from dominating and protecting overall yield.

In deciding whether to build, buy or borrow a programmatic trading platform, borrowing almost always makes the most sense. Just ensure you do your due diligence on the company licensing the tech to satisfy yourself that they have your - not their - best interests at heart.

David Nelson, Co-founder and CEO, Limelight Inc.

About: Limelight Inc. - the world’s fastest growing white label platform, helps companies in the ad tech ecosystem to easily navigate the complex programmatic landscape, blending cutting-edge technology with best-in-class expertise and human support. Hundreds of ad networks and publishers use Limelight’s programmatic oRTB solution to build bespoke, white-labelled trading environments, drive profitability and performance at scale and unlock incremental revenues – immediately. Limelight is more than a service provider; our ethos is firmly centred on human support and strong partnerships for the global Limelight community.

Every publishing business has a category of work that nobody planned, nobody budgeted for, and nobody can see on a P&L. It is the checking.

Somebody logs into the ad server each morning to see whether campaigns are pacing. Somebody pulls numbers into a spreadsheet at month end because three systems disagree. Somebody notices on a Thursday that a campaign is going to miss its guaranteed impressions, and the make-good conversation starts. None of that work appears in a job description, all of it is paid for.

I spent twenty years running operations, most recently as group COO of a services business across six countries, and the checking is the most reliable thing I find. It’s a different sector, but the problems are the same. Work that exists only because a system cannot tell a person when something has gone wrong.

It is also, conveniently, the easiest waste in a business to put a number against. Which matters, because you cannot confidently decide what to automate until you know what the current situation costs.

Start With What Is Actually Happening, Not the Process Map

The first mistake is to ask how the process is supposed to work, ask the staff what they did last week instead.

In practice this means sitting with the person doing the work and watching them. Ask them to talk you through the last month-end, what they do first thing on a Monday or what they check twice because they do not trust the number. That last question is usually the most productive one you will ask all week.

You are listening for three things:

1. Polling - Somebody looking at a system to find out whether anything has changed. Checking delivery pacing across live campaigns is polling. So is refreshing a dashboard.

2. Reconciliation - Somebody making two sources agree. Ad server vs the advertiser’s own numbers. Booked revenue vs delivered revenue vs invoiced revenue.

3. Re-keying - The same data typed into a second place. Campaign details from the insertion order into the ad server. Delivery numbers from a report into a client deck.

Each of these is a symptom of the same underlying problem: two systems that do not communicate, bridged by a person.

Cost It Properly, and Cost the Delay Separately

Now put a number on it. There are two components, and most people only count the first.

The labour. Hours per week multiplied by a fully loaded hourly rate, which is salary plus employer costs plus overhead.

Take an illustrative case. Two people spending five hours a week each on pacing checks, discrepancy chasing and report building. At a loaded rate of £40 an hour, that is £400 a week, or around £20,000 a year. Substitute your own figures, but be honest about the time. People consistently underestimate this, because the work is usually scattered in short blocks throughout the day.

The cost of finding out late. This is often the omitted piece, and it is usually the larger number.

Checking is not free even when it works, because checking is periodic and problems are not. If someone reviews pacing every morning, the average problem lives for half a day before anyone sees it. If the review happens weekly, the average problem lives three and a half days.

Now attach a consequence. A campaign that has fallen behind can be corrected cheaply in week one by widening targeting or adding placements. In the final week the only options left are expensive: a make-good, a credit, or over-delivering by taking inventory that another campaign needed. If that situation arises, say, six times a year, and the average cost of a late catch is £1,500 in make-goods and lost inventory, that is £9,000 a year attributable purely to detection lag, not to the underlying problem.

Again, use your own numbers. The point is the structure: Labour plus delay. Many businesses count the first and are baffled that automating it did not deliver what they expected.

Rank Before You Build

By now you will have found more than one of these. Do the same sum for every piece of checking on your list, then rank them by what each costs you a year.

The ranking is the deliverable. It is worth more than any individual fix, because it turns an unbounded question, “where do we even start?” into a bounded one: here are our seven most expensive pieces of manual work, in order, and here is what each is worth.

Where AI Actually Comes In

Very little of the above needs AI, and it is worth being clear about that.

Most checking is replaced by exception alerting, which is ordinary automation. The data already exists in your ad server, and it has an API. A scheduled job can compare actual delivery against required pace overnight and tell someone only when a campaign drifts outside tolerance. The half day detection lag becomes minutes, and the labour disappears along with it.

AI earns its place higher up the stack:

1. Predicting which campaigns are likely to under-deliver before they visibly do.

2. Reading unstructured inputs, like a booking confirmation in an email, and turning them into structured data.

3. Drafting the narrative for a month end report from reconciled numbers.

That distinction matters commercially. If you go to market asking for an AI solution, you will be sold one, and you will pay AI prices for something a scheduled script could have done. Knowing which of your problems require which solution is worth more than any particular tool.

The Uncomfortable Part

The checking is usually being done by your most experienced people. They do it because they have learned, correctly, that the system cannot be trusted to tell them when something is wrong. It is a rational response to an unreliable process.

Which means the conversation you need to have is not about whether they are doing valuable work. It is about the fact that the business is paying senior people to compensate for a gap that could easily be closed. Frame it that way and the people doing the checking usually become your best allies, because they have wanted to get rid of it for years.

Start by counting. You cannot make a sensible decision about automation, AI, or anything else until you know what today already costs you.

Jeremy Thorburn is the founder of LatenZ, an independent operations and AI advisory. He represents no vendor or platform.

Today’s Long Read looks at the latest Advertising Association and WARC data, which shows that whilst UK ad spend leapt 9.3% in Q1, regional and national media witnessed a decline of 5.9%. Bo Sacks - who many of you know - says the trend is echoed in the States and is structural, not temporary. So what can publishers do to address this?

A little AI-heavy this week…

• Time Magazine Pioneers AI-only Advertising

  Time is testing a new advertising model that targets AI rather than human readers. Working with Mobian, the initiative serves sponsored content from advertisers (e.g. Ally Bank) directly to AI crawlers from companies such as OpenAI et al. Mechanics: Time serves a separate machine-readable version of pages to AI crawlers, human readers see the normal page…

• Claude Is Embedding a Hidden Watermark in All AI Content

  In a bid to provide more transparency and abide by the EU AI Act, Anthropic is embedding a watermark to show when text has been generated by Claude. The watermark will be hidden but will travel with the text, even when copied/pasted. Applies worldwide. P.S. Google’s SynthID watermark has already been used 50M times globally…

• Play: The Economist’s New Audio & Video Tier Pays Off

  Coming in at half the price of a Premium subscription, The Economist’s new audio & video tier is attracting a swathe of brand-new readers as well as an uptick in Premium subs. Aimed at younger audiences and people on the move, the cheaper tier is part of The Economist’s drive towards content with a deeper human connection. i.e. Podcasts, short-form video, Insider editor-led shows, etc…

• Nobody Owns Your Category in AI Yet

  Semrush has mapped 1,094 topic categories and only 15% have a clear owner, meaning that 85% are still contestable. Once a brand/publisher establishes ownership, it sticks, with 90% retaining their position month-on-month. N.B. Topic ownership requires a brand to appear across at least four of five related prompts. #goldrush #internet2.0

• The Real Reason that Substack is Collapsing

  As more publishers experiment with Substack, Scott Carney (ex-Wired) says its subscription model has maxed out. He cites tech hack Taylor Lorenz who says her Substack subs have “fallen off a cliff”, and adds that without a bundled offering, individual creators can only grow by “pillaging paid subscribers from other creators”. The Ankler left Substack in April… #economics101 #tellmeaboutit

• ‘No Blocking’: Man Of Many Receives 1.3M AI Crawler Visits Per Week

  Since opening its site to AI crawlers earlier this year, one of Australia’s leading lifestyle media brands has seen referrals from Claude and Gemini surge 594% and 539% respectively. That said, LLM referrals only account for 0.3 per cent of total sessions, while Google organic and direct traffic still generate 70% of its audience. #Zerosumgame

• El País Targets the Spanish-Language Market in the U.S.

  Following last week’s story about the Guardian launching a newsletter in India, EL PAÍS US has hired former NYT senior editor María Sánchez Díez as it expands its operations as part of a wider push across the Americas, where it already has editions in Mexico, Colombia and Chile. A clear land grab for international audiences… #trend

• Nobody Said Stop: How AI Chatbots Keep Users Engaged

  Henk van Ess analysed over 1.8M AI chats to answer one question: how deep can a person sink into a rabbit hole before the machine says stop? TL;DR: When a chatbot finished with “let me know if you need anything else,” only 2% of users continued. But ask a question and 58% continued, and these prompts have increased sevenfold. One physics conversation ran to 1,300 messages… [500k tokens]

• Warning: AI Agents Becoming Both a Weapon and a Risk

  As AI models get cleverer, agents chasing goals will routinely bypass restrictions and deceive humans. The AI Security Institute says, “good containment should not depend on the model choosing not to test its boundaries”. A separate report from Crowdstrike found that attackers hijacked one company’s AI access and fired 200,000 requests in two minutes, all paid by the victim. Report here…

• AI Tool: OtterlyAI

  For publishers without Semrush ($$), OtterlyAI tracks how your content appears across AI search engines. A July update shows which URLs are gaining or losing citations and which prompts are driving them. Free trial, starts at $29 a month. Its partnership with NewsroomsAI aims to help publishers “maintain traffic authority in AI search results”.

• Event: News Product Alliance Summit 2026

  Last year’s NPA Summit is described by Ben Werdmuller (ex-senior director of tech at ProPublica) as, “the most substantive conference about news product and technology I’d been to”. Praise indeed. This year’s theme: Audience Intelligence as AI Infrastructure for News. 21st-23rd Oct 2026 | Chicago | $399

In partnership with Bridged, WNIP has created Media Genie - a smarter way to explore 17 years of publishing insight. Ask a question about the media business and get a direct answer grounded in WNIP’s archive. 👇

AA/WARC Q1 2026: UK Ad Spend Sees 9.3% Growth - Yet Publishers Are Missing Out

The UK ad market grew strongly in Q1 2026, but publishers did not share in the uplift. As spend moves towards performance-led channels, publishers must prove context, attention and commercial impact.

The latest expenditure report from the Advertising Association and WARC has shown that the UK advertising industry began 2026 positively as a whole, with an increase of 9.3% year-over-year in advertising investment during Q1, taking total spend to £11.7bn.

However, a disconnect is revealed when it comes to published media. Regional and national media experienced a decline of 5.9% in ad revenue, underlining an increasing gap between the rapidly developing platform-driven advertising channels and traditional print and digital publishing models.

News No Longer Hitting the Headlines for Advertisers

The drop in spending is most evident in news publishing. National newsbrands fell 3.7% overall, with online regional news revenue down 12.1% and online national news down 0.8%. News publishers continue to compete for the same budgets, but increasingly need to demonstrate the value of their editorial environments rather than simply relying on the attraction of audience scale.

Robin De Wit, Product Marketing Director at Refinery89, believes the latest figures expose a wider structural shift rather than a temporary downturn. “For years the industry has assumed digital advertising growth would naturally benefit publishers,” he says. “These latest figures suggest that assumption no longer holds.”

This structural shift is echoed Stateside. Commentator Bo Sacks, writing in his newsletter, says, “The same contradiction is emerging in the United States. This is not merely a temporary advertising downturn. It looks increasingly like a structural transfer of audience, revenue, and power away from publishers. A recession eventually ends. A structural transfer does not.”

A Subsidised Rival for Local Attention

Owen Meredith, Managing Director of Public Policy at DMGT and former CEO of the News Media Association (NMA), says the ad figures only tell half the story. Data shows BBC local coverage grew its reach YoY from 15m to 20.3m people, up 35%, with page views rising 55% from 169m to 262m.

In short, a taxpayer-funded broadcaster grew its local audience by a third while commercial regional titles lost 12.1% of their online ad revenue. Writing on LinkedIn, Meredith said he raised this exact concern with Ofcom while still at the NMA, warning about the BBC’s expansion into local news online.

“For all the good BBC does, this is an obvious and blinding misstep. When I was at the News Media Association we warned Ofcom of the consequences of the BBC’s online expansion in the local news market. They chose not to act.” Owen Meredith, Managing Director, Public Policy, DMGT

The Growing Demand for Performance Channels

The channels which enjoyed the most growth in Q1 were those seen as offering performance, impact, and return on investment. Search, retail media, social media, addressable TV, and digital out-of-home (DOOH) all saw strong results. These environments can deliver the rich audience data, clear attribution, and direct connections between advertising exposure and consumer action that marketers demand.

Sarah Lawson Johnston, Managing Director, Global Revenue & Partnerships at Vudoo, emphasises this point: “Marketing budgets are proving remarkably resilient, but that increased spend comes with even more accountability, where every channel must now demonstrate clear commercial value.”

The shift in how campaigns are planned and executed is also being driven by new automated and agentic technologies. As advertisers look for agility, adtech platforms are equipping them to make real-time decisions based on direct performance signals.

Matt Salmon, VP Advertiser Solutions and AgenticOS, EMEA at PubMatic, believes stronger growth in channels such as addressable TV reflects advertisers’ increasing appetite for media that delivers “demonstrable ROI.” He believes AI is accelerating that trend by helping marketers turn existing data into “faster, smarter decisions”.

Bottom Line

Separate AOP and Deloitte Digital Publishers’ Revenue Index data shows publisher revenues declined 4.55% year-on-year in Q1 2026, ending four consecutive quarters of growth. While premium display advertising increased by 5.06%, subscription growth largely plateaued at just 0.63%, with recruitment classifieds, off-platform revenues and digital audio all recording significant declines.

Together, the figures reinforce the challenge facing publishers: growth remains possible, but it is becoming increasingly concentrated around higher-quality advertising propositions rather than legacy revenue streams.

If digital publishers want a bigger share of this spend, they need to prove impact the way performance channels do: shoppable formats, first-party measurement, and inventory built for agentic buying, not just impressions.

Hat tip: Andy Evans, Hendrik Geert van Ess, Scott Purcell, Nadine Sanders, Monojoy (Oddly Obvious), Praia de Monte Clérigo PT, Yamaha FZ8

However, a disconnect is revealed when it comes to published media. Regional and national media experienced a decline of 5.9% in revenue, underlining an increasing gap between the rapidly developing platform-driven advertising channels and traditional print and digital publishing models.

News no longer hitting the headlines for advertisers

The drop in spending is most evident in news publishing, where online regional news revenue fell 12.1%, while online national news slipped 0.8%. News publishers continue to compete for the same budgets, but increasingly need to demonstrate the value of their editorial environments rather than simply relying on the attraction of audience scale.

Robin De Wit, Product Marketing Director at Refinery89, believes the latest figures expose a wider structural shift rather than a temporary downturn. “For years the industry has assumed digital advertising growth would naturally benefit publishers,” he says. “These latest figures suggest that assumption no longer holds.” Instead, he argues that future growth will favour publishers “that can clearly demonstrate the quality, context and effectiveness of their inventory.”

The growing demand for performance channels

The channels which enjoyed the most growth in Q1 were those seen as offering performance, impact, and return on investment. Search, retail media, social media, addressable TV, and digital out-of-home (DOOH) all saw strong results. These environments can deliver the rich audience data, clear attribution, and direct connections between advertising exposure and consumer action that marketers demand.

Sarah Lawson Johnston, Managing Director, Global Revenue & Partnerships at Vudoo, emphasises this point: “Marketing budgets are proving remarkably resilient, but that increased spend comes with even more accountability, where every channel must now demonstrate clear commercial value.”

She argues that, as consumer journeys become more fragmented across publishers, creators and retail platforms, “capturing consumer attention is merely the starting point.” The brands extracting the greatest value from budgets, she says, are those that can reduce friction between inspiration and purchase, ultimately “turning everyday engagement into measurable transactional outcomes.”

According to the Q1 2026 report, DOOH was a stand-out channel, with investment surging 17.6% year-on-year, outperforming the wider market by over eight percentage points. As Christoph Berg, Founder and CEO of MINT Square, notes: “DOOH continues to succeed because it bridges the gap between reach and agility. Advertisers get the visual impact of high-profile, physical screens combined with the dynamic creative and contextual targeting of digital.”

The impact of AI

The shift in how campaigns are planned and executed is also being driven by new automated and agentic technologies. As advertisers look for agility, adtech platforms are equipping them to make real-time decisions based on direct performance signals.

Matt Salmon, VP Advertiser Solutions and AgenticOS, EMEA at PubMatic, believes stronger growth in channels such as addressable TV reflects advertisers’ increasing appetite for media that delivers “demonstrable ROI.” He believes AI is accelerating that trend by helping marketers turn existing data into “faster, smarter decisions”.

Ian Maxwell, CEO at Converge, says the report findings signal a structural transformation in how digital advertising is bought. As the boundaries of data, automation and AI continue to blur, he explains that the competitive advantage will increasingly come from organisations able to combine “trusted data and greater transparency” with connected infrastructure, where automation is used to drive meaningful business results, as opposed to just improved efficiency.

How publishers can increase their market share

For publishers, the focus must shift from selling impressions to proving intent and context if they want to improve their offering to advertisers.

Separate AOP and Deloitte Digital Publishers’ Revenue Index data shows publisher revenues declined 4.55% year-on-year in Q1 2026, ending four consecutive quarters of growth. While premium display advertising increased by 5.06%, subscription growth largely plateaued at just 0.63%, with recruitment classifieds, off-platform revenues and digital audio all recording significant declines.

Together, the figures reinforce the challenge facing publishers: growth remains possible, but it is becoming increasingly concentrated around higher-quality advertising propositions rather than legacy revenue streams.

If digital publishers want to capitalise on the content at their disposal, they should take a leaf out of newer channels’ playbooks, harnessing technology that helps them show the direct impact of ads and making inventory more accessible to media buyers. This approach could include: integrating shoppable formats, commerce media capabilities, and calls to action directly into editorial content; or using first-party data and direct measurement tools to prove brand-safe alignment and real conversion impact to agencies. Publishers could also ensure inventory is structured so that agentic buying engines and automated agency tools can execute against it effortlessly.

The latest AA/WARC findings suggest the challenge for publishers is not a drop in overall advertising budgets - which are forecast to increase by a further 8.2% across 2026. It is whether publishers can evolve quickly enough to capture a greater share of that investment.

With Reach’s Daily Expresso becoming the most-watched UK news show on YouTube, this week’s Long Read looks at why video podcasting has become a serious product extension for many publishers.

But what does it take to have a hit video podcast? I talk with Anuj Agarwal who has crunched data from 34,208 video podcasts to find out the real secret for a show’s success. TL;DR: Don’t launch unless you are prepared to take the long game and keep going past show 250.

Let’s crack on…

• AI Firms Are Buying Old Books, Scanning & Destroying Them

  AI platforms are buying antiquarian books en masse so they can be scanned to train their LLMs before being destroyed. Under ‘Project Panama’, hydraulic cutting machines lop off books’ spines and then slice individual pages to be scanned with industrial-grade equipment. And you don’t think they’re scanning behind your paywall? #shameless

• Publishers May Make More Licensing to Businesses

  The UK’s Copyright Licensing Agency is paying publishers millions through licensing deals with niche industry verticals, who need content to feed their own gated AI systems. Exhibit A: Springer Nature and OpenEvidence yesterday announced a subscription agreement where doctors can ‘retrieve and cite (Springer Nature’s content) during patient care’. Further reading: The AI-Era Monetization Blueprint.

• Guardian Launches ‘This is India’ Newsletter

  The Guardian attracts 4M unique visitors from India, making it the country's third-largest international digital news source by reach. It's now launched a weekly newsletter directly aimed at Indian readers. Toby Moses, the Guardian’s Head of Newsletters, says, “It’s the first time we’ve done something like this”. But probably not the last…

• AI Is Getting Better at Writing. Humans Must Get Better at Editing

  The Economist has discovered that after comparing 14 versions of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok with its own journalism, it found AI writing is becoming more human-like with each update. Its conclusion? Publishers with a distinct voice, lean copy, and sharp editorial analysis now have a clear advantage. Related: The value of charisma, style and weirdness is going to go up.

• Publisher Live Blogs Are Audience Products, Not Update Feeds

  Live events are now often streamed with WhatsApp messages pinging between friends, as well as publishers’ live blogs updating in the background. They can drive unusually strong engagement, retention and sponsorship revenue but only if publishers resource them properly and measure them as products, not tagged-on rolling feeds. N.B. The Guardian gets 15% of its total page views from live blogs…

• Creators Are the New Media Moguls But Scaling a Face Is Hard

  Mr Beast has 500M subs, making his audience larger than the EU’s population. This year, U.S. brands will spend at least $21 billion on creators, and the gap between publishers’ programmatic display businesses and creator earnings has collapsed by almost half since 2022. Key quote, “Basically every major media company has a foot in this.” However, the Influencer Recession has just landed…

• Future-Proof Consent Infrastructure Is a Competitive Advantage for Publishers

  With the EU AI Act coming into law last Sunday, and other legislation on the horizon, treating reader consent as just a cookie banner won’t be enough. Didomi’s Nial Ferguson (ex-Global Content Director of Future plc) argues that the systems that record what readers have agreed to are now business-critical. And a clear commercial advantage. He’s right. [Full report here]

• PR Firm Creates Fake AI Publicists to Pitch Journalists
  PR agencies - the disreputable ones - are using fake personas with GenAI headshots and fake company names, to pitch journalists with stories on behalf of real brands. Key takeaway? If you don’t know the PR, check their LinkedIn profile. If they have one... P.S. The New York Post appears to have been duped.

• Creator-Style Content Sees Time Deliver 7x Increase in YouTube Views

  Neatly segueing with today’s Long Read (see below 👇) is this story covering Time, which is collaborating with social media creators “as if they were Time columnists” as part of its push into video. Key quote: “We’ve used creators as what I would traditionally think of as freelancers.” The result? YouTube views up 773%, and social revenue up 119%.

• AI Tool: GoFaceless

  It could be overlooked as just another video generation tool, but this little gem turns any prompt into a ready-to-publish short-form video and automatically generates the script, narration, visuals, captions and music. Ideal for publishers turning articles into short-form video but without a dedicated production team…

• Event: U.S. Newsrooms Study Tour 2026

  You’ll need deep pockets and a generous expense account, but this tour involves spending five days visiting top-tier newsrooms in D.C., NYC and Philly. Hear directly from the editors, product leads, and technologists reshaping American journalism. 19th - 23rd Oct 2026 | Open to members and non-members | Cost: If you need to ask…

In partnership with Bridged, WNIP has created Media Genie - a smarter way to explore 17 years of publishing insight. Ask a question about the media business and get a direct answer grounded in WNIP’s archive. 👇

Video Podcasting Has Become a Serious Publishing Product

MillionPodcasts’ research shows video podcasting is a YouTube-led publishing market. For publishers, success depends on treating shows as serious, long-term products, not as cheap format extensions.

MillionPodcasts’ State of Video Podcasting 2026 report finds a market far more concentrated, platform-dependent and slow-building than most publishers probably realise.

Indeed, the research – based on an analysis of 34,208 active English-language video podcasts – shows that the vast majority of shows sit well below the audience level needed for publishers to attract a sponsor, let alone gain any sort of larger network distribution deal.

The research is a wake-up call, coming at a time when publishers are being sold video podcasting as a quick solution to several problems at once: younger audiences, more video inventory, social clips and sponsor-friendly formats. These benefits certainly exist, but only when the show is built as a serious, consistent product, not a cheap content add-on.

The Average Is a Fiction

The numbers behind video podcasts are still relatively small. MillionPodcasts says the typical show has around 2,000 monthly listeners, but the average rises to around 32,000 because of a handful of very large shows which pull the number upwards. This is why “average podcast performance” is a poor benchmark for publishers.

The market is also heavily concentrated. The top 10% of shows take 85% of all monthly listening hours, which means most publishers are competing outside the part of the market where scale and sponsorship revenue exist.

Speaking to Anuj Agarwal of MillionPodcasts, he told me that the middle market exists but, “It is too big for a hobby and too small for serious brand budgets”. He added that for many shows it’s where growth stalls rather than where true scale begins.

YouTube Has Become Infrastructure

Every one of the top ten shows in the report’s dataset publishes on YouTube, just as much for the purposes of discovery rather than viewing preferences per se. Short video clips are also how podcasts get found, so publishers that do not film their shows risk cutting off a key discovery route. Moreover, shows publishing across Apple, Spotify and YouTube together are 2.8 times more likely to reach the top audience tier.

By way of example, Reach’s Daily Expresso - launched last September - generated 3,388,950 YouTube views in June alone, making it the most-watched UK news podcast on the platform within nine months of launch, according to Tubular Labs figures shared by Reach.

Daily Express deputy editor-in-chief Sam Lister told Press Gazette last month, “The ethos was to make it warm and witty, and informative, and engaging, and move away a bit from that very hectoring, argumentative style that I think people have become a little bit fed up of.”

Only 23% of shows show any evidence of sponsorship, with sponsored shows having a median audience of around 10,000 monthly listeners, as against 1,500 for unsponsored shows.

“Brands buy scale that already exists, they do not reward quality. Sponsorship is a lagging indicator of a launch that worked, not a way to fund one.” — Anuj Agarwal, MillionPodcasts

Daily Expresso also shows how sponsorship tends to arrive after audience proof. Reach says two brands are now trialling ad placements on the show, after its YouTube audience made it visible to advertisers. In other words, to get any chance of a sponsorship deal, proof of audience has to come first.

Persistence Is the Product Strategy

The number of episodes in a show’s back catalogue is also crucial. Median audience goes from around 200 listeners under 25 episodes to around 30,000 past 500. That takes years, not a pilot season, so shows that stop early can never really find out what they could have been. For publishers it means that taking a long game view, and investing properly is vital.

“Launching is cheap and most publishers do it well. The hard part is publishing past episode 250 while the numbers look unremarkable, which is exactly where shows get cancelled.” — Anuj Agarwal, MillionPodcasts

Guest formats dominate the top ten, but they don’t do much for shows further down the list: guest shows median just 2,500 listeners against 1,500 for solo shows. What separates the top shows is not the guests, it’s a format with its own identity, one that holds up week to week regardless of who is sitting across the table.

Longer episodes surprisingly also do better (where do people find the time?), up to around 6,500 listeners past 90 minutes. Reviews are worth evaluating, but star ratings are not, because almost every show is rated highly and it tells a publisher very little about whether the show has built a loyal audience.

Key Takeaway

Any perception that video podcasting is an easy win for publishers is fictional. MillionPodcasts’ State of Video Podcasting 2026 report demonstrates that the economics reward persistence, scale, repeatability, talent, and video-native production measured in years, not months.

Publishers should either commit to podcasts as long-term media products, with a funded runway, YouTube-first production, sustained talent investment and watch-time as the core metric, or keep them deliberately small and strategic.

The riskier option is the middle one: a cheap extension expected to behave like a scalable business.

Hat tip: Simon Owens, Naomi Owusu, Nial Ferguson, Nadine Sanders, Paul Gerbino, Monojoy (Oddly Obvious), Portimao Festival Da Sardinha, Austin Distel (Unsplash).

MillionPodcasts’ State of Video Podcasting 2026 report finds a market far more concentrated, platform-dependent and slow-building than most publishers probably realise.

Indeed, the research – based on an analysis of 34,208 active English-language video podcasts – shows that the vast majority of shows sit well below the audience level needed for publishers to attract a sponsor, let alone gain any sort of larger network distribution deal.

The research is a wake-up call, coming at a time when publishers are being sold video podcasting as a quick solution to several problems at once: younger audiences, more video inventory, social clips and sponsor-friendly formats. These benefits certainly exist, but only when the show is built as a serious, consistent product, not a cheap content add-on.

The Average Is a Fiction

The numbers behind video podcasts are still relatively small. MillionPodcasts says the typical show has around 2,000 monthly listeners, but the average rises to around 32,000 because of a handful of very large shows which pull the number upwards. This is why “average podcast performance” is a poor benchmark for publishers.

The market is also heavily concentrated. The top 10% of shows take 85% of all monthly listening hours, which means most publishers are competing outside the part of the market where scale and sponsorship revenue exist.

Speaking to Anuj Agarwal of MillionPodcasts, he told me that the middle market exists but, “It is too big for a hobby and too small for serious brand budgets”. He added that for many shows it’s where growth stalls rather than where true scale begins.

YouTube Has Become Infrastructure

Every one of the top ten shows in the report’s dataset publishes on YouTube, just as much for the purposes of discovery rather than viewing preferences per se. Short video clips are also how podcasts get found, so publishers that do not film their shows risk cutting off a key discovery route. Moreover, shows publishing across Apple, Spotify and YouTube together are 2.8 times more likely to reach the top audience tier.

By way of example, Reach’s Daily Expresso - launched last September - generated 3,388,950 YouTube views in June alone, making it the most-watched UK news podcast on the platform within nine months of launch, according to Tubular Labs figures shared by Reach.

Daily Express deputy editor-in-chief Sam Lister told Press Gazette last month, “The ethos was to make it warm and witty, and informative, and engaging, and move away a bit from that very hectoring, argumentative style that I think people have become a little bit fed up of.”

Only 23% of shows show any evidence of sponsorship, with sponsored shows having a median audience of around 10,000 monthly listeners, as against 1,500 for unsponsored shows.

“Brands buy scale that already exists, they do not reward quality. Sponsorship is a lagging indicator of a launch that worked, not a way to fund one.” — Anuj Agarwal, MillionPodcasts

Daily Expresso also shows how sponsorship tends to arrive after audience proof. Reach says two brands are now trialling ad placements on the show, after its YouTube audience made it visible to advertisers. In other words, to get any chance of a sponsorship deal, proof of audience has to come first.

Persistence Is the Product Strategy

The number of episodes in a show’s back catalogue is also crucial. Median audience goes from around 200 listeners under 25 episodes to around 30,000 past 500. That takes years, not a pilot season, so shows that stop early can never really find out what they could have been. For publishers it means that taking a long game view, and investing properly is vital.

“Launching is cheap and most publishers do it well. The hard part is publishing past episode 250 while the numbers look unremarkable, which is exactly where shows get cancelled.” — Anuj Agarwal, MillionPodcasts

Guest formats dominate the top ten, but they don’t do much for shows further down the list: guest shows median just 2,500 listeners against 1,500 for solo shows. What separates the top shows is not the guests, it’s a format with its own identity, one that holds up week to week regardless of who is sitting across the table.

Longer episodes surprisingly also do better (where do people find the time?), up to around 6,500 listeners past 90 minutes. Reviews are worth evaluating, but star ratings are not, because almost every show is rated highly and it tells a publisher very little about whether the show has built a loyal audience.

Key Takeaway

Any perception that video podcasting is an easy win for publishers is fictional. MillionPodcasts’ State of Video Podcasting 2026 report demonstrates that the economics reward persistence, scale, repeatability, talent, and video-native production measured in years, not months.

Publishers should either commit to podcasts as long-term media products, with a funded runway, YouTube-first production, sustained talent investment and watch-time as the core metric, or keep them deliberately small and strategic.

The riskier option is the middle one: a cheap extension expected to behave like a scalable business.

“Launching is cheap and most publishers do it well. The hard part is publishing past episode 250 while the numbers look unremarkable, which is exactly where shows get cancelled.” — Anuj Agarwal, MillionPodcasts

MillionPodcasts.com is a B2B podcast database and intelligence platform covering more than 3 million podcasts globally. They provide PR professionals, agencies, brands, and podcasters with searchable, filterable access to podcast contact information, show statistics, guest booking information, and audience intelligence.

The biggest pageview spike came in the 21st minute, when Curaçao equalised. It was the country's first-ever World Cup goal and triggered a 186% spike in pageviews - more than any of Germany's seven goals - making it the biggest pageview response to any goal in the match, despite having far less impact on the eventual result.

“Publishers often assume audience attention rises and falls with the scoreline, but this data suggests something much more interesting. Readers are drawn to moments of significance, not simply goals.” - Naomi Owusu, CEO and Co-Founder, Tickaroo

Live Blogs Have Become A Second Screen

Tickaroo’s wider analysis covered 1,362 World Cup live blogs from 24 publishers and found that more than 75% of readers were from mobile devices including tablets. The audience behaviour outlined by Tickaroo has become all-too familiar for anyone following major events: television on, phone or tablet open, WhatsApp messages and social posts covering the same story.

“In that setting, the live blog has to hold the order of events, explain the moment, add background, gather reaction and give readers somewhere to respond while the event is still happening.” - Naomi Owusu, CEO and Co-Founder, Tickaroo

Peak traffic for the Curaçao game came at the final whistle, with 7,428 pageviews in one minute at 18:59 UTC, well after the result had already been decided.

The end of an event is when readers want the clearest understanding of the implications and fallout from what occurred, as well as reaction from participants and analysts. In sport, that means expert quotes, fan comments, table implications and discussions about the next game. In elections, trials, inquiries or company announcements, it means consequences, legal exposure, market response or what happens next.

“Many live desks shift their energy to follow-up articles at that point, but the Tickaroo data suggests the live blog still has work to do, and the audience may still be there for it.” - Naomi Owusu, CEO and Co-Founder, Tickaroo

Measuring The Behaviour, Not Just The Traffic

The 920% interaction spike after Germany’s seventh goal would be missed in a pageview report, but it is the exact depth of insight publishers need if they want to understand whether a live blog is creating real engagement.

Return visits, dwell time, comments, poll responses, reactions, subscriber usage and sponsor interaction all have to be analysed alongside pageviews, since these are the measures that show whether the format is building a genuine habit.

Live blogs are also easier to sell to advertisers when based on a suite of audience data. Tickaroo points to a sponsored Super Bowl live blog produced by kicker, football-world.news, quartermedia and DKB, which achieved a 62% interaction rate, generated more than 4,000 fan responses through polls and reactions, and produced a click through rate 100 times higher than comparable embedded article placements.

Owusu also says some of the highest retention rates Tickaroo has observed came from a publisher whose live blog sat behind a paywall, suggesting premium live coverage can additionally play a role in retention when subscribers see it as the best place to follow an event properly.

Key Takeaway

Tickaroo’s data shows that when a live event blog is executed properly, it can hold readers through the full event, give them ways to participate and create advertising or subscription value around behaviour that standard articles struggle to compete with.

This needs careful planning, with editorial teams given additional resources in staffing to cover the event, commercial teams given advance warning in order to sell sponsorship, and product teams allowed to open the paywall if the potential value warrants it.

There was a time when conversations about privacy with publishers were almost entirely driven by compliance. The question was usually, “What do we need to do?” Once the consent banner was live, attention quickly shifted elsewhere.

That isn’t how those conversations sound today.

Over the past few years, I’ve watched privacy move much closer to the commercial heart of publishing. Discussions now revolve around audience relationships, first-party data, advertising performance, and increasingly AI. Consent sits underneath all of them. Nothing meaningful happens without it.

That shift matters because the environment in which publishers operate keeps changing. Consumer expectations continue to evolve, browsers continue to restrict data collection, and regulators continue to refine their thinking. The Information Commissioner’s Office’s recent advice to the UK government on potential changes to the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR) is simply the latest reminder that privacy is never a finished project.

No changes have been made to the law and the current PECR rules remain in force. Even so, the consultation points to something much larger. Publishers that have invested in flexible consent infrastructure will be able to adapt as regulation evolves. Those relying on rigid implementations are far more likely to find themselves responding under pressure.

That difference is becoming increasingly commercial.

Trust has become something publishers can actually measure

Trust is one of those words that appears on almost every conference agenda. It’s discussed constantly, yet often feels difficult to quantify.

For publishers, however, trust produces something remarkably tangible. It influences whether people consent.

When readers understand why data is being collected and believe they’re being given a genuine choice, consent rates improve. That has consequences well beyond compliance. Better consent supports stronger first-party datasets, which in turn improve audience segmentation, programmatic performance, and the ability to deliver more relevant experiences.

Publishers are already seeing the benefit of years spent investing in direct audience relationships. According to Didomi’s 2026 State of Data Privacy benchmark, media organisations and publishers recorded the highest average consent rates across Europe at 82.7%. At a time when public debate often focuses on declining confidence in digital media, that statistic tells a rather different story. Audiences are still prepared to share their data when they trust the organisation asking for it.

I’ve seen this become particularly clear with “consent-or-pay” models. Many premium publishers have introduced them over the past few years, and the results demonstrate that transparency creates stronger relationships than assumptions ever could. When readers actively choose how they want to engage, the quality of that relationship changes.

The same principle applies beyond cookies. Preference management gives publishers a better understanding of how people want to hear from them, whether that’s newsletters, subscriptions or marketing communications. Someone who has actively told you what they value represents a far stronger commercial relationship than someone who simply never opted out.

Better consent creates better data, which matters even more in the AI era

Much of the discussion around AI in publishing has understandably focused on disruption. Concerns around content scraping, declining search traffic, and changing advertising models are entirely legitimate.

There’s another side to the conversation that perhaps deserves more attention.

AI depends on data, but it also exposes weaknesses in data quality more quickly than previous technologies ever did. Personalisation engines, recommendation models, and audience analytics are only ever as good as the information they’re working with.

That makes consented first-party data considerably more valuable than many publishers realise.

Publishers with a clear understanding of what they’re collecting, where consent has been given, and how data flows across their technology stack are better placed to deploy AI in practical ways. They’re working with cleaner signals. They know where those signals came from. They also know what isn’t available because consent wasn’t granted.

That level of visibility is becoming increasingly important as third-party signals are less dependable. AI may automate decision-making at remarkable speed, but it cannot compensate for poor-quality inputs.

The publishers best positioned to benefit from AI won’t necessarily be those investing the most in new tools, but the ones that have already invested in the quality and governance of the data feeding those tools.

The publishers preparing for tomorrow are treating privacy as infrastructure

The ICO’s recent advice on potential PECR reform illustrates a broader point. Regulation rarely stands still for long.

Whether future changes involve first-party advertising frameworks, additional transparency requirements or something entirely different, publishers will need to adapt. The same is true beyond the UK. Many premium publishers serve audiences across multiple markets, meaning UK privacy rules often sit alongside GDPR obligations and an expanding patchwork of US state legislation.

Then there’s platform complexity. Modern publishing businesses rarely operate solely on the web. Mobile apps, connected TV, and other digital environments all introduce their own technical considerations. Delivering a consistent consent experience across every touchpoint requires considerably more than deploying a standard cookie banner.

This is where infrastructure starts to matter.

The publishers making the strongest progress tend to view privacy in much the same way they view analytics or identity. It sits underneath everything else. That way of thinking also creates opportunities beyond compliance.

Take server-side tracking. Moving data collection away from a heavily script-based client-side approach gives publishers greater control over how consent signals move through their systems, while reducing unnecessary complexity. It also fosters confidence when discussing measurement and data governance with advertisers, who increasingly want a clearer understanding of how audience data is being collected and activated.

Privacy, performance, and transparency are becoming much more closely connected than they once appeared.

The publishers that are gaining an advantage aren’t necessarily responding faster every time regulation changes. They’ve simply built the kind of consent infrastructure that allows them to absorb those changes without constantly rebuilding the foundations underneath.

Privacy has become part of the operating model for modern publishing. It supports cleaner data, stronger audience relationships, and greater confidence across the advertising ecosystem. It also leaves publishers better prepared for whatever comes next, whether that’s another regulatory update, another shift in browser technology or another wave of AI innovation. For an industry that has spent years adapting to constant change, that kind of flexibility may prove to be one of its most valuable assets.

Nial Ferguson, Managing Director UK & Ireland at Didomi

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About: Didomi provides organizations with the data quality foundation they need to turn privacy into a competitive advantage.

Through its comprehensive platform, Didomi offers a range of privacy-preserving solutions, including consent management, first-party data orchestration, server-side tagging, and compliance monitoring. This allows large corporations to optimise the collection and activation of user data, reduce compliance risk under global privacy regulations, and build their revenue operations on data they can trust. Active in more than 55 countries and supporting over 2,800 clients across diverse sectors, including some of the world’s largest corporations, Didomi provides the infrastructure organisations need to stop settling for dead-end data.

This week’s Long Read looks at how falling search traffic is reshaping advertising. It’s not all bad news - if advertiser demand holds while overall supply falls, the remaining premium supply could become more valuable.

Using fresh Ozone data, adtech and data monetisation consultant Mimmo Palmieri argues that publishers should stop chasing volume and build around quality instead.

Let’s jump in… (preferably to a cool pool)

• Large Publishers Considering Blocking Google Search Completely

  WSJ reports that USA Today, Politico, Reuters, Economist, People, and others, including Reddit, are considering leaving Google’s indexing entirely because declining search traffic vs GenAI summaries is looking like a Faustian bargain. An SEO consultant told me, “In your dreams”, but the conversation has started. P.S. Search Engine Roundtable’s comments section is 100% worth a read…

• ChatGPT Becomes an Advertising Medium

  Not content with, allegedly (lawyer insertion), training its models on publishers’ content, OpenAI has launched ChatGPT Ads. You can now, quote, “Reach people as they explore options, compare choices, with relevant ads that fit naturally into the experience.” All trained on publishers’ content. Allegedly. In any other business it’s called piracy. #Napster2.0

• Publisher CEOs Unite Behind AI Stealth Bot Bill

  News Corp, Hearst, Condé Nast, and others have thrown their weight behind the Stealth Bot Prohibition Act, legislation that would require AI stealth crawlers (i.e. ‘bad bots’) to disclose their identity and purpose, as the first step towards re-establishing a functional ecosystem for news content. The News/Media Alliance has created a publisher resource centre with further details…

• AI Exposes Publishers’ Young Audience Problem

  Exceptional insights from 15 leading UK publishers. Too much to unpack here, topline? Publisher loyalty amongst young audiences is weakening rapidly, and whilst AI is accentuating it, it’s not the cause. Key takeaway: Publishers must develop recognised voices, creators, and specialist products alongside their master brand. See below…👇

• Publishers Are Rebuilding Around Video, and Succeeding

  Reach plc launched The Daily Expresso in 2025 and within nine months it’s become the most-watched UK news podcast on YouTube. Its formula? Warm, witty, and informative, rather than sombre and argumentative.

  .

  It comes as The Guardian yesterday launched its first 15-min food video series: FEED, starring Jimi Famurewa, as it aims to become, “more visual, digital and experimental”. The publisher has also established Guardian Studios, billed as its new creative hub for video-first, personality-led journalism. #clear #trend

• How Rocky Mountain Media Turned Members into Friends

  Most reader trust breakdowns occur because of a belief a newsroom is serving someone else’s interests. Rocky Mountain Public Media is addressing this by creating a ‘belonging dashboard’ (tracking more than a million touchpoints) which measures what it’s doing for its readers rather than the other way around. Result? ‘Friendships’ went up and so did revenue… #trust »» #belonging

• Why 1.4 Million People Pay The Guardian When It’s Free

  The Guardian doesn’t have a paywall, yet 1.4M people choose to pay. The key has been to communicate its mission properly, with one Editor’s message raising $2M alone. The lesson: understand the full range of reasons people support you, then keep telling that story consistently. The Salt Lake Tribune has seen similar success in tests…

• Substack Integrates with Pangram

  To stop a flood of AI slop, Substack has integrated with Pangram to allow readers to scan/evaluate individual articles for AI-generated content. Announcing the move on X, Substack CEO Chris Best says, “We don’t want Substack to turn into LinkedIn.” #Claudefishing || Related: Publishers and Substack » Enders’ Report.

• AI Tool: NewsGrade

  Built by Yoni Greenbaum (American Press Institute), this audit tool grades news websites the way outside systems and readers experience them. Covers 70 criteria including search visibility, structured data, trust and credibility signals, and how well a site is set up for AI systems to read it. Each scan produces a report with prioritised recommendations for publishers...

• Podcast: Could Faster Cashflow Unlock Adtech’s Next Growth Wave?

  Adtech has spent years making advertising faster, smarter and more automated, so why are publishers waiting 60, 90 or as long as 120 days to get paid? It comes at a time when many brands are paying creators and influencers quickly, which begs the question why this can’t be extended to publishers? Yep…

• Event: Business of Apps, Berlin

  Founded by James ‘Coops’ Cooper, ex-Head of Strategy at The Guardian, BoA will see over 1,000 app marketing, growth, and product professionals descend on Germany’s capital. Includes all verticals - media, fintech, shopping, health & fitness, entertainment, etc - good for cross-industry ideas. Berlin, 12th November

In partnership with Bridged, WNIP has created Media Genie - a smarter way to explore 17 years of publishing insight. Ask a question about the media business and get a direct answer grounded in WNIP’s archive. 👇

The Ad Supply Crunch Is Here. Publishers Need to Rethink Scarcity

Falling ad supply is starting to change the economics of the open web. For publishers, the opportunity is a chance to rebuild pricing power around quality, data and direct relationships.

Almost a year ago, while reviewing ad revenue, capacity and yield numbers across the Condé Nast portfolio, a steep decline in traffic, driven largely by Google’s AI Mode, pointed to one conclusion: a supply crunch was coming, and it would eventually push prices higher.

The logic was simple: Falling traffic means fewer pages viewed. Fewer pages viewed mean fewer ad slots loaded, and fewer ad slots loaded mean fewer impressions available to sell. If that decline continued across quality publishers while advertiser demand held steady, the open market would be left with less premium supply to bid on. Buyers would compete for a shrinking pool of quality impressions, and eCPMs would rise.

A fresh Ozone report, covering June 2026, now confirms the pattern. Across 20 billion impressions tracked in the UK and US, ad supply fell by roughly 40% year on year. UK eCPMs rose by around 30% year on year, while US eCPMs were up a more modest 7%. Bid density held steady at 5.4 bids per ad request, suggesting that demand has not fallen away. Buyers are still there. They are simply chasing fewer impressions, and paying more for the ones that remain.

Scarcity is new territory for programmatic

The open programmatic market was built on the assumption of abundant supply. RTB and the systems that sit around it were designed for large pools of impressions, and DSP bidding algorithms are tuned to work at scale. Scarcity changes the maths. Smaller sample sizes make optimisation harder and more costly, which means the buy side has its own reasons to be selective rather than simply chasing reach wherever it can be found.

That selectivity matters for publishers, because the reduction in supply is not evenly spread. Much of it is concentrated among the same top-tier titles that make up the premium end of the market, the kind of publishers now weighing up whether their best inventory, logged-in users, high-value formats, premium placements, belongs in the open marketplace at all.

Direct and programmatic guaranteed deals already account for more than three-quarters of US programmatic spend, according to eMarketer, and that share is likely to keep growing as sellers with strong direct sales operations decide the open auction no longer makes economic sense for their best inventory.

Why volume thinking will not solve this

The instinct for many yield teams will be to respond to falling ad requests with more of the same: adding ad units, chasing paid traffic, or leaning harder on lower-quality inventory to keep the numbers up. That is understandable, and it may help fill a Q4 budget gap, but it treats a structural shift as a short-term dip.

Buying traffic to compensate for falling supply is also becoming more expensive, since there are fewer users to buy, and it risks diluting the very quality signals that now command a premium.

The harder challenge may be cultural rather than technical. Publisher yield teams have spent years optimising for volume: pageviews, impressions, session length, all of it built on the logic that more traffic means more revenue. A market defined by scarcity asks for a different set of metrics: engagement and churn rather than pageviews, retention over raw traffic, lifetime value over RPM. That shift in mindset is arguably harder to make than the revenue loss itself.

As Gabriel Dorosz put it in Digiday’s coverage of the Ozone data, the opportunity now sits with publishers able to surface meaningful signals, whether first-party, contextual or attention-based, that demonstrate their impressions meet the quality thresholds buyers are actively seeking.

This points to where the real value lies: not in the auction price alone, but in proprietary data, direct audience relationships and formats a publisher’s competitors cannot easily replicate. Done well, this can also open other revenue lines, subscriptions, commerce, events, data licensing, that a purely volume-led model would never have prioritised.

Bottom Line

Publishers should not respond to falling supply by chasing volume, adding ad units or buying in lower-quality traffic to plug the gap. That approach treats a structural shift as a temporary problem and dilutes the inventory that is actually gaining value.

The better response is to make fewer, better impressions worth more: protecting premium supply for direct and guaranteed deals, proving inventory quality through first-party and contextual data, and building the audience relationships that give buyers a reason to pay above the average. A 40% drop in ad requests is not a quarter to manage through, but rather a clear signal to rebuild the business around scarcity rather than scale.

Mimmo Palmieri, AdTech & Data Monetisation Consultant

Hat tip: Monojoy (Oddly Obvious), Sam Quigley, Eric Shanfelt, GingerMay (all of you!), Mimmo Palmieri, Mark St Andrew, Fantic Caballero 500, Monchique PT

Almost a year ago, while reviewing ad revenue, capacity and yield numbers across the Condé Nast portfolio, a steep decline in traffic, driven largely by Google’s AI Mode, pointed to one conclusion: a supply crunch was coming, and it would eventually push prices higher.

The logic was simple: Falling traffic means fewer pages viewed. Fewer pages viewed mean fewer ad slots loaded, and fewer ad slots loaded mean fewer impressions available to sell. If that decline continued across quality publishers while advertiser demand held steady, the open market would be left with less premium supply to bid on. Buyers would compete for a shrinking pool of quality impressions, and eCPMs would rise.

A fresh Ozone report, covering June 2026, now confirms the pattern. Across 20 billion impressions tracked in the UK and US, ad supply fell by roughly 40% year on year. UK eCPMs rose by around 30% year on year, while US eCPMs were up a more modest 7%. Bid density held steady at 5.4 bids per ad request, suggesting that demand has not fallen away. Buyers are still there. They are simply chasing fewer impressions, and paying more for the ones that remain.

Scarcity is new territory for programmatic

The open programmatic market was built on the assumption of abundant supply. RTB and the systems that sit around it were designed for large pools of impressions, and DSP bidding algorithms are tuned to work at scale. Scarcity changes the maths. Smaller sample sizes make optimisation harder and more costly, which means the buy side has its own reasons to be selective rather than simply chasing reach wherever it can be found.

That selectivity matters for publishers, because the reduction in supply is not evenly spread. Much of it is concentrated among the same top-tier titles that make up the premium end of the market, the kind of publishers now weighing up whether their best inventory, logged-in users, high-value formats, premium placements, belongs in the open marketplace at all.

Direct and programmatic guaranteed deals already account for more than three-quarters of US programmatic spend, according to eMarketer, and that share is likely to keep growing as sellers with strong direct sales operations decide the open auction no longer makes economic sense for their best inventory.

Why volume thinking will not solve this

The instinct for many yield teams will be to respond to falling ad requests with more of the same: adding ad units, chasing paid traffic, or leaning harder on lower-quality inventory to keep the numbers up. That is understandable, and it may help fill a Q4 budget gap, but it treats a structural shift as a short-term dip.

Buying traffic to compensate for falling supply is also becoming more expensive, since there are fewer users to buy, and it risks diluting the very quality signals that now command a premium.

The harder challenge may be cultural rather than technical. Publisher yield teams have spent years optimising for volume: pageviews, impressions, session length, all of it built on the logic that more traffic means more revenue. A market defined by scarcity asks for a different set of metrics: engagement and churn rather than pageviews, retention over raw traffic, lifetime value over RPM. That shift in mindset is arguably harder to make than the revenue loss itself.

As Gabriel Dorosz put it in Digiday’s coverage of the Ozone data, the opportunity now sits with publishers able to surface meaningful signals, whether first-party, contextual or attention-based, that demonstrate their impressions meet the quality thresholds buyers are actively seeking.

This points to where the real value lies: not in the auction price alone, but in proprietary data, direct audience relationships and formats a publisher’s competitors cannot easily replicate. Done well, this can also open other revenue lines, subscriptions, commerce, events, data licensing, that a purely volume-led model would never have prioritised.

Bottom Line

Publishers should not respond to falling supply by chasing volume, adding ad units or buying in lower-quality traffic to plug the gap. That approach treats a structural shift as a temporary problem and dilutes the inventory that is actually gaining value.

The better response is to make fewer, better impressions worth more: protecting premium supply for direct and guaranteed deals, proving inventory quality through first-party and contextual data, and building the audience relationships that give buyers a reason to pay above the average. A 40% drop in ad requests is not a quarter to manage through, but rather a clear signal to rebuild the business around scarcity rather than scale.

Mimmo Palmieri, AdTech & Data Monetisation Consultant

Mimmo Palmieri is an expert in advertising technology, AI, and data, and the founder of MIMMS, a sell-side consultancy that helps media brands unlock the full commercial value of their audiences and data, from ad tech infrastructure to first-party data strategies. He spent over a decade in senior global roles at Condé Nast and the Financial Times, leading advertising revenue, yield, measurement, and data functions. An Italian-born Londoner, Mimmo is a passionate builder, whether it’s digital products, global brands, or road bikes.

Smarter investment takes priority over bigger budgets

Rather than signalling a return to unrestricted spending, the latest Bellwether findings suggest marketers are placing greater emphasis on making every investment work harder, which is setting the scene for publishers.

Sarah Lawson Johnston, Managing Director, Global Revenue & Partnerships at Vudoo, sees the same trend playing out across commerce media. Marketing budgets may be holding up, she says, but “every investment is under greater scrutiny,” with brands demanding greater clarity around what every pound delivers. As consumer journeys become more fragmented, she believes success will increasingly depend on content experiences that “don’t just generate awareness but enable measurable outcomes,” helping brands connect engagement directly to commerce.

Publishers have an opportunity to compete on quality

That greater scrutiny also creates opportunities for publishers able to demonstrate the value of premium environments. As Joseph Worswick, SVP, Global Partnerships, OpenX argues “marketers are under greater pressure and can no longer afford to blindly rely on scale.” What they want now instead is “media that combines reliable audience signals, trusted environments, and better supply quality, from partners who can actually guarantee it. In this environment, it is essential for every impression to show its worth.”

Keith Arrowsmith, Global Marketing Director at Onetag, added that the Bellwether findings reinforce “a growing recognition that sustainable business growth requires long-term investment, not just short-term activation.” For the programmatic open web, he argues, this is “a meaningful moment” as advertisers increasingly seek environments capable of delivering measurable value rather than simply low-cost reach. Advances in AI-driven sell-side decisioning, immersive creative formats and outcomes-based optimisation are helping publishers narrow the gap with the walled gardens.

Pierce Cook-Anderson, MD Advertising at Mail Metro Media, believes advertisers are also becoming more selective about the environments in which they build brands. While video may be the standout performer in the report, he argues that demand is increasingly centred on publishers that allow brands to “tell richer stories and earn attention” as audiences move between reading, watching and listening. Mail Metro Media’s own research, he adds, shows that trusted media environments deliver stronger attention, recall and commercial performance.

Hugo Welkers, CEO at Refinery89, welcomes continued budget growth but warns that publishers cannot be overlooked. He believes chasing scale has “quietly eroded publisher revenues for years,” despite quality content remaining fundamental to the advertising ecosystem. Sustaining that momentum, he argues, means supporting publisher businesses while creating more efficient supply paths that maximise value for both advertisers and media owners.

Video becomes a strategic advantage

The Bellwether findings reinforce the growing importance of video across publisher strategies.

Charlotte Wells, Strategy Director at Reach, says the report reflects what her organisation has been seeing for some time. “It is why we’ve placed video at the centre of our newsrooms and studio offering,” she adds. Growth in video and events has driven investment across Reach’s newsrooms, studio capabilities and live experiences business, helping brands connect editorial, social, commerce and in-person engagement through a more integrated strategy.

For Fiona Salmon, Managing Director at Mantis, the report confirms a trend already visible across conversations with publishers and agencies. The challenge now, she argues, is helping publishers unlock the full value of expanding video libraries. “So much video sitting in publishers’ libraries is genuinely hard to categorise,” she adds, urging that the industry must improve how video content is labelled, reducing reliance on incomplete metadata and ensuring advertisers can discover the most relevant inventory.

From attention to accountable outcomes

Perhaps the strongest message emerging from the Bellwether findings is that attention alone is no longer enough. Publishers are increasingly expected to demonstrate how engagement contributes to measurable business performance.

Lawson Johnston believes the value of content now lies in “what happens next,” whether consumers discover products through creators, trusted publisher environments or other digital channels. Closing the gap between inspiration and action, she argues, will become increasingly important as brands look to make every marketing investment more accountable.

Arrowsmith also believes AI presents both an opportunity and a responsibility for publishers. While the technology can make advertising “smarter, more impactful, and more accountable,” he warns that its value will be lost if it is viewed simply as another cost-cutting tool.

Looking ahead

The latest Bellwether Report suggests publishers are entering a period where quality, trust and measurable impact matter more than scale alone.

Brands are continuing to invest, but with greater discipline around where budgets flow and how success is measured. For publishers that can combine premium environments, richer content experiences and transparent measurement of performance, that shift offers a clear opportunity to strengthen their role within the future of digital advertising.

For the past decade, digital publishing has been built around a familiar equation: attract more readers, generate pageviews, grow ad revenue. For a long time, volume was the industry’s default metric for success, its primary currency; and much of the conversation revolved around acquiring more of it.

Content strategies and commercial models were all optimised around acquiring clicks and publishers had no choice but to chase traffic in this volume driven ecosystem.

Today however, the landscape is shifting. AI, social platforms and UGC and changing consumer behaviours have made discovery more fragmented than ever. A single customer journey might begin in an AI interface, continue through a creator’s video on social media, move to a publisher for trusted reviews, and end on a retailer’s website. No single platform owns the path to that purchase.

Discovery Is Fragmenting, But Intent Still Matters

But if AI answers more questions directly or consumers increasingly discover products through creators rather than search engines, what happens to the publisher’s role? It’s an important question but it may not be the only one that we need to be asking. Rather than asking where audiences are discovering content, what’s more salient is what happens once those audiences arrive.

Attention has never been the end goal, it was always a means to an outcome. That distinction matters because the value of premium publishing has never simply been attracting visitors. It has been creating trusted environments where people are actively researching, learning and making decisions. In many cases, those audiences arrive with genuine commercial intent, yet too often publishers are still forced to hand that intent off to someone else.

For years, digital publishing has operated on a model where great content creates interest, advertising captures attention and consumers are then redirected elsewhere to complete an action. Every additional click introduces friction, every platform change creates new uncertainty, every handoff reduces the publisher’s role in the customer journey.

Publishers Are Still Handing Value Away

As discovery fragments further, that model becomes increasingly difficult to sustain. The opportunity ahead is not to compete with AI, creators or retail platforms for ownership of discovery. It is to become more valuable at the point where trust (and traffic) already exists.

This year’s conversations at Cannes reflected a broader shift taking place across the industry. Marketers are increasingly measuring success through outcomes rather than impressions alone. Similarly, creators are no longer judged purely by their reach but by the commercial impact they generate. Media investment is becoming more accountable and every touchpoint is expected to contribute to measurable business results.

The same evolution is beginning to reshape publishing. Instead of treating articles, videos or editorial content as static destinations, publishers have an opportunity to view their content as environments where discovery can naturally transform into action. The moment a consumer is researching a product, reading expert advice or exploring inspiration is often the moment their intent is strongest. Why should that experience end with another search, another tab or another platform?

Trust Is the Commercial Advantage

This, however, presents an opportunity for publishers because trust remains one of their greatest competitive advantages. While AI can summarise information and creators can generate awareness, publishers continue to provide context, expertise and credibility. Those qualities become even more valuable as consumers navigate an increasingly complex information landscape.

The question is whether publishers continue monetising that trust through impressions alone, or whether they begin using it to create richer commercial experiences.

This is not about turning every article into a storefront or compromising editorial integrity. Readers engage with premium publishers because they value independent journalism, expert opinion and high-quality content. Those foundations remain essential. However, content and commerce no longer need to exist separately. If readers have already invested their attention and demonstrated intent within a trusted environment, enabling them to explore products, compare options or complete relevant actions without disrupting that experience, benefits audiences, brands and publishers alike.

The digital publishing industry has spent years fighting for traffic as though more visitors alone will secure its future. But traffic is becoming increasingly volatile, shaped by opaque algorithms, AI interfaces and platform decisions beyond any publisher’s control. Traffic can be turned off by a platform overnight.

Intent, however, is different. Intent represents something publishers have always been uniquely positioned to capture: audiences actively seeking credible information before making decisions. As discovery continues to evolve, that may prove far more valuable than simply attracting another click.

Nick Morgan, Founder and CEO, Vudoo

About: Vudoo is a pioneering content commerce platform that empowers publishers and brands to create interactive, shoppable experiences directly within digital content. By combining video, storytelling, and seamless transaction capabilities, Vudoo helps partners drive engagement, capture intent, and convert audiences in real time. Trusted by leading media and enterprise partners, Vudoo is redefining how content drives commerce in the age of AI.

This week’s Long Read looks at how publishers are rethinking reader support beyond the paywall.

As HuffPost, The Salt Lake Tribune and The Guardian show, voluntary contributions only work when the payment request is tied to mission, identity and a clear value exchange. For publishers, the lesson is not that donations replace subscriptions, but that reader revenue increasingly depends on giving audiences credible reasons to support the journalism they want to remain open.

Let’s crack on…

• Google Search Traffic to Leading UK Publishers Set to Halve by Q3 2027

  Google search traffic to leading UK publishers is projected to halve within a year, according to a new AOP study analysing 10.8 billion page views across eight publishing groups. It’s not uniform, with sports, travel, and health & wellness faring best, and tech, politics, finance and business faring worst. Evergreen content, easily digested by LLMs, is done for…

• Publishers File Massive Lawsuit Against Google Over Gemini Training

  Hachette, Cengage Learning, Elsevier, and author Scott Turow are plaintiffs in an NY court case accusing Google of wilful copyright infringement, alleging it unlawfully used copyrighted materials to train its Gemini AI models. The case could become a defining legal test of whether AI companies can train on copyrighted works without permission. Precedent incoming…

• Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Hands Its Column to a Creator

  With Reuters Institute reporting that 27% of people get their news from a creator, U.S. Cosmo has joined forces with young creator Julia Mervis as its first-ever social-only columnist (TikTok & Instagram). The title has pivoted to a social-first strategy with 18.7M social followers. Key quote: “We’re evolving the traditional magazine column into a format that’s native to our audience.”

• What 14 Years of Slow Growth Built at elDiario.es

  As the wounds from England’s World Cup exit still smoulder, another Spanish success story shows how its second-most read digital news outlet has financed itself by individual reader-donors (“socios”). Whilst it’s a free publication, 121,000 people pay an average of $83 a year to support it. Key quote: “Independent journalism cannot exist without economic independence.” See Long Read below…

• New EU AI Transparency Rules Extend Beyond The EU

  Just in: From 2 August, Article 50 of the EU AI Act requires ‘deployers’ of qualifying AI systems to disclose AI interactions, mark AI-generated content and label deepfakes. The EU’s final guidance confirms the rules also apply to organisations outside the EU where AI-generated content is intended for use in the EU. You’ve been warned…

• Mail Metro Media Research: Fewer Ads Drive 1.6x Higher Attention

  In a study comparing low-ad-load environments with standard layouts, Mail Metro Media and Lumen Research found that fewer ads deliver better results for readers and advertisers alike, driving 1.6x higher attention and 2.4x greater brand recall. Key quote: “When publishers reduce ad load, they create environments that encourage greater engagement and slower scrolling.” i.e. ad clutter costs…

• Press Freedom Concerns Amidst Debanking & Copyright Takedowns

  Three weeks after The Canary suspended its national print newspaper because Lloyds ‘allegedly’ closed its bank account, Google has been deleting thousands of articles from search due to suspicious US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) requests. In short, state and corporate actors “routinely target articles they dislike with multiple takedown requests”. Publishers aren’t informed either...

• OpenAI Says Its AI Models Went Rogue

  On Tuesday, OpenAI said its AI models went rogue and hacked into Hugging Face, a digital library of A.I. tech. In separate testing, it also observed “unwanted behaviour” that saw its model ignore instructions, find a hole in its sandbox, and upload results to a public GitHub repository. P.S. Hugging Face’s CEO has been a strong, vocal advocate of open-source AI. #Suspicious

• WaPo’s Video-Journalism Ads Outperformed Its Subscription Campaigns

  With organic search dying, and its direct marketing flatlining, the Washington Post has been forced to re-think its entire subscriber acquisition strategy. Its solution? Paid Facebook and Instagram ads built around its own journalists’ content. The result? 4x higher engagement and much stronger acquisition numbers…

• The Industry Needs an SSP for LLMs

  Franklin Rios, CEO of Next Net and co-founder of the SAIL licensing initiative, argues that in the web era, publishers optimised for clicks. The new battleground is inclusion in the AI answer itself, where the most valuable position is the cited source shaping the AI response. Rios argues the answer could be an SSP for LLMs, giving publishers the shared infrastructure needed to compete…

• AI Tool: Kimi K3

  Kimi K3 is a new frontier-level AI model from Chinese startup Moonshot AI, with its performance already approaching the best models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Open source, it allows publishers to build their own powerful, independent AI system. Running an independent version necessitates a specialist data-centre or cloud partner. [Released for download 27th July]

• Webinar: Data-Driven Acquisition & Retention: Strategies for Growth

  Vivek Malhotra, India Today Group’s CMO and COO for Strategy, outlines how the publisher leveraged its data to optimise customer acquisition, improve engagement, and build long-term subscriber relationships. 30th July | 11.30 UK, 6:30 EDT | Free

• Event: Future of Media Technology Conference

  Now in its fifth year, Press Gazette’s FMT Conference is billed as a one-day masterclass combining panel discussions, case studies, debates and keynote speeches. The speaker lineup already looks strong, with confirmed speakers including the FT’s CEO Jon Slade, Condé Nast’s VP of Audience Strategy Sarah Marshall and others. London, Bankside | 10th Sept

In partnership with Bridged, WNIP has created Media Genie - a smarter way to explore 17 years of publishing insight. Ask a question about the media business and get a direct answer grounded in WNIP’s archive. 👇

Beyond the Paywall: What The Salt Lake Tribune and HuffPost Can Tell Us About the Future of Reader Support

As publishers test voluntary contributions, Flip-Pay CEO Paul McCarthy-Brain explains how HuffPost and The Salt Lake Tribune are turning reader goodwill into sustainable income.

As more publishers test voluntary contributions alongside subscriptions, the lesson from titles including The Salt Lake Tribune, HuffPost and The Guardian is clear: reader support only works when the payment request is tied to mission, identity and a strong perceived value exchange.

Paul McCarthy-Brain, CEO of reader revenue platform Flip-Pay, has worked with contributions-based publishers including HuffPost and The Salt Lake Tribune. His view is that too many publishers still treat donations as an add-on payment option, when the real work is in explaining why support matters before the reader is asked for money.

He also emphasises that implementing a voluntary contribution model demands as much commercial discipline as a subscription model, requiring just as much product thinking, data capability and retention work. The key difference is that the transaction is framed less as a content purchase and more as a relationship with a publication’s purpose.

“The key is bringing the reader along with you,” he told me. “You have to communicate your mission, and why their support matters; make them feel they’re making a difference and show the value their contribution creates.”

Mission Is the Product: Reader Support Has to Start With Purpose

The Guardian remains the clearest example of mission-led giving. “Their donations are based on consistent messaging, which states that when you donate, you’re supporting their independence, free from political influence and the whims of billionaires,” says McCarthy-Brain. “It works because it’s true to who they are. You couldn’t simply apply that messaging to every publisher.”

A more recent example is The Salt Lake Tribune. After becoming the first legacy newspaper in the US to transition to non-profit status, it dropped its paywall this year, making its content free to access online. Rather than reframing donations as an alternative payment method, it now positions them as preserving access to journalism that might otherwise not survive.

“The Tribune believes that its reporting should be available to everyone because reliable information is becoming harder to find, and access to trustworthy news matters,” says McCarthy-Brain.

“Before lowering their paywall, they conducted reader research and found that 87% of subscribers surveyed were happy to continue paying, even when content was made free,” he says. “Readers understand why they’re being asked to contribute because the publication has a very clear mission.”

HuffPost Tests the Same Logic Differently

Another publisher that McCarthy-Brain works closely with is HuffPost, and whilst it remains a for-profit title, the publisher has been operating a voluntary donations model since 2023. Its pitch? Inviting readers to join a ‘community’ of like-minded people who believe journalism should serve the public good.

“The way they position it is that, by donating, you’re not just funding journalism, you’re standing alongside thousands of supporters who value fairness, clarity, and accountability,” says McCarthy-Brain.

For publishers presenting a clear vision, donations become more than a payment mechanism, and become a way for readers to actively support values they believe in. The commercial test then becomes whether voluntary support can survive beyond a single donation and turn into repeatable income.

All three of the aforementioned publishers have gone beyond a simple ‘donate’ request, and developed tiered membership models, which include incentives for different levels such as ad-free experiences, exclusive newsletters, events and merchandise.

Memberships become a particularly strong middle-point as they’re effectively voluntary subscriptions repositioned into a sense of belonging.

“Publishers enjoy the regular income, and readers are given a choice about how they want to support you,” he says. “Those supporters enjoy a sense of belonging and can often become more loyal than someone who’s feeling compelled to cough up because they’re hitting a paywall.”

Having a membership proposition also gives a clear reason for regular communication that helps further nurture the reader connection, such as email updates on how their donation is being spent, invitations to insider events, or early access to certain content or opportunities.

McCarthy-Brain points to behavioural economist Rory Sutherland’s advice that small signals of belonging can have an outsized impact on loyalty. “Something as simple as telling someone, ‘You’ve been a member since…’ reminds them they’re part of something bigger,” he says.

Giving Readers a Choice

While publishers like the Guardian, the Salt Lake Tribune and HuffPost are relying on donations and memberships as their primary reader revenue models, McCarthy-Brain doesn’t believe subscriptions are disappearing, nor does he expect donations to work for everyone.

Premium publishers such as the Financial Times or The Wall Street Journal will continue to thrive behind paywalls, he says. Other organisations, particularly local and mission-led publishers, and non-profits looking to remain independent, may find greater success by keeping journalism open and encouraging voluntary support.

Increasingly, however, he expects to see the distinction between subscriptions, memberships and donations become less important than the overall reader relationship. Publishers should focus less on persuading people to pay for content, he says, and more on giving readers reasons to support quality journalism, with a portfolio of options.

“The most successful publishers won’t rely on a single revenue model,” he says. “They’ll understand their audience, communicate their value clearly and give readers different ways to support the journalism they care about.”

Hat tip: Monojoy (Oddly Obvious), Emily Bamber, Paul McCarthy-Brain, Amy Lawrence, Alice Howey (good luck in your new role), Mimmo Palmieri, Srishti Bahadur, Jen Hibberd, Toe Pyae Naing, Carvoeiro PT, Yamaha Fazer8.

As more publishers test voluntary contributions alongside subscriptions, the lesson from titles including The Salt Lake Tribune, HuffPost and The Guardian is clear: reader support only works when the payment request is tied to mission, identity and a strong perceived value exchange.

Paul McCarthy-Brain, CEO of reader revenue platform Flip-Pay, has worked with contributions-based publishers including HuffPost and The Salt Lake Tribune. His view is that too many publishers still treat donations as an add-on payment option, when the real work is in explaining why support matters before the reader is asked for money.

He also emphasises that implementing a voluntary contribution model demands as much commercial discipline as a subscription model, requiring just as much product thinking, data capability and retention work. The key difference is that the transaction is framed less as a content purchase and more as a relationship with a publication’s purpose.

“The key is bringing the reader along with you,” he told me. “You have to communicate your mission, and why their support matters; make them feel they’re making a difference and show the value their contribution creates.”

Mission Is the Product: Reader Support Has to Start With Purpose

The Guardian remains the clearest example of mission-led giving. “Their donations are based on consistent messaging, which states that when you donate, you’re supporting their independence, free from political influence and the whims of billionaires,” says McCarthy-Brain. “It works because it’s true to who they are. You couldn’t simply apply that messaging to every publisher.”

A more recent example is The Salt Lake Tribune. After becoming the first legacy newspaper in the US to transition to non-profit status, it dropped its paywall this year, making its content free to access online. Rather than reframing donations as an alternative payment method, it now positions them as preserving access to journalism that might otherwise not survive.

“The Tribune believes that its reporting should be available to everyone because reliable information is becoming harder to find, and access to trustworthy news matters,” says McCarthy-Brain.

“Before lowering their paywall, they conducted reader research and found that 87% of subscribers surveyed were happy to continue paying, even when content was made free,” he says. “Readers understand why they’re being asked to contribute because the publication has a very clear mission.”

The HuffPost Tests the Same Logic Differently

Another publisher that McCarthy-Brain works closely with is HuffPost, and whilst it remains a for-profit title, the publisher has been operating a voluntary donations model since 2023. Its pitch? Inviting readers to join a ‘community’ of like-minded people who believe journalism should serve the public good.

“The way they position it is that, by donating, you’re not just funding journalism, you’re standing alongside thousands of supporters who value fairness, clarity, and accountability,” says McCarthy-Brain.

For publishers presenting a clear vision, donations become more than a payment mechanism, and become a way for readers to actively support values they believe in. The commercial test then becomes whether voluntary support can survive beyond a single donation and turn into repeatable income.

All three of the aforementioned publishers have gone beyond a simple ‘donate’ request, and developed tiered membership models, which include incentives for different levels such as ad-free experiences, exclusive newsletters, events and merchandise.

Membership becomes a particularly strong middle-point as they’re effectively voluntary subscriptions repositioned into a sense of belonging. “Publishers enjoy the regular income, and readers are given a choice about how they want to support you,” he says. “Those supporters enjoy a sense of belonging and can often become more loyal than someone who’s feeling compelled to cough up because they’re hitting a paywall.”

Having a membership proposition also gives a clear reason for regular communication that helps further nurture the reader connection, such as email updates on how their donation is being spent, invitations to insider events, or early access to certain content or opportunities.

McCarthy-Brain points to behavioural economist Rory Sutherland’s advice that small signals of belonging can have an outsized impact on loyalty. “Something as simple as telling someone, ‘You’ve been a member since…’ reminds them they’re part of something bigger,” he says.

Giving Readers a Choice

While publishers like the Guardian, the Salt Lake Tribune and HuffPost are relying on donations and memberships as their primary reader revenue models, McCarthy-Brain doesn’t believe subscriptions are disappearing, nor does he expect donations to work for everyone.

Premium publishers such as the Financial Times or The Wall Street Journal will continue to thrive behind paywalls, he says. Other organisations, particularly local and mission-led publishers, and non-profits looking to remain independent, may find greater success by keeping journalism open and encouraging voluntary support.

Increasingly, however, he expects to see the distinction between subscriptions, memberships and donations become less important than the overall reader relationship. Publishers should focus less on persuading people to pay for content, he says, and more on giving readers reasons to support quality journalism, with a portfolio of options.

“The most successful publishers won’t rely on a single revenue model,” he says. “They’ll understand their audience, communicate their value clearly and give readers different ways to support the journalism they care about.”

This week’s Long Read looks at Reach plc, the UK’s largest commercial news publisher and owner of titles including the Mirror, Express and Manchester Evening News.

Can it build a live experiences business from established events such as Pride of Britain, while also giving advertisers a role that adds to the experience rather than compromises it? Push that too far, and just like Zurich’s Street Parade, mass commercialism can damage the spirit that made the audience care in the first place.

Rather AI-heavy this week…but that’s where it’s happening.

• Bauer Replaces Freelance Commissions With In-House AI

  One of Europe’s largest publishers, Bauer Media has told writers it is ‘pausing’ (i.e. ceasing) freelance commissions for Take a Break Feast, part of the UK’s best-selling women’s weekly magazine brand. It has introduced AI tools to produce more content in-house, with a Pangram analysis of its short stories showing 100% AI generation. You’d think they could afford freelance commissions…

• Publishers Seek Sanctions Over Paywalled ChatGPT Responses

  OpenAI is facing calls for “serious sanctions” after allegedly trying to block access to millions of internal logs that could reveal whether it reproduced paywalled news articles in response to user prompts. NYT Lead Counsel: “If OpenAI genuinely believed that copying our clients’ journalism was fair and legal, it wouldn’t have hid the truth about having done it.” He’s got a point…

• PPA Launches ‘Publisher AI Licensing Framework’

  The Professional Publishers Association (UK) has analysed its members across size, content vertical, revenue model and current AI licensing activity to develop a Publisher AI Licensing Framework. Publishers enter their own details to receive an AI impact score, a forecast of potential traffic loss and tailored licensing recommendations.

  

• Publishers Confront AI’s New Advertising Reality

  Enders Analysis’ latest report deconstructs Cannes Lions, concluding that ‘the supply side wins’. Good in theory, but whilst AI is changing how advertising is created, bought and measured, Big Tech remains dominant. For publishers, first-party data, audience ownership and distinctive formats now matter more than ever. Generic ad inventory is dying off… (free report).

• 96,477 “Private” Chats Went Public in 2026

  When you use an AI platform, you might ‘share’ the chat thinking you’ve made a private link to forward on to colleagues. Not so. What you’ve actually created is a public web page that might eventually end up in a public archive for all to read. The commercial consequences can be profound. Standout research from Henk van Ess… #DigitalDigging

• Sundial & Next Net Launch Rights/Payment Network for AI Content Retrieval

  AI discovery company Next Net and Sundial Media & Tech Group (parent company of Refinery29, ESSENCE, etc) have launched SAIL, a new scalable, permission-based marketplace designed to help publishers control how their content is accessed, credited, and monetised in ‘the AI era’. Billed as an alternative to one-off licensing deals and copyright battles…

• Audio-Only Podcasting Is Becoming a Competitive Disadvantage

  A study of 34,000 video podcasts reveals that a multiplatform distribution strategy is essential for podcasting success. Shows distributed across Apple, Spotify and YouTube are 2.8X more likely to reach the top audience tier than those that are not. Key lesson? Endurance. Shows under 25 episodes reach a median of 200 listeners; those past 500 episodes reach 30,000.

• 27% Of People Get Their News From A Creator

  Legacy news websites are now the main source of news for just one in five young people. 52% of 18-24-year-olds say social, video networks and AI are their main source of news. Publishers need to stop treating creators as a route back to websites and start building personality-led products in their own right. P.S. In France, HugoDécrypte is watched by a third of U35s and now employs twelve people.

• Voice AI Finally Got Good. What Happens Now?

  Florent Daudens, former News Director at Le Devoir, argues that voice AI has reached a tipping point and publishers now need to optimise not just for search, but for spoken answers. Key quote: “I’ve had early access to OpenAI’s new voice model for a few weeks, and I ended up doing something I didn’t expect: I turned voice on by default.” Voice and screen together could become the optimal interface…

• AI Tool: NewsGenie

  As AI becomes more sophisticated, the challenge of detecting deepfakes will only become far more difficult. Using patent-pending tech, NewsGenie aims to distinguish legitimate content from Gen-AI images and videos using multi-layered forensic analysis across a wide spectrum of parameters. Explainer video.

• Podcast: How People Are Using AI Chatbots for News

  Just sixteen minutes long, this episode from the recent Reuters Digital News 2026 Report focuses on who is using AI chatbots for news, what they are asking and what it means for publishers. Features Mitali Mukherjee and Amy Ross Arguedas. TL;DR: “AI usage is much more concentrated among the demographics that are (already) strong news lovers.”

• Event: INMA Media Advertising Summit

  Most advertising events pay lip service to the supply side, but INMA’s event is set to rebalance the scales. This two-day conference is billed as the first major global event built specifically for the people who conceive, create, build, and sell news media advertising. Includes study tour (CNN, Hearst, etc). NYC | 9-10th Dec [🥶]

In partnership with Bridged, WNIP has created Media Genie - a smarter way to explore 17 years of publishing insight. Ask a question about the media business and get a direct answer grounded in WNIP’s archive. 👇

Can Publisher Trust Scale Offline? Reach Live Experiences Will Test It

Reach is taking trusted editorial brands into live experiences, backed by audience data. The test is whether those relationships can become repeatable advertiser products.

Reach plc, the UK’s largest commercial news publisher, has launched Reach Live Experiences, a new events and experiential division built on its history in live formats, including Pride of Britain and Pride of Scotland. The division is designed to extend Reach’s editorial brands into physical audience engagement for advertisers, allowing partners to translate studio content into live activations rooted in audience interests.

Alongside the division, Reach has introduced LIVE, a proprietary audience planning framework structured around Location, Interests, Values and Engagement. The framework draws on billions of data points to give advertisers a more precise understanding of Reach’s audiences.

In short, Reach is making a commercial bet that trusted brands create stronger connection in live environments, while building a planning structure that lets advertisers buy that connection across content, video, social and experiential.

From Audience Scale to Participation

Sophie Robinson, Reach’s Director of Events and Live Experiences, argues that the opportunity lies in participation rather than scale. Digital media can put content in front of large audiences, but live formats create shared emotion and memory in a way that standard campaigns often struggle to match.

“Experiential transforms audiences from consumers into participants. Digital media is brilliant at reaching people, but live experiences create something much harder to replicate online, and that is shared emotion.” Sophie Robinson, Director of Events and Live Experiences, Reach plc

Pride of Britain, running since 2001, is Reach's clearest example of a brand with a live format ready to build on. Its success is now rolling out into year-round experiences, content and new franchises without detaching the experience from its original purpose.

Ad agencies need a way to plan, compare and justify experiential spend within a wider media strategy, and that is the gap LIVE is built to fill. Its four categories, Location, Interests, Values and Engagement, give Reach’s commercial teams a structure they can put in front of advertisers instead of a case built on sentiment, trust and goodwill.

Maria Purcell, Reach’s Interim Chief Revenue Officer, says the wider push is one of continuity rather than reinvention.

“When we talk about transformation, we don’t mean leaving one world behind for another, we mean taking the trust and audience connection Reach has built over generations and evolving it into a richer, faster, more visual future.” Maria Purcell, Interim Chief Revenue Officer, Reach plc

Authenticity Is the Commercial Constraint

Robinson argues that editorial understanding has to shape an event from the start rather than be layered on as a sponsorship opportunity. Authenticity depends on whether the audience recognises the experience as a natural extension of the brand, rather than as a sponsorship opportunity with editorial branding attached.

“Commercial partnerships work best when they’re additive rather than intrusive. The right partner should enhance the audience experience because they genuinely align with the values of the brand, not simply because they want visibility.” Sophie Robinson, Director of Events and Live Experiences, Reach plc

The sponsor proposition needs to come after the audience proposition. Editorial, audience, events and commercial teams should first agree why people would attend, what they will get from it, and what role a partner can credibly play. A sponsor that adds access, expertise or utility can then strengthen the experience; one added mainly for commercial visibility misses the opportunity.

Robinson’s strongest commercial point is that the event should not be the end product. Live moments should feed editorial coverage, video, social storytelling and follow-up audience activity, so the value extends before and after the room.

That is where publishers have an advantage over conventional events businesses. They can turn one live experience into multiple assets: editorial features, video clips, social distribution, audience insight and advertiser case studies.

The discipline is deciding what the event is meant to produce before it is sold. If it is treated as a single activation, experiential becomes expensive custom work. If it is built as part of a wider content and audience cycle, it has a clearer route to repeatability, margin and advertiser value.

Execution Will Decide It

The IPA’s Autumn 2025 Digital Media Owners Survey found that Reach scored 73% for understanding how opportunities across media can be exploited, up 18 percentage points on Spring 2025. That suggests agencies already see the publisher improving in the joined-up delivery that experiential will depend on.

Reach has a credible reason to take live experiences seriously: it owns brands with audience recognition, advertiser appeal and existing live formats to build on. LIVE adds a planning layer that may help agencies understand where those experiences fit within wider campaigns.

The harder test is repeatability. Pride of Britain gives Reach a strong starting point, but publishers should not confuse a trusted flagship brand with a scalable events strategy. Live experiences only make commercial sense when the brand has a real reason to bring people together, the partner improves the audience experience, and the event creates value beyond attendance.

Hat tip: Monojoy (Oddly Obvious), Michael Tilus, Sophie Robinson, Tessa Flanagan, Alice Howey, Anuj Agarwal, Toe Pyae Naing, Jenny Mulholland, Alte PT, Fantic Caballero 500.

Alongside the division, Reach has introduced LIVE, a proprietary audience planning framework structured around Location, Interests, Values and Engagement. The framework draws on billions of data points to give advertisers a more precise understanding of Reach’s audiences.

In short, Reach is making a commercial bet that trusted brands create stronger connection in live environments, while building a planning structure that lets advertisers buy that connection across content, video, social and experiential.

From Audience Scale to Participation

Sophie Robinson, Reach’s Director of Events and Live Experiences, argues that the opportunity lies in participation rather than scale. Digital media can put content in front of large audiences, but live formats create shared emotion and memory in a way that standard campaigns often struggle to match.

“Experiential transforms audiences from consumers into participants. Digital media is brilliant at reaching people, but live experiences create something much harder to replicate online, and that is shared emotion.” Sophie Robinson, Director of Events and Live Experiences, Reach plc

Pride of Britain, running since 2001, is Reach's clearest example of a brand with a live format ready to build on, built on a public proposition that is clear: recognition, emotion and shared celebration. That success is now rolling out into year round experiences, content and new franchises without detaching the experience from its original purpose.

Ad agencies need a way to plan, compare and justify experiential spend within a wider media strategy, and that is the gap LIVE is built to fill. Its four categories, Location, Interests, Values and Engagement, give Reach’s commercial teams a structure they can put in front of advertisers instead of a case built on sentiment, trust and goodwill.

Maria Purcell, Reach’s Interim Chief Revenue Officer, says the wider push is one of continuity rather than reinvention.

“When we talk about transformation, we don’t mean leaving one world behind for another, we mean taking the trust and audience connection Reach has built over generations and evolving it into a richer, faster, more visual future.” Maria Purcell, Interim Chief Revenue Officer, Reach plc

Authenticity Is the Commercial Constraint

Robinson argues that editorial understanding has to shape an event from the start rather than be layered on as a sponsorship opportunity. Authenticity depends on whether the audience recognises the experience as a natural extension of the brand, rather than as a sponsorship opportunity with editorial branding attached.

“Commercial partnerships work best when they’re additive rather than intrusive. The right partner should enhance the audience experience because they genuinely align with the values of the brand, not simply because they want visibility.” Sophie Robinson, Director of Events and Live Experiences, Reach plc

The sponsor proposition needs to come after the audience proposition. Editorial, audience, events and commercial teams should first agree why people would attend, what they will get from it, and what role a partner can credibly play. A sponsor that adds access, expertise or utility can then strengthen the experience; one added mainly for commercial visibility misses the opportunity.

Robinson’s strongest commercial point is that the event should not be the end product. Live moments should feed editorial coverage, video, social storytelling and follow-up audience activity, so the value extends before and after the room.

That is where publishers have an advantage over conventional events businesses. They can turn one live experience into multiple assets: editorial features, video clips, social distribution, audience insight and advertiser case studies.

The discipline is deciding what the event is meant to produce before it is sold. If it is treated as a single activation, experiential becomes expensive custom work. If it is built as part of a wider content and audience cycle, it has a clearer route to repeatability, margin and advertiser value.

Execution Will Decide It

The IPA’s Autumn 2025 Digital Media Owners Survey found that Reach scored 73% for understanding how opportunities across media can be exploited, up 18 percentage points on Spring 2025. That suggests agencies already see the publisher improving in the joined up delivery that experiential will depend on.

Reach has a credible reason to take live experiences seriously: it owns brands with audience recognition, advertiser appeal and existing live formats to build on. LIVE adds a planning layer that may help agencies understand where those experiences fit within wider campaigns.

The harder test is repeatability. Pride of Britain gives Reach a strong starting point, but publishers should not confuse a trusted flagship brand with a scalable events strategy. Live experiences only make commercial sense when the brand has a real reason to bring people together, the partner improves the audience experience, and the event creates value beyond attendance.

Independent adtech has long sold itself as the clean alternative to walled gardens - no conflict, bloat or legacy incentives. The promise was objective technology helping buyers make smarter decisions.

That story worked when the market still accepted opacity as the price of sophistication. It works less well now. Across the buy side, agencies are under pressure from clients to defend every basis point of working media. And when clients start asking where the money goes, “trust us” is no longer a satisfying answer. The old model relied on complexity as a moat. But complexity is starting to look a lot like margin.

That is why so many large adtech platforms suddenly find themselves in an uncomfortable position. The same buyers that once celebrated independent infrastructure are now interrogating it. What exactly is the fee? Where in the chain is value being created? Who benefits when supply-path optimisation becomes another tollbooth? How much of this is technology, and how much is simply spread?

Many quality, independent platforms have helped professionalise programmatic and gave advertisers leverage they did not have before. But the market has matured. Once a company becomes large enough, profitable enough and embedded enough, it gets graded on economics. And economics are becoming harder to hide.

From Clicks to Citations

This is happening at exactly the moment consumer behaviour is shifting again. Consumers are increasingly asking LLMs what to buy, where to go, what software to use, which financial product to trust and which brand is worth their time. They are not browsing in the old sense. They are prompting. And when they do, the unit of value is the citation.

That should force a major rethink. In the web era, marketers optimised toward links, clicks and landing pages. In the platform era, they optimised toward audiences, outcomes and closed-loop measurement. In the LLM era, they will need to optimise toward inclusion in the answer itself.

That means the most valuable real estate may soon be the cited source that shapes the model’s response. In other words, influence will increasingly flow through retrieval, citation and recommendation layers that today are barely monetised and poorly standardised.

The Missing Layer

The industry is not ready for that. Right now, there is no real supply-side infrastructure for LLM discovery. There is no true SSP for answer engines: no widely accepted layer that helps publishers, retailers, data owners and brands package their content for citation, signal value to demand, manage pricing, enforce quality and create auction dynamics suited to AI interfaces.

That gap will not remain open for long. Either the industry builds infrastructure that makes LLM monetisation transparent and interoperable, or it will repeat the mistakes of the last decade: hidden fees, black-box intermediaries and a handful of players extracting outsize margins from a market they claim to simplify.

Advertisers should not want that. Neither should publishers. Nor should agencies that are already tired of defending opaque economics to clients who have learned to ask better questions.

The opportunity here is to build the market structure that supports commercial discovery in an answer-driven internet. Brands will need paid products, yes. But they will also need systems that create trust, pricing logic and transaction rails around AI-mediated attention.

Programmatic transformed advertising by organising chaos. LLMs are about to create a new kind of chaos. The industry should resist the temptation to solve it with another opaque middle layer dressed up as innovation.

Franklin Rios, CEO of Next Net

About Next Net
Next Net is building infrastructure for trusted content discovery, AI-era access and digital value exchange. The company works with content owners, rights holders and technology platforms to support more transparent, scalable and accountable ways for external knowledge to participate in AI-powered environments.

Increased demand alone won’t translate into premium CPMs. Publishers also need to identify audiences, manage frequency, activate campaigns across channels, and prove performance if they want to capture the full commercial opportunity.

A World Cup Like No Other

Excitement and engagement with the World Cup is a gradual build, not a spike as seen by other multi-week sporting events like the Olympics. Starting with qualifying buzz, group stage announcements, and match scheduling, the buzz about the World Cup began with advertisements running since the end of the 2025 holiday season. While sporting events like the Olympics, Super Bowl, and most recently Wimbledon are always big revenue drivers for publishers, this World Cup has been even bigger.

For the first time in history, the World Cup is being hosted not by one country but spread across all of North America, with Canada, the US, and Mexico hosting games across 16 cities. It’ll also be the longest World Cup to date, with 48 teams participating and 104 matches compared to the standard 64 matches in previous years.

Scale is everything. These increases and changes will drive up viewership, with a projected 6 billion viewers and a projected $10 billion in ad spend. Not to mention, FIFA predicts 5.5 million people from all around the world are traveling to multiple cities across North America to attend the matches in person.

It’s also important to recognise that these audiences won’t arrive with a single intent. Some will be researching destinations, others booking restaurants, following national teams, searching for local events, or planning journeys between host cities. Those moments create valuable signals around location, interests, behaviour, and purchase intent that advertisers increasingly want to reach through privacy-compliant audience offerings.

Let me be clear — it’s not just linear TV, CTV, and sporting publishers that stand to benefit. Local businesses and big brands alike that operate in the 16 host cities will benefit from the in-person crowds who won’t just be watching the matches in the stands but also traveling, planning, spending, and exploring the cities they are visiting. This rising tide will also lift publishers across all verticals including travel, food, culture, local news, entertainment, and lifestyle.

Can a Rising Tide Lift All CPMs?

The answer is no. Audience growth on its own doesn’t guarantee premium yield. The publishers that benefit most will be those that can package the signals they already have, including intent, location, interests, and behaviour, into privacy-compliant audience products that advertisers can confidently activate throughout (and beyond) the tournament.

The publishers that will command premium CPMs will be those who have first-party data strategies in place to give them the clearest picture of the right target audiences. First-party data may open the door, but sustained value depends on what publishers can do with it.

Publishers also need to protect the quality of the audience experience through frequency capping to avoid over-serving the same ad, ensuring retargeting reaches the right audience across channels, and measurement to connect campaigns to conversions. Without these, even the strongest first-party data strategy won’t convert into the premium CPMs publishers are after.

This is where having an effective identity layer comes into play. Identity infrastructure bridges publishers first-party data across properties and channels to create a more comprehensive understanding of their audience enabling accurate frequency capping, retargeting, and reliable measurement. This way, publishers can give advertisers the confidence to scale campaigns without sacrificing performance or accountability.

Privacy: The Part Publishers Can’t Ignore

The global scale of a tournament such as the World Cup also raises the stakes on privacy compliance and this is one area where being underprepared has real consequences. Publishers will be inundated with international visitors and viewers, and traffic coming from different markets that carry different privacy requirements.

Publishers need geo-targeted consent mechanisms and multi-jurisdictional compliance frameworks in place. To name a few, that means being CCPA/CPRA (California), PIPEDA (Canada), GDPR (EU), and LFPDPPP (Mexico) compliant.

And in 2026, blocking international audiences is not a strategy. It simply means losing a significant share of the audience and advertising budget at a pivotal moment.

And the Winner is….

Winning publishers won’t be the ones who react in the moment but the ones who prepared. They’ll be the ones that have invested in first-party data, identity infrastructure, and privacy compliance, and can package audiences in ways that help advertisers plan confidently. For those publishers, the World Cup represents an opportunity to demonstrate lasting value through addressable, measurable, privacy-compliant advertising.

Lisa Abousaleh - SVP, Partnerships @ ID5

About: Founded in 2017 by industry experts, ID5 is redefining identity for digital advertising, building solutions where privacy and addressability work in sync. Its Adaptive Identity technology learns and adjusts, ensuring seamless recognition across media properties, devices, and channels. This allows media owners to unlock sustainable revenue, enables advertisers to deliver measurable results, and helps platforms to maximise data and inventory value.

When it comes to audience measurement, Stephen Jones is as experienced as anyone in publishing. Previously the Head of Analytics at the Press Association, he became increasingly frustrated by the number of platforms he had to use to pull together a single view of content performance. His answer? He built his own.

I spoke to Stephen and Sophie Vokes-Dudgeon, Chief Content Officer at Hello! Magazine, about what happens when publishers can see what each story is worth across Apple News, MSN, NewsBreak, SmartNews and other channels. TL;DR: page-view growth of 33% upwards, with revenue growth to match.

Let’s jump in…

• AI Overviews Represent a Straight Loss of Audience

  Google insists that although AI Overviews reduce clicks, the clicks publishers lose are the ‘low quality’ ones. It’s simply not true. Research by Saharsh Agarwal (Indian School of Business) and Ananya Sen (Carnegie Mellon) also found a whopping 40% decrease in organic clicks when the summaries are shown. The publishers’ friend…

• ChatGPT Commands 92% of AI Referral Traffic

  Previsible’s latest AI traffic study, based on 6.7 million LLM sessions, finds that ChatGPT accounts for 92% of AI referral traffic. Monthly LLM sessions grew 9.9x between Nov 2024 and May 2026. BUT ChatGPT referrals fell by half in Nov 2025, from 448k to 213k, before recovering the following month due to a ‘model-related change’. A clear warning…#volatile #traffic

• Advertising Is Now a Product People Pay to Avoid

  Sir John Hegarty, one of the legends of British advertising, used Cannes to argue that the latest generation of marketers have no understanding of branding and are fixated on sales promotions. The result? People have stopped liking the work. Key quote: “I’ve never read a business book that says, to succeed, make a worse product.” The World Media Awards shortlist - just out - is an exemplary exception.

• Readers Use Le Monde Op-Ed to Push Back Against AI Sub-Editors

  In an extraordinary opinion piece, readers of ‘La Gazette des communes’ - a highly respected French B2B title - have used a full-page in France’s leading newsbrand to attack Infopro Digital’s plan to replace sub-editors with AI. Their argument? Human judgement is needed to check, contextualise, edit and maintain reader trust. Too right…

• Philly Inquirer Turns Cancellation Requests Into Renewals

  The Philadelphia Inquirer saw long-term retention exceed 75% by replacing generic special offers with a dedicated retention team consisting of human agents, phone and live chat. The publisher combined “deep listening” with specialised capability aimed at “delivering the best possible experience” for subscribers thinking of leaving. NB: One-size-fits-all programmes were dropped…

• Open-Source Tool PxPipe Cuts Claude Fable 5 Token Costs Up to 70%

  Big deal? Yes. For publishers developing AI tools, token optimisation is everything. In an AI group I belong to, one media exec ran an agent task overnight and ended up with a £2,500 bill. This workaround renders source code or text into PNG images, which are billed differently, so the total token usage falls significantly. P.S. Costs are only going much higher » https://isaiprofitable.com/

• What It Really Takes to Build a Membership Programme

  Around 48% of the events industry is either already operating or planning to launch a membership proposition within the next 12 months - yet many fail because publishers mistake an audience for a community. AMO’s Kari McMahon outlines exactly what it takes to create a membership community. Rule #1: Don’t use the community as an upsell machine…

• Europe’s AI Compensation Framework Starts To Take Shape

  Following the UK’s CMA pushing Google to let publishers opt out of AI Overviews without being punished in search rankings, Italy is using EU copyright rules to support collective negotiation over publisher compensation. If policymakers don’t set the terms, Silicon Valley will. Key quote: “Voluntary compliance remains the weakest link in the entire system.”

• WAN-IFRA Appoints Ezra Eeman To Lead AI In Media

  Known as one of the world’s leading voices on the use of AI in media, WAN-IFRA (World Association of News Publishers) has landed Ezra Eeman, who joins from Dutch public broadcaster NPO. He will lead WAN-IFRA’s AI strategy, as well as the development of new initiatives to help publishers accelerate AI adoption and transformation. A significant appointment…

• AI Tool: Honeylog

  Honeylog lets publishers see who is really consuming their content: human readers, search engines, AI crawlers, commercial bots, and scrapers. By analysing server logs, it shows how much machine traffic reaches their sites, which bots generate value, and which consume resources without giving anything back. Turns invisible technical data into strategic insights and AI negotiation leverage…

• Webinar: The AI-Era Monetization Blueprint for Publishers

  As AI systems increasingly rely on machine-readable content, publishers that can structure their content accordingly, and make their journalism easy to license, track and control will be better placed to benefit. Features media licensing luminary, Creative Licensing International’s Paul Gerbino, and others… Tues 14th July | 10am EDT | 3pm UK

• Event: Data Science Day 2026

  WAN-IFRA’s annual gathering for senior data scientists, analysts and CDOs in news media. Seven publisher case studies, two expert workshops, and speakers from News UK, The Times, Schibsted, Axel Springer and others. Early registrants get complimentary access to selected Digital Media Europe sessions the next day. 21 October | The Royal Institution, London

In partnership with Bridged, WNIP has created Media Genie - a smarter way to explore 17 years of publishing insight. Ask a question about the media business and get a direct answer grounded in WNIP’s archive. 👇

How Hello! Turned an Industry-Wide Google Traffic Drop Into an Off-Platform Audience Success

With Google referrals falling across the publishing industry, Hello! built a cross-platform data strategy designed to grow off-platform audience without handing editorial control to any single channel.

Hello! Magazine has been a fixture of British media since 1988, when it brought the celebrity journalism of its Spanish sister title, ¡Hola!, to UK newsstands. Nearly four decades later, the brand’s challenge is certainly now less about recognition and more about distribution, with readers encountering the brand across numerous different platforms.

Like many publishers, Hello! built a significant share of its digital audience through Google referrals. As search behaviour has evolved and AI-generated answers and algorithm changes have reduced referral traffic, particularly over the past year, the underlying strategic problem has been how to measure the performance of all its various channels and allocate resources accordingly.

Rather than pivot from one platform dependency to another, Hello!’s response has been to bring all its platform data into one daily view, so editors can see what works across Apple News, MSN, NewsBreak, SmartNews, and others, without letting any of these platforms dictate editorial commissioning.

Whilst this has been a difficult balance to achieve, the results over six months have been concrete: page view growth of between 33 and 102 percent across aggregator channels, depending on the platform, with revenue growth to match.

The risk of off-platform growth

The obvious response to falling Google referrals is to find new sources of external traffic. But publishers risk replicating the same structural problem: building audience on ground they do not control, and making commissioning decisions shaped by incentives that belong to someone else.

Sophie Vokes-Dudgeon, Chief Content Officer at Hello!, is clear about the lessons she has already learned. The question her team now asks is not what is driving traffic but whether a story makes sense for the brand.

“Once bitten, twice shy. Before, we’d ask ‘what’s driving traffic?’ Now the question is always ‘does this make sense for the brand?’ first.” — Sophie Vokes-Dudgeon, Chief Content Officer, Hello! Magazine

Strategically this is important because off-platform growth is only commercially useful if it serves the publisher’s own audience relationship. Hello!’s VIP membership programme also depends on readers who have chosen a direct relationship with the brand. Aggregator platforms are therefore now being looked at as routes into this relationship and not as a replacement for it.

The data challenge underpinning the strategy

The key problem Hello! encountered was obtaining a single bird’s eye overview of its off-platform distribution, and discovering what was actually happening across multiple platforms.

This is far harder than it sounds because although each platform produces analytics, the data sits in separate systems, updated at different intervals, and in different formats. In short, any meaningful analysis required days of manual work consolidating information that was not designed to sit together.

“When you’re writing for website traffic, you’re optimising against one metric. Suddenly you’re looking at page views across half a dozen platforms, each behaving differently from week to week.” — Sophie Vokes-Dudgeon

Hello! used Maro, a content analytics platform built by journalist and former Press Association analytics head Stephen Jones, to pull performance data from across its distribution footprint into a single daily view.

The system uses a traffic light scoring model, ranking every story as a top performer, mid-table, or content that is working nowhere, across each measured channel simultaneously.

Jones built Maro to address a problem he had encountered directly at PA Media, where large volumes of data from multiple sources did not translate into clearer editorial decision-making.

The gap was not in the quantity of analytics available but in whether editors could use them quickly enough to act on them. “Most of the analytics platforms out there are designed for an age where everything’s on your website,” he told me. “Nowadays, for publishers, that’s not the case.”

What cross-platform views reveal

The first data point a single unified view unearthed for Hello! was that a small number of stories were underperforming across every measured platform simultaneously. This had been cloaked when data lived in separate systems, but by identifying and reducing low-return stories, the team immediately redirected its commissioning effort.

The other significant finding was that Hello!’s content did not behave uniformly across channels. Royal coverage would perform strongly on one channel, while celebrity and lifestyle features, by contrast, delivered stronger returns on another.

Another learning was around tactics to ensure best results - differences in headline formats or publication times to optimise for best performance on each channel. All of these learnings led to growth, and would have been missed if only analysing their on-site numbers.

“We needed that data presented clearly enough that we could see, by writer and by platform, what was actually working.” — Sophie Vokes-Dudgeon

Six months in, top-performing content is up 12 percent and bottom-performing content is down 11 percent - as measured by Maro’s traffic-light system. Editorial and audience teams are now working from the same daily numbers, creating a shared sense of mission across a large and multi-functional editorial team.

“We’ve got more levers to pull now, which makes the whole approach feel a lot safer than relying on any single channel ever did.” — Sophie Vokes-Dudgeon

Bottom Line

Hello!’s experience shows that platform analytics alone no longer give editorial teams enough information to judge story value, because the same content can perform very differently across Apple News, MSN, NewsBreak, SmartNews and other channels.

The Google dependency problem is not solved by finding new platforms, it is solved by knowing what your content is worth across all of them and commissioning from that position.

Hat tip: Monojoy (Oddly Obvious), Jim Bilton, Stephen Jones, Sophie Vokes-Dudgeon, Lorenzo Diaco, Charlotte Panther, Dean Roper, Giselle Ho, Carvoeiro PT, Fantic Caballero 500.

Like many publishers, Hello! built a significant share of its digital audience through Google referrals. As search behaviour has evolved and AI-generated answers and algorithm changes have reduced referral traffic, particularly over the past year, the underlying strategic problem has been how to measure the performance of all its various channels and allocate resources accordingly.

Rather than pivot from one platform dependency to another, Hello!’s response has been to bring all its platform data into one daily view, so editors can see what works across Apple News, MSN, NewsBreak, SmartNews, and others, without letting any of these platforms dictate editorial commissioning.

Whilst this has been a difficult balance to achieve, the results over six months have been concrete: page view growth of between 33 and 102 percent across aggregator channels, depending on the platform, with revenue growth to match.

The risk of off-platform growth

The obvious response to falling Google referrals is to find new sources of external traffic. But publishers risk replicating the same structural problem: building audience on ground they do not control, and making commissioning decisions shaped by incentives that belong to someone else.

Sophie Vokes-Dudgeon, Chief Content Officer at Hello!, is clear about the lessons she has already learned. The question her team now asks is not what is driving traffic but whether a story makes sense for the brand.

“Once bitten, twice shy. Before, we’d ask ‘what’s driving traffic?’ Now the question is always ‘does this make sense for the brand?’ first.” — Sophie Vokes-Dudgeon, Chief Content Officer, Hello! Magazine

Strategically this is important because off-platform growth is only commercially useful if it serves the publisher’s own audience relationship. Hello!’s VIP membership programme also depends on readers who have chosen a direct relationship with the brand. Aggregator platforms are therefore now being looked at as routes into this relationship and not as a replacement for it.

The data challenge underpinning the strategy

The key problem Hello! encountered was obtaining a single bird’s eye overview of its off-platform distribution, and discovering what was actually happening across multiple platforms.

This is far harder than it sounds because although each platform produces analytics, the data sits in separate systems, updated at different intervals, and in different formats. In short, any meaningful analysis required days of manual work consolidating information that was not designed to sit together.

“When you’re writing for website traffic, you’re optimising against one metric. Suddenly you’re looking at page views across half a dozen platforms, each behaving differently from week to week.” — Sophie Vokes-Dudgeon

Hello! used Maro, a content analytics platform built by journalist and former Press Association analytics head Stephen Jones, to pull performance data from across its distribution footprint into a single daily view.

The system uses a traffic light scoring model, ranking every story as a top performer, mid-table, or content that is working nowhere, across each measured channel simultaneously.

Jones built Maro to address a problem he had encountered directly at PA Media, where large volumes of data from multiple sources did not translate into clearer editorial decision-making.

The gap was not in the quantity of analytics available but in whether editors could use them quickly enough to act on them. “Most of the analytics platforms out there are designed for an age where everything’s on your website,” he told me. “Nowadays, for publishers, that’s not the case.”

What cross-platform views reveal

The first data point a single unified view unearthed for Hello! was that a small number of stories were underperforming across every measured platform simultaneously. This had been cloaked when data lived in separate systems, but by identifying and reducing low-return stories, the team immediately redirected its commissioning effort.

The other significant finding was that Hello!’s content did not behave uniformly across channels. Royal coverage would perform strongly on one channel, while celebrity and lifestyle features, by contrast, delivered stronger returns on another.

Another learning was around tactics to ensure best results - differences in headline formats or publication times to optimise for best performance on each channel. All of these learnings led to growth, and would have been missed if only analysing their on-site numbers.

“We needed that data presented clearly enough that we could see, by writer and by platform, what was actually working.” — Sophie Vokes-Dudgeon

Six months in, top-performing content is up 12 percent and bottom-performing content is down 11 percent - as measured by Maro’s traffic-light system. Editorial and audience teams are now working from the same daily numbers, creating a shared sense of mission across a large and multi-functional editorial team.

“We’ve got more levers to pull now, which makes the whole approach feel a lot safer than relying on any single channel ever did.” — Sophie Vokes-Dudgeon

Bottom Line

Hello!’s experience shows that platform analytics alone no longer give editorial teams enough information to judge story value, because the same content can perform very differently across Apple News, MSN, NewsBreak, SmartNews and other channels.

The Google dependency problem is not solved by finding new platforms, it is solved by knowing what your content is worth across all of them and commissioning from that position.