Digital Publishing Outlook and Priorities 2025: Turning Readership into Revenue

This year, as publishers become savvier as to what AI can and can’t do, we’re seeing softening attitudes towards the technology spanning both its risks and its opportunities, perhaps showing the peak of the hype cycle has been crested. Unfortunately, we may also have passed the peak of the industry’s commitment to corporate responsibility. More on that, and much more, below.

Readership growth forms the backbone of revenue strategy

Publishers are nothing without their audience, and this year’s survey shows they are keenly aware of this fact: ‘growing our readership’ took the top spot in organisational priorities, with 85% of respondents agreeing or strongly agreeing on its importance.

At a time of infinite distractions and overwhelming user choice, it’s appropriate to get back to basics on publishing fundamentals. After all, whether a publisher is prioritising subscriptions or advertising — or a combination of both — readers are the wellspring from which all revenues flow.

Which leads us neatly to the next two priorities on the podium: ‘developing new revenue streams through product innovation’ and ‘increasing advertising revenues’, which scored 80% and 79% in combined agree and strongly agree responses. Product innovation encompasses everything from client-facing campaign planning tools and audience research platforms to audience-facing media experiences and site features, giving in-house developers and solutions providers a broad remit for driving revenues.

Speaking of solutions providers, they were also polled on the organisational priorities of their clients and returned the same top three; though product innovation, naturally, took first place. Priorities were also mirrored between B2C and B2B publishers.

Looking at which priorities have fallen down the list is equal parts encouraging and discouraging. Data privacy and compliance and recruiting and retaining talent both fell sharply, though these are signs of success. At this point, most publishers will have their data ducks in a row and will thus have less work to do in this area, and the talent shortfall has decreased this year, reducing pressure on recruitment. Less positive is the precipitous decline in publishers prioritising a diverse and inclusive workforce, which we will explore in more detail below.

With readership and revenues clearly top of mind, let’s look at how publishers are planning to achieve growth in these areas.

Just over half (52%) of publishers are focusing on increasing their content output, while two-fifths are planning to change the type of content they produce to attract greater audience numbers, both sensible approaches to boosting readership. More readers mean more potential subscribers, and around a third (34%) of publishers are planning to introduce a subscription to boost revenues, while a similar proportion (32%) are exploring ‘freemium’ models (limited free content leading to a paywall).

Consistent with what we’ve reported in the Digital Publishing Revenue Index — where subscriptions have returned consistent, albeit slowing, growth and now almost go toe-to-toe with advertising revenues — half of respondents believe subscriptions have the most growth potential over the next three years. This was the most common answer ahead of branded content and first-party data sales, which were both selected by 45% of publishers.

Switching to advertising, two-thirds of respondents agree or strongly agree that they are exploring ways to increase revenue from advertisers, such as through providing detailed reader insights, making it the most popular choice for growth strategy this year. However, publishers are less bullish on advertising’s returns in the long term, with just 31% selecting it as the revenue stream with the highest three-year growth potential.

This does, however, depend on where the advertising is coming from. Today, according to our respondents, 72% of advertising is secured through direct deals, 2% through private marketplaces, and 26% through open marketplaces. When asked to look ahead three years, the shares shift to 69% direct deals, 26% private marketplaces, and just 9% from open marketplaces.

Optimistic, perhaps, but given the ongoing frustrations around the ‘murky middle’ of programmatic pipelines, it’s no wonder publishers foresee a future where they have pulled away from open markets in favour of supply chains where they are offered more transparency and control.

Data priorities undented by cookie deprecation U-turn

With first-party data sales taking joint-second place in predicted future revenue growth, let’s drill deeper into publisher data strategies.

As expected from the above statistic, first-party data — such as data collected from users with their consent, website and app usage data, or contextual data — scored a strong 4.2 out of 5 when publishers were asked how strong a focus it has in their commercial strategy development. Given that you’d be hard pressed to find a publisher that doesn’t describe themselves as ‘data-driven’ these days, this comes as no surprise.

For publishers that are already squeezing all the juice they can from their first-party data, there is an opportunity to supplement their data strategy with zero-party data. This is data that is given willingly by the user through the likes of polls and surveys and is ideal for collecting qualitative and attitudinal data on audiences, perhaps in collaboration with commercial partners that want to conduct research.

Though a valuable source of insights, zero-party data scored just 2.8 out of 5 in the same question, indicating that there is ample growth ready to be realised on this front.

Moving on to identifiers, there was a fear that Google’s bombshell announcement that it would not, in fact, deprecate third-party cookies would hinder efforts to establish a replacement ID infrastructure. Our survey shows that — on the publisher side, at least — this has not occurred.

Publishers were asked to rate whether they agreed or disagreed with various descriptions of their identity strategy following Google’s decision. The strongest response by some margin was 54% strongly disagreeing with ‘we had begun to trial new identity solutions but now plan to return to using cookies’.

“It’s encouraging to see publishers taking proactive steps toward the future of online identity to preserve independent, quality journalism,” says Theo Luke, senior director inventory development at The Trade Desk — which sponsored the survey. “Digital outlets are continuing to explore new identity solutions, which is a critical move in ensuring that ad revenue continues to support premium content. Publishers are paving the way for a more transparent advertising ecosystem by adopting alternative identity solutions and leveraging first-party data tools, aligning with what brands today are seeking. This shift will drive the traffic and revenue that news organisations desperately need to keep delivering the relevant, high-quality journalism that audiences rely on.”

While it’s reassuring that publishers are not taking two steps back on their evolution away from an increasingly obsolete technology, the survey reveals that a degree of confusion and uncertainty does still remain in the ID space. For all other described approaches, from implementing or trialling new ID solutions to using a mix of cookies and alternative IDs, the most common response was a ‘3: neither agree nor disagree’. Publishers are adamant they are not regressing, but the path to progress is less certain.

ESG commitments crack under commercial pressure

As custodians of the information ecosystem, it’s important for publishers to consider the full impact of their businesses on the wider world as well as how ethically they conduct themselves, typically benchmarked against a set of standards known as Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG).

Unfortunately, it’s when tracking ESG priorities that we see the most significant shifts in responses this year, and all for the worse. Participants were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the following statements, where the percentages listed represent the combined figures for agree and strongly agree:

• It’s important to our employees to work for an organisation that is focused on ESG goals’: 70% in 2024, 51% in 2025
• Investors expect our business to develop and implement a policy to meet ESG goals’: 51% in 2024, 44% in 2025
• Our business places a strong importance on ESG strategies: it’s central to our values’: 62% in 2024, 44% in 2025
• Advertisers and agencies expect our business to develop and implement a policy to meet ESG goals’: 58% in 2024, 39% in 2025

A similar pattern emerges when asking publishers about the specific ESG actions they are taking, with only social and community causes resisting the downwards trend:

• We have a clear strategy for supporting particular social or community causes’: 58% in 2024, 60% in 2025
• We are focused on reducing the carbon footprint of our organisation as a whole’: 67% in 2024, 53% in 2025
• We have a clear strategy to create a more diverse and inclusive workforce’: 66% in 2024, 53% in 2025
• We are focused on reducing the carbon footprint of our websites’: 67% in 2024, 45% in 2025

So why, after years of progress, has there been such a dramatic backslide on ESG priorities? A new question introduced this year may hold the answers. When asked whether they agree that ESG goals have had to be de-prioritised due to wider commercial challenges, around a quarter (26%) of participants agreed. Apply this number to the rest of the questions, and it’s easy to see where the reduction has come from.

While we cannot ignore the many publishers who have held firm on their ESG goals, if ethics are abandoned the moment there is friction, then those ethics were never particularly strong to begin with. A quarter of publishers are proving an often-whispered suspicion to be accurate, that many ESG initiatives are mere performances that are abandoned once profits are on the line.

Publishers’ attitudes towards AI soften slightly

Last year was the first time we surveyed publishers on their attitudes towards AI, which makes this year our first opportunity to make a comparison. Much like IDs, this is an area of tremendous uncertainty, though one where we do now have some sense of the direction of travel.

In 2024, respondents ranked the impact of AI on their operations and processes as 5.5 on a scale, where 0 represented the extreme negative and 10 the extreme positive. Solutions providers were slightly more optimistic, giving AI’s impact a score of 6, but both groups stuck to neutral territory.

After a year where neither the worst nor the best-case scenarios of AI’s proliferation played out, we see a gradual shift towards the positive end of the scale, with publishers scoring AI’s impact as 6.5, while solutions providers also moved a point upwards to 7.

In a new question introduced this year to home in on the impact of generative AI and generative search on business models and profitability, publishers and solutions providers were both more apprehensive and more aligned, scoring 6 and 6.1 respectively.

We also asked publishers what steps they are taking to adapt or prepare for the growth of generative AI. Top of the list, and with almost no movement, was exploring how to use generative AI to deliver efficiencies, which was selected by 76% of respondents in 2024 and 77% in 2025.

Next was the exploration of generative AI by the product team, which fell from 70% to 63%, and then editorial training and policy development, which fell from 55% to 47%; though this is likely because once such training and policies have been developed, they no longer require further work.

There was a slight increase in publishers’ legal teams pursuing IP protection from LLM training data, from 39% in 2024 to 42% in 2025, while there was a decrease in audience developments teams exploring generative AI for off-platform content promotion, from 40% to 34%.

At the bottom of the list, though representing the largest change in the data, was publishers who had an editorial policy to prohibit the use of generative AI. In 2024, over a quarter (26%) of publishers reported such a policy, falling to just over a tenth (11%) today, signalling growing acceptance of the technology’s utility. AI is a bit less scary today than it was a year ago, but also a bit less exciting.

This year’s survey shows publishers haven’t been rattled by the immense challenges of monetising online content in today’s big tech-dominated media ecosystem. Their priorities and strategies demonstrate a sober, tried-and-tested approach to growth, sensibly supplemented by emerging AI technology. But back to basics need not mean regression, which is what we’re seeing in the significant walk back on corporate responsibility. I urge publishers to remember that good business means doing good as well.