One of Wessenden’s surveys in the summer of 2025 took a detailed look at the whole issue of business confidence. We asked the question, ‘How much confidence do you have in the financial future of your own operation over the coming year?’, using a 1 to 10 score. This was the result….
The average score across all respondents was a solid 7.4 out of 10. Yet this ranged from 1 all the way through to 10 and varied markedly:
- By sector: The strongest score was in B2B (7.9) and the weakest in News (6.2) with Consumer in between. This all reflects the state and relative buoyancy of each area of publishing.
- By age of respondent: Predictably, scores decayed with age from 9.0 in under 34s to 6.9 in over 65s. Yet there was an unexpectedly big dip in the 45-54s. Is this age group finding the current disruption and the responsibility to do something about it, more overwhelming than other cohorts?
We then moved on to ask how their current level of confidence compared to a year ago.
The net score of +20 (39% stronger minus 19% weaker = +20) is a good, solid performance given the tough trading conditions. Yet this 2025 figure is weaker than 2024’s +26 and 2023’s +27. It all shows that the environment has become progressively more challenging.
All the signs are that 2026’s figures will have dropped again, as the challenges and frustrations of the whole area of automation and AI grow.
The reasons why
They are usually very specific to their own company and include such factors as the quality of senior management (who often think that they are doing better than the foot soldiers do!), the nature of the ownership structure (a family firm is driven in a very different way to a publicly quoted or PE-funded operation) and really practical issues, such as to where they are geographically (size and quality of the available staff pool). On the positive side are those who are getting their act together: that usually means making progress on the two vulnerable areas of publishing: tech and affordable people with the right skills.
Where they are on the journey
With so many things on everyone’s to-do list, prioritising and sequencing have become critically important. mediafutures participants were asked whether they had a “clear and detailed action plan in place for the immediate future?” The majority (67%) are well into some kind of structured programme. Yet these are split between…
- Those who have communicated the plan through the organisation and have obtained company-wide buy-in (43%) and…
- Those who still need to sell the plan internally (24%).
By contrast, there is a significant 33% who look vulnerable, as they are still at various stages of “getting their act together”.
Another factor that runs through the whole survey is the different challenge faced by transforming legacy companies as opposed to greenfield start-ups. Start-ups lack established brands and content inventory, corporate knowledge and experience, and do not always have the profit-focus that is usually baked into legacy operations. Yet, they come with little “corporate baggage” and with a can-do and fast-implementation mindset. Nevertheless, the thought-processes and disciplines are identical across all companies when it comes to prioritisation.
What’s in store for 2026? Here are a few snippets from recent interviews:
- Prioritisation: “2026 has begun much as 2025 ended. We still have the same list of things to do, but we are now much clearer that we can’t do it all and must prioritise much more ruthlessly.”
- More flexibility & agility: “I suspect that our to-do list will be very similar in principle to most other companies: the need to diversify, to increase productivity using AI tools, to get closer to our communities, to leverage more value from our content, etc. Yet, we have different priorities, brand by brand. We also have assets – and gaps! – in terms of where we are as a company: what we know we are good and bad at.”
- More speed: “We talk about being an ‘experimental’ company, but we are still too slow and consensual. Our matrix of cross-departmental project groups is too cumbersome. And our sharing of the learnings is just not fast enough.”
- Pausing to take breath: “We need to speed up, but we also need to pause: to celebrate success and to make a proper assessment of what we have really learnt from our activities.”
- Investing in people: “First, we simply need more people to do everything we want to do with the right quality. ‘Good enough’ is not good enough! Second, we need new skills quickly. Upskilling existing staff is the fair and decent thing to do, but can take a long time. Bringing in new people is faster, as is buying in temporary or sub-contracted staff.”
- New metrics. In the ongoing structural shift from volume to value, new, industry-wide metrics are needed that measure attention, engagement, dwell time and meaningful interaction.
There is much more in addition to this. The issues include smarter pricing strategies, joined-up tech stacks, finding the right skills, premium print activity, better management of the content distribution pipelines, more proactive data management, monetising video, etc. Yet the really big issue for 2026 is D2C: getting closer to our readers and end-users and “owning” them before somebody else does.
So, with all these things swirling round, it is no wonder that resilience and self-belief matter. Yet these need to be grounded in clear-sighted self-knowledge. Confidence can easily flip into arrogance. Activity can morph into empty PR and spin. And the key tools to enable growth remain the same: people and tech.
mediafutures is an ongoing benchmarking survey of the industry, undertaken by Wessenden Marketing. mediafuturesPULSE is a more regular tracking survey of key industry performance metrics. mediashapers identifies the most influential leaders, companies and brands in the media business each year.
This article was first published in InPublishing magazine. If you would like to be added to the free mailing list to receive the magazine, please register here.
