Ozone shareholders announce significant investment

Ozone – the UK’s digital advertising platform built for brands, by publishers – saw advertising revenue increase by 61% in 2022, outpacing the 7.4% AA WARC forecast for online display advertising by more than eight-fold.

On the advertising side of Ozone’s business, brand count increased by 48% year on year, with retained brands spending 103% more on average, per campaign, says the company. The introduction of new display and video formats – such as Ozone Stories and Premium Only Video pre-roll – has helped Ozone further diversify trading partnerships across network agency groups and independents alike.

Strong growth was also seen on the publisher side with the likes of BuzzFeed UK, HuffPost UK, Mumsnet, Autovia and Asian Media Group joining the UK alliance, and numerous technology partnerships signed with publishers across the world. The company also launched Ozone’s Biddable Management Service to help small and medium sized publishers, or UK arms of international publishers, increase their total programmatic revenues.

In the past year Ozone has won many industry accolades including Media Week’s Sales Team of the Year and Media Brand of the Year, The Media Leader’s Technology Company of the Year, The Marketing Society’s Best Scale-Up Business and Digiday’s Best Publisher Platform.

This past year of business performance has now been underpinned by additional investment from Ozone’s existing shareholders, enabling the business to fast track development of its product and service offering for advertisers and tools and analytics for publishers.

Commenting on the new investment, Martin Harriman, Ozone’s chair said, “Following an impressive twelve months, our shareholders have invested further in Ozone to accelerate the profitable growth plans of the business. Not yet five years old, the new investment reinforces the board’s view of Ozone’s critical role in creating a sustainable future for journalism and editorial content, as well as the digital advertising ecosystem at large.”

Damon Reeve, CEO, Ozone, said, “We’re delighted to have started 2023 with an even deeper commitment from our founding publishers. The investment enables us to build on the exceptional performance we’ve seen in the past 12 months, and focus on delivering better service, products and tools to our advertiser and publisher partners.”