Journalism is expensive to produce, yet much of the value it creates is easy to take for granted. News competes for attention with social posts, influencers and an expanding supply of free information, even as publishers invest in the reporters, editors, expertise and verification required to produce credible original work. That means that news organizations need to consistently make an effective case for why professional journalism is worth paying for, investing in and supporting.
A new UNESCO report, The Value of Journalism: Global evidence on why media matters to economics, national security and crises, gives publishers more evidence to make that case. The report brings together research that puts numbers against benefits that rarely appear in conventional media metrics. It links independent journalism to economic growth, government savings, disaster aid and other measurable outcomes. For publishers, the findings provide useful proof points for conversations with audiences, business leaders, commercial partners and policymakers about what journalism contributes—and what is at stake when the resources supporting it disappear. UNESCO’s research provides valuable evidence at a time when the economics supporting original reporting are under strain.
Journalism supports economic growth and government accountability
One of the report’s most significant findings concerns the relationship between journalism and economic performance. Research covering 97 countries found that declines in press freedom are associated with a 1% to 2% reduction in real GDP growth. According to UNESCO, the effects can persist for years.
Access to reliable information helps businesses and individuals make informed decisions. Journalism can also expose corruption and identify waste, producing benefits for governments and taxpayers.
UNESCO cites research finding that every $1 invested in journalism can generate more than $100 in public savings through reclaimed funds, improved services and reductions in corruption. Other research points to the same disconnect between the value journalism creates and the revenue news organizations can capture. A 2025 study of nearly 5,000 people in the U.S., U.K. and Norway found that investigative journalism functions as a public good that markets are prone to under-provide. While those returns don’t appear on a publisher’s balance sheet, they provide concrete evidence of the economic contribution made by organizations that invest in original reporting.
This evidence can be particularly useful in conversations about the conditions necessary to support a healthy news ecosystem. Publishers routinely quantify audience reach and commercial performance. Adding measures of economic impact can help demonstrate the returns journalism generates for institutions and communities that benefit from the work without directly funding it.
The research also offers news organizations an opportunity to consider how they document impact. Some publishers already track policy changes, money recovered for communities, investigations prompted by their reporting and other outcomes. More consistent measurement can give media organizations additional evidence to use with audiences, policymakers, funders and business partners.
News coverage can influence where resources flow
The impact of journalism becomes especially tangible during disasters and humanitarian emergencies. One study highlighted by UNESCO examined 2,337 natural disasters in developing countries and their coverage in U.S. media. It found that each additional New York Times story about a disaster was associated with approximately $500,000 in additional U.S. disaster aid.
The finding demonstrates the importance of visibility as well as reporting. News coverage can put an event in front of people and institutions with the ability to respond, influencing where attention and resources are directed.
That has added significance as the pathways through which audiences discover journalism continue to change. Search and social platforms have long played a role in determining which reporting reaches audiences. AI-generated answers and summaries are now becoming another layer between publishers and information consumers. For news organizations, reach and discovery affect audience development and revenue. The UNESCO research shows that the ability of credible information to travel can have consequences well beyond those business metrics.
UNESCO also examines journalism’s role in countering misinformation and supporting security. The report cites estimates that put the global economic cost of disinformation at $355 billion to $516 billion annually. Research across 152 countries finds that greater access to free media is associated with fewer human rights abuses and lower risks of conflict and repression.
These findings give publishers additional evidence for discussions about the importance of trusted information environments. They also help put a value on investments in reporting, verification and editorial standards that can be difficult to capture through conventional measures of media performance.
Giving publishers more ways to demonstrate value
The report arrives as many news organizations are looking for sustainable ways to support original journalism. Changes in search and social referral traffic are disrupting established audience models, while AI companies are creating products that derive value from professionally produced information. At the same time, publishers are exploring subscriptions, licensing and other revenue streams to support continued investment in content.
UNESCO’s research provides another tool for making that case. Publishers can use evidence of economic and societal impact alongside audience and revenue data to demonstrate what professional journalism contributes and what can be lost when investment declines.
There is also an opportunity for publishers to become more systematic about collecting their own evidence. Tracking the outcomes of reporting, incorporating impact into case studies and communicating those results to audiences and partners can make journalism’s contribution more visible. Such measures can support corporate positioning, policy discussions, consumer marketing and, where appropriate, licensing negotiations.
Media companies will continue to rely on revenue, audience and engagement metrics to make investment decisions. UNESCO’s findings expand the evidence available to them. For publishers seeking support for the costly work of original reporting, a stronger accounting of journalism’s economic and societal returns can help make its value clear to the people and institutions whose decisions will help determine its future.
Publishers collect large amounts of valuable audience data and audience platforms have long helped publishers turn those signals into action. Lately, there’s a lot of talk about how AI can enhance these capabilities, but AI isn’t just changing what these platforms can do.
There’s a question moving through audience and product meetings right now, usually raised by someone sharp who just watched a developer ship in an afternoon what used to take a quarter: with AI tools this good, couldn’t we just build our own audience platform?
It’s a fair question, and it deserves a real answer rather than a defensive one. What follows is a way to work it out honestly: which layers of an audience stack AI genuinely compresses, which it does not, and five questions that move the decision off a software comparison and onto the operating reality where it lives. By the end you will know whether your organization is one of the few that should build — or one of the many that would ultimately regret it.
What genuinely changed
Give AI its due first, because pretending it changes nothing would be inaccurate. AI has meaningfully compressed the cost of real work: moving data between systems, standing up a schema, building a query interface, generating a reporting screen. A small team with the right tools can now do those things faster than most people expected a year ago.
Here’s the catch. AI makes it much easier to build what an audience platform does. It doesn’t necessarily make it easier to operate everything that makes those capabilities work reliably. That asymmetry is central to the decision to build or buy.
The comparison that breaks the math
The case for building your own often starts with an obvious savings: eliminate the vendor fee. But that cost doesn’t simply disappear. It shifts to the people required to build and maintain the system, manage every integration, and keep pace as your needs and the technology change.
And the thing you’d be building isn’t one product. When people picture “our own version,” they usually picture the one screen they live in: a query builder, a report, an email send. Underneath sits identity resolution across email, web, print, events, and forms; sending infrastructure with its own IP and domain reputation; journey orchestration; billing and payments; print fulfillment; consent and preference management; audit-grade reporting; a dozen live integrations; and the data hygiene that keeps all of it honest. That’s roughly 15 distinct systems, several highly regulated and at least one involving physical mail. And integrating them isn’t a one-time job. Each connection has to keep working as systems, requirements and regulations change. AI can make the code faster to write; it doesn’t eliminate the work of keeping everything connected.
Which points at the more useful question. The bottleneck in audience work was never really the software. According to Omeda’s State of Audience in Media 2026, only 9% of publishers use audience data extremely effectively to inform action. That gap isn’t a missing query tool. It’s everything around the tool — the accumulated data, the operational discipline, the trust that a number is right.
Five things you still own if you build your own
If you’re weighing a build seriously, stress-test these, because they don’t get shorter no matter how good the code generation gets.
Accumulated data. Behavioral history, engagement recency, consent, and deliverability reputation are the output of years of observation. You can migrate a database; you can’t migrate a decade of behavior nobody was recording.
Sender reputation. IP and domain reputation is earned through sending history at the mailbox providers. A brand-new domain starts at zero no matter how elegant the tooling around it gets.
Certification. BPA and AAM don’t certify a codebase. They certify process, controls, and auditable records. A publisher whose audit depends on a homegrown system has put its rate card at risk.
Regulated operations. Payment processing under PCI, privacy obligations under a growing patchwork of state laws, and physical fulfillment all carry weight that has nothing to do with how good the software is.
The integration surface. Every connected system is a standing maintenance obligation. AI can write the integration; it doesn’t take the call when a vendor changes its API at 2 a.m.
Publishers have made this call before
This decision comes around every decade, and the industry tends to land in the same place. Publishers left their own data centers for the cloud. They run an ad server they didn’t build. They process payments through a provider rather than carrying PCI themselves. Anyone who built a homegrown CMS in 2005 remembers how that aged. The logic each time: capital-intensive, compliance-heavy infrastructure only earns out at a scale a single publisher can’t reach alone, so it makes more sense to rent the plumbing and spend scarce engineering on what actually differentiates the business.
Some organizations should build
A few genuinely should build. The profile fits a dedicated platform-engineering organization, an existing product-management function, in-house privacy counsel, security and compliance staff, and the willingness to fund all of it for 10 years, not 10 months. If that’s you, build with confidence.
The profile that will regret it looks different: a lean team already behind on the site and the paywall, no product manager to spare, privacy handled by whoever has time. The build will consume the people you needed for the work that grows revenue.
Five questions to ask before you build
Who is on call at 6 a.m. when the morning send fails, and how fast can they fix it?
Who owns privacy governance for this — by name?
What happens when the person who built it leaves?
How many engineers are on your site, paywall, and integrations today — and is that enough?
When the next state privacy law passes, who reads it and who implements it?
If those answers come easily, you may be in the group that should build. If they make you wince, you’ve found the real cost and it’s one that never reaches the spreadsheet.
The point isn’t “don’t build”
This isn’t an effort to convince you not to build. For some companies, it will be the right choice. The point is to compare the right things. The AI era has genuinely changed what a small team can create. It hasn’t changed what it takes to run an audience platform your revenue, your auditors, and your advertisers can depend on. Those are two different questions and confusing them is the expensive mistake.
Media success used to be all about traffic, unique users and clicks. Now the focus for any sustainable business must be on relationships, loyalty and habit. These new targets require new metrics. Reach is still important, and everyone still needs an audience, but that audience must be built and measured differently.
As the Senior Manager for Editorial Insights & Development at Axel Springer Germany, Janis Kitzhofer and his team have established a data-driven newsroom at BILD and WELT. But their focus has changed in the past year.
“I’ve been at Axel Springer five years now, and I think from the very first week I was saying page views were not the best metric to guide editorial decisions, or at least shouldn’t be the only one, partly because they are so easy to manipulate,” Kitzhofer explains. “Page views is so established here because it has an immediate advertisement revenue impact and easily translates into money. Something like a relationship or a return visit is much harder to put a dollar sign behind.”
Kitzhofer says that, although reach is still relevant, it is now vital to look beyond it. “We need to build relationships and then metrics like direct visits become more important,” he says, explaining that trust is now a huge focus. How you measure that trust, however, is not easy and Kitzhofer is currently building a pyramid-style framework on how best to do so. It has different layers covering original journalism, engagement (including scroll depth, video playback rates and expected reading time) and relationships and commitment (including frequency and retention).
Many newsrooms have created their own metrics to try to measure the less tangible, but now extremely important, attributes such as trust and loyalty, not to mention lifetime value (LTV). LTV, the total value generated for a publisher over the entire time a reader has a relationship with the brand, changes how success is measured. It means that instead of rewarding content that produces a one-off spike in traffic, the emphasis is on whatever creates lasting relationships.
Because of this focus on value over volume, subscriber behavior has become much more important. The Wall Street Journal has adopted contextual metrics that assess content in relation to its aim, scoring every article against subscriber interest, subscriber engagement, purposeful reach (did it attract valuable new audiences from high-converting channels?) and conversion.
Meanwhile the Times of London has made daily habit its “north star” while its in-house analytics tool, TED (Times Editorial Dashboard), is designed to rank stories by subscriber engaged minutes. Engaged readers are less likely to cancel, so anything which strengthens that engagement has become increasingly significant.
Connecting newsroom metrics to business goals
“The most important thing for me in terms of metrics is that they must have a strong link to business goals and the commercial operation,” says Sofia Delgado, audience development advisor and former director of audience at Metro. Delgado argues that publishers got used to chasing volume because it was easy to monetise, but says that approach no longer works. Instead, editorial, commercial and subscription teams should work towards shared goals rather than operate in separate silos.
At Metro, Delgado’s team introduced a “golden metric” combining volume, dwell time and engagement such as polls and comments.
“I’m a fan of compound metrics if the business has done their homework to make sure that it’s the right one for them,” she says. “They’re also good because once you lift the lid on metrics, there are so many, and for a newsroom to be paying attention to all of them while there’s also so much noise around, is just not efficient. If you can have one that does most of the job, that’s good.”
Kitzhofer is keen for his metrics to be available in real time as well as simple enough for everyone in the newsroom to understand. Otherwise, he argues, they will not influence editorial decisions. Delgado agrees, saying Metro’s golden metric became part of commissioning conversations.
Measuring the value of repeat behavior
At BILD, where a vast majority of users come directly to the homepage, Kitzhofer takes note of what interactions happen next, whether that is signing up for a newsletter, playing a video, or taking part in a quiz. Visits without any subsequent interactions have far less long-term value than those that start a relationship, so building habits – and frequency – is key.
“Clearly now everyone would say I’d rather have a user coming six times a week for five minutes compared to once a week for half an hour,” says Kitzhofer, while Delgado adds that RFV (recency, frequency, volume) is an increasingly popular indicator.
“I think it’s a good general one that will help you regardless of your business model,” she says. “It’s a first step to start thinking about subscriptions but if you don’t have that as a priority, it also gives you an idea of topics that are strong.”
When it comes to habits and engagement, one of the most powerful tools a publisher has is their newsletters. However, the measures of success for these have changed too.
Audience signals deliver deeper value
“Even a few years ago, so many publishers were focused on growth metrics like subscriber count and basic engagement metrics like opens and clicks,” says email expert Dan Oshinsky, who runs Inbox Collective. “But those are vanity metrics. A big list doesn’t necessarily tell you that you have the right, powerfully-engaged list. Now we’re all trying to go a bit deeper.”
Oshinsky is a fan of surveys and reader feedback as signs of that deeper engagement. He is also very keen on conversion data and says: “We need to look at how good the newsletter is at bringing in not just new readers, but readers who will stay around and pay.
“Publishers are starting to try to find ways to prove they have a loyal, engaged audience who actually make time and space for their work.”
All this is well and good, but hard to show on a dashboard. Oshinsky says it might be time to learn from some of the modern newsletter platforms such as Substack and beehiiv which collate deeper data on newsletter performance.
For example, they share useful data points such as engagement by cohort, which gives newsletter owners a way to check which particular sign-up sources are effective. “It’s about building a loyal audience, but also about making a better product,” adds Oshinsky. “The closer we get to something that’s actionable, the better.”
As newsroom priorities change, measurement needs to keep pace. The metrics that matter most will be the ones that help publishers understand what is working, act on that insight and build a more sustainable business.
A busy comment section can look like proof that a story connected with readers. But new research complicates that picture: data-rich stories tend to draw fewer commenters, while the people who do participate contribute more analytical, evidence-rich responses. It turns out that publishers that focus on volume alone may be overlooking a different and potentially valuable kind of engagement.
News stories often use statistics, data, and analysis to provide readers with more information and evidence. But adding more material can also make a story more demanding for readers to process and could attract less commentary. In fact, the way that information is presented is often associated with whether or not readers choose to comment – but also how they comment.
New research from Avner Kantor and Sheizaf Rafaeli examines this relationship across 6,400 New York Times stories and nearly one million comments. Kantor and Rafaeli’s analysis shows that stories with more statistical information and a stronger analytical writing style are associated with fewer people participating in the comments. However, on stories with fewer participants, comments contain more external sources and use more analytical language. They also use less emotionally oriented language.
More information can mean fewer commenters
The study focuses specifically on participation in news comment sections. The researchers define participation as the number of unique people who leave top-level comments on each story. Replies between commenters are excluded. The researchers also examine the language and information the commenters use.
Not every feature of a story has the same relationship with participation.
How Story features relate to comment participation
↓ Associated with fewer commenters Articles with more statistical information Articles with more analytical writing
↔ No significant relationship with participation Articles with more external sources Articles with static data visualizations
↑ Associated with more commenters Articles with more emotionally oriented writing
The study reveals that comment volume does not tell the whole story. Smaller groups of commenters also communicate differently. The researchers call this a “participation filtering mechanism.” They argue that stories requiring greater cognitive effort can discourage some readers from commenting. On stories with lower participation, commenters tend to use more analytical language and external sources, and less emotionally oriented language.
Data journalism is associated with analytical comments
The study also finds differences between comments on The Upshot stories and traditional New York Times stories. The Upshot is the Times’ data journalism section. Even after accounting for individual story features and comment volume, comments on The Upshot stories are more analytical. They contain more statistics and external sources and rely less on emotionally oriented language.
Who reads what and why
The researchers identify two factors associated with these commenting patterns: who the journalism attracts and who ultimately chooses to comment. They argue that data journalism can attract readers who are more analytically oriented. The informational demands of an individual story can then further filter who participates in the comments.
This distinction adds context for publishers because the audience discussing a story may already differ based on the type of journalism they choose to consume. The characteristics of an individual story are then associated with who decides to comment. The researchers describe audience self-selection and participation filtering as complementary processes that help explain these commenting patterns.
Kantor and Rafaeli’s analysis offers publishers a broader view of comment activity. The research connects commenting patterns to both the type of journalism readers choose and how information is presented within individual stories. Comment volume remains one measure of participation, but it does not capture who participates or the characteristics of their comments.
Access to breaking news is everywhere. Audiences can follow major events in real time through countless broadcast and digital sources. For publishers, the challenge is no longer simply reporting what happened first, but creating an experience that gives audiences a reason to stay, participate and return.
This is changing how publishers think about live blogs. Increasingly, they are recognizing that live coverage can be far more than a fast and flexible way to publish updates during a breaking news event; it can become a strategic audience product that brings together reporting, context, multimedia and interaction around a shared moment to build loyalty, deepen engagement, support subscription journeys and create new commercial opportunities.
But achieving those outcomes requires more than a publishing platform. It hinges on how live coverage is operationalized across the organization – how it is planned, produced and then experienced by audiences. Our work with The Baltimore Banner provides a useful example.
Creating an experience audiences return to
As The Baltimore Banner expanded its live coverage, the newsroom wanted to move beyond the traditional model of a single journalist publishing a running sequence of updates. Its ambition was to create immersive, collaborative experiences that reflected the strength of its local reporting and gave readers a reason to return throughout the day.
That meant enabling reporters, photographers and videographers to contribute simultaneously, while giving editors a clear view of the overall story. The live blog could bring together real-time reporting with photography, video, analysis, background reporting and links to supporting coverage, creating a more complete picture of an event in one place.
This changes how audiences consume live journalism. Instead of passively viewing a stream of updates, readers can move between breaking developments, analysis and deeper context as a story unfolds. The strongest live experiences create a sense of connection, helping audiences feel closer to both the event and the journalism behind it.
The Baltimore Banner applied this approach to its coverage of the Preakness Stakes horse race. Rather than relying solely on written updates, the live blog combined reporting from multiple journalists with photography, video and behind-the-scenes moments. Readers could follow different perspectives, watch key moments unfold and experience the atmosphere of the event alongside the newsroom.
As Nicole Orders, SVP of Product at The Baltimore Banner, explained in a recent webinar with Arc XP: “The more immersive we can make that experience, and the more that we can meet audiences where they are, the more likely they are to keep coming back.”
Preparing for success
Technology is only part of the equation. Successful live coverage depends on preparation, clear editorial ownership and workflows that allow journalists to focus on creating valuable coverage.
Before major events, The Baltimore Banner trains journalists on both the publishing tools and the editorial approach behind the coverage. During Maryland’s primary elections, more than 50 journalists received training on how to contribute text, images and video.
Each live blog also has a dedicated editor responsible for orchestrating the experience. Before publication, that editor prepares the page with background reporting, links to existing journalism and useful context, ensuring readers receive value from the moment they arrive.
During the event, the editor coordinates coverage, highlights important developments and identifies opportunities for deeper standalone reporting. This ensures the live blog feels like a coherent experience rather than a fragmented collection of updates.
Connecting live moments to wider audience journeys
The most successful live blogs rarely exist in isolation. They connect audiences with the wider body of journalism around an event, creating opportunities for deeper engagement before, during and after the live moment.
The Baltimore Banner demonstrated this during Maryland’s primary elections, combining live coverage with a voter guide published in advance and a dedicated election results experience on polling day. Rather than treating each as a separate product, they became connected parts of a broader editorial journey.
The approach generated record subscription conversions from election coverage, alongside record page views for the live blog itself. It illustrates the value of thinking beyond the event: from preparation and anticipation, through the live experience, to the analysis and follow-up reporting audiences seek afterwards.
Creating these experiences also requires collaboration beyond the newsroom. Audience, product, newsletter, analytics and commercial teams can help ensure coverage reaches the right audiences, supports discovery and creates measurable value.
Measure engagement, not traffic alone
If live blogs are being treated as strategic audience products, publishers need to look beyond traffic alone. Page views remain an important measure of reach, but they do not reveal whether audiences are finding genuine value.
Metrics such as engaged time, repeat visits, interaction rates, recirculation into related content, registrations and subscriber conversions can show whether readers are simply arriving because an event has attracted attention, or actively choosing to spend time with the publisher.
These insights can also help newsrooms understand which elements of a live experience are resonating, from multimedia storytelling to audience participation, and where future coverage can be improved.
Turning live coverage into a lasting audience product
Live blogs are most powerful when they are treated as audience products, not just reporting formats. They allow publishers to combine immediacy with depth, showcasing distinctive journalism while building stronger relationships with audiences during moments of high attention.
The publishers seeing the greatest value are approaching live coverage as a planned experience: prepared before an event begins, supported across editorial and business teams, and designed around what audiences want from real-time journalism.
When done well, live blogs do more than capture attention in the moment. They create experiences that encourage audiences to return, engage more deeply and build lasting connections with the journalism behind the story.
For as long as vertically-oriented video has been popular on smartphones, media businesses have been testing their potential.
The format has proven to be popular for communication, entertainment, and increasingly news. It has also been particularly in demand among younger consumers, a demographic that publishers are keen to reach.
It isn’t just light entertainment or specious news that works well on vertical video platforms, either. Aisling Ennis, news editor on the video desk at PA Media, said, “Vertical video works brilliantly for breaking news, sport, entertainment, lifestyle and human-interest stories. We find that different publishers are looking for different genres, but there is demand across the board.”
Similarly, Bill Carey, Managing Editor, Audience & Membership for Vox, explains, “We clearly see that Gen Z, Gen Alpha, and millennials are consuming news and information through vertical video, which is why we’ve invested in doing more of it and making sure we’re reaching our audiences in that format.”
So if the vertical format works for video in general, what have been the sticking points when it comes to publishers making the most of it?
Changing audience habits
For one thing, it took a while for vertical videos to become a large part of audience consumption habits.
According to analyst Mary Meeker, people use vertically oriented devices nearly 30% of the time. That is a dramatic change from 2010, at which point that figure was only five percent. This shift was driven, at least in part, by the rise of vertical video-specific platforms.
With TikTok, Snap, and then a variety of imitators seeking to replicate the success of the video format on their own platforms, that vertical-oriented behavior grew. It was, however, largely confined to those platforms. Even now, the majority of the consumption of news video among younger audiences takes place on platforms designed specifically for vertical video. According to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism:
“Almost the same proportion of people in all age groups (around a third) say they use YouTube weekly for online news videos. The contrast with TikTok and Instagram is immense: almost four in ten people aged 18–24 say they use TikTok weekly for news videos (it is 36% for Instagram), compared to just 12% of over 55s (15% for Instagram).”
However, the reality is that vertical video has been around for long enough – and aped by so many apps – that it now exists as a habit outside of any specific platform. This audience inclination presents media businesses with the opportunity to ride the wave of vertical video on their own terms.
Off the platforms
At The New York Times, that begins with a recognition that vertical video reaches a huge swath of people, divorced from any one app. To that end, it has invested in its Watch tab in its own app, which launched last October, Solana Pyne, Video Director at The New York Times, said: “Nearly all the video we make is vertical first because we know most people are watching on their phones, but we don’t tailor our stories for specific platforms.”
CNN, too, launched a dedicated feed on its app’s homepage dedicated to vertical video in November of last year. Both USA Today and BILD have followed suit, with most including Le Monde building upon what they initially learned about the format on other platforms like TikTok.
“It is also something of a self-fulfilling prophecy: the more trusted publications push the format, the more audiences will seek it out when looking for news and information.” As Pyne explains, “We see our audience watching more vertical video as we’ve reported more stories in the format. A scrollable feed has become such a common way to engage with these kinds of videos, not just on TikTok but also on Instagram and YouTube Shorts. The Watch Tab was the next natural iteration of our investment in this kind of journalism”.
Importantly, the shift towards publishing vertical video on owned sites allows publishers to focus upon metrics they can both trust and integrate into wider strategy development. Anna Dubenko, Newsroom Audience Director at The New York Times, explained: “Every platform is slightly different when it comes to reaching and engaging audiences. And social elements vary between platforms – for example, sharing and commenting have different significance across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.”
There are, however, certain benefits to the social aspects of the vertical video platforms that publishers can take advantage of. As Carey explained, “The opportunity with vertical video-first platforms is the additional social element. When major breaking news happens, for example, we might ask our audience directly through an Instagram broadcast channel or WhatsApp to send us their questions. We have always done versions of that kind of audience listening. But now with vertical video, we have a new format for answering those questions, and we can hop in the comments to answer an additional question if needed.”
Vertical limits
Watching a video lengthways is not the only changing audience behavior driven by the format, however. For better or worse, the shortform nature of most vertical video is designed to keep people on platform, allowing easy access to the next video either through a swipe or infinite scroll.
At Reach Plc, which has been heavily investing in video content across the board, that has led to a change in how much of its vertical video is presented on its sites. Its Studio Creative Director Amy Hydes explains: “We recently launched continuous scroll video on the Daily Star and the plan is to launch out across more titles this year.
“We know that people have come to expect that seamless scrolling experience and again, we need to meet people where they live and weave ourselves into their lives.”
She notes that one way to do so is to leverage the expertise of creators and journalists who have direct experience with social video: “Launching new original formats and standalone video brands means we are bringing more vertical video experts into the business. I have been bringing social first natives into the original content teams who live and breathe social platforms; they know what the latest trends are, shoot and edit content quickly, are confident being on camera, can launch social formats and also dive into the analytics.”
Platform and purpose
By divorcing vertical video from the platforms on which it emerged, there is also the potential for media businesses to present it in an environment that is both more brand safe, and also away from the non-stop advertising and sponsored content that appears on those apps.
All of the interviewees DCN spoke with also stressed that they do not create journalism in the vertical video format for the sake of it. Instead, they say it has to exist and stand alongside the rest of their multimedia output in terms of purpose and quality. The Telegraph’s Executive Editor of Audio and Video, Matthew Bayley, said: “The
most important criteria in deciding investment is whether the story we are telling – and the
the way we are telling it – amounts to distinctive, quality journalism”.
Carey said: “We know that more casual, creator-style formats where a journalist is talking into their phone like they’re having a conversation with a friend often resonate better on vertical video platforms than more highly produced videos. But because our journalists are already used to thinking across mediums, we’re able to expand the reach of important stories by being thoughtful about how each version is presented.”
So, as audience consumption of vertical video has grown, media businesses have increasingly brought production in-house for their own platforms.
Now that the association with the social platforms where the format originated has lessened, publications are able to use the format to further their own journalistic mission while speaking to a new demographic that is becoming used to consuming information that way.
DCN’s Q2 2026 Digital Subscription Tracking Report shows that the U.S. digital subscription marketplace continues to evolve as consumers actively manage their subscription portfolios rather than simply adding more services. Households are increasingly reallocating spending toward offerings that provide greater value and flexibility. At the same time, average monthly household spending climbed to $169.70, up 10.6% year over year, driven primarily by higher subscription prices rather than a meaningful increase in the number of services households maintain.
Consumers continue shifting toward value
The strongest growth continues to come from lower-cost, ad-supported subscription models. Household penetration for ad-supported SVOD increased to 79.4%, while ad-free streaming declined to 71.1%. Consumers now maintain the same average number of ad-supported and ad-free streaming subscriptions, signaling that hybrid subscription models have become a mainstream part of the streaming mix rather than simply a budget alternative.
The shift extends beyond streaming video. Virtual multichannel video programming distributors (vMVPDs) continue gaining ground as traditional pay TV subscriptions decline. The gap between MVPD and vMVPD household penetration narrowed to 10.3 percentage points, reflecting consumers’ ongoing migration toward more flexible live TV options.
A market driven by optimization, not expansion
The Q2 2026 findings point to a digital subscription market that is maturing rather than slowing. Households are maintaining roughly the same number of subscriptions, but they’re reshaping their portfolios by favoring lower-cost, ad-supported services and newer distribution models while spending more overall as prices continue to rise. For publishers and streaming providers alike, delivering clear consumer value through pricing, packaging, and product differentiation will remain essential to sustaining subscriber growth through the remainder of 2026.
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The biggest move in the market this past year wasn’t a bigger budget, it was a better bet. And for the platforms and publishers competing for that budget, understanding where the bet landed matters as much as the number itself.
Total U.S. media investment came in around $281 billion in 2025, according to MediaRadar’s Annual Investment Blueprint, up just 0.3% against 2024. That’s not really the headline however.
The headline is what happened underneath it: your clients moved real money, tens of billions of dollars, into the channels that were actually working for them, and pulled it out of the ones that weren’t. That’s the reallocation digital media leaders need to be tracking, since it’s a direct read on where advertiser demand, and the dollars behind it, are heading next. Digital alone accounted for 65% of the $281 billion, or $182 billion, and even that share hides a lot of movement. As the report frames it, this was the year of moving from scale to precision, an outcome-led mix rather than a broad one.
Social overtakes search, and it’s reshaping what advertisers expect from a platform.
The clearest example of a bet paying off: social hit $65.5 billion in 2025, up 9.9% year over year. It now sits at about 36% of all digital spend, and has officially passed search for the first time. And it was no small leap, either. Social was trailing search by $3.7 billion the year before. Now it leads by $4.1 billion.
That money had to come from somewhere, and a lot of it came out of search (down 3%) and display (down roughly 3.5%), two channels advertisers used to default to without a second thought. For platforms and publishers holding search or display inventory, that’s worth sitting with: it’s demand your clients aren’t bringing back on its own, and it points to where they’re expecting to find performance instead.
Video keeps compounding, and it’s where advertiser attention is consolidating.
Video was the other bet that paid off, spreading across formats rather than consolidating into one. Online video grew 6.7%. Mobile web video grew 5.5%. AVOD, streaming’s ad-supported side, grew 13% and now sits at $19.2 billion.
And as live games keep moving off linear and onto streaming, the role sports has to play in this shift can’t go unnoted: AVOD picks up the audience and the ad dollars that follow. It’s a trend worth watching closely: see how sports is reshaping the investment picture. Linear TV fell 7%, with cable, network, and local all down, and print dropped 22%. As the report puts it, your clients’ next dollar isn’t chasing reach anymore. It’s chasing attention, and that’s a design constraint worth building around.
What this means for digital media leaders going into the rest of the year.
MediaRadar’s analysis points to five signals worth planning around:
Allocation is the real lever now on the buy side, so track where your clients’ spend is actually gaining share and build your platform or inventory strategy toward it.
Social has passed search, meaning it’s now the benchmark advertisers are measuring every other platform and content environment against.
Video is compounding across formats while static display slides, worth factoring into how you prioritize inventory and ad products.
Search and display still hold value for advertisers seeking reach, but the growth budgets are moving to video: worth watching closely if that’s not where your inventory sits.
The TV economy is moving to streaming, AVOD included, a structural shift in where your clients’ demand lives, not a temporary blip to wait out.
None of this means search or television are going away. Both are still enormous, still foundational, still where a lot of reach lives for your clients. But in this kind of market, every platform has to justify its role to the advertisers buying into it. The properties that keep growing will be the ones whose numbers give clients a reason to stay, not the ones coasting on what’s worked before.
The report’s own conclusion says it best: optimize, don’t expand. 2025 wasn’t the year advertisers spent more. It was the year the best bets got rewarded, on both sides of the transaction. Those platforms that understood where their clients’ attention was heading got ahead of it, while others raced to catch up or were left holding a positioning that no longer matched where the money actually went.
The signals are clear, the data’s available, and the digital media leaders who move now still have time to position ahead of where their clients’ spend is headed next. After all, placing better bets starts with better intelligence.
Kelly Killips is the SVP of Marketing at MediaRadar, where she leads marketing strategy to drive brand growth. With 15+ years in creative directionand a decade of team leadership, she brings a data-driven approach honed across AdTech, B2B, and B2C campaigns—building collaborative teams and scalable creative that turns marketing intelligence into measurable impact.
News organizations collect enormous amounts of audience intelligence, but they often lack a consistent way to translate that evidence into coordinated organizational action. Every day, audience, product, marketing and revenue teams generate valuable insights that advance their own objectives. The opportunity is to use that same evidence more consistently to identify when journalism has demonstrated broad audience demand and merits additional investment across the organization.
That observation became the foundation for a concept I call the Cross-Channel Decision Model. It provides a repeatable decision process that helps news organizations evaluate every published story through the same decision lens and make more consistent decisions about where additional organizational resources should be allocated.
Organizations already make decisions about where to invest in promotion, product placement, fundraising efforts and editorial attention after stories are published. What they often lack is a consistent process that helps every department recognize the same audience signal and respond the same way every time. Those decisions often emerge through editorial meetings, team discussions, individual judgment and department-specific priorities. The question is whether every story should move through the same decision process before those decisions are made.
In my model, rather than relying on informal coordination, every story follows the same decision process regardless of topic, author or beat. When every department evaluates the same audience evidence through the same decision process, organizations can make more consistent decisions about where to invest additional time, attention and resources.
In other words, audience intelligence can serve as a common basis for organizational decision-making because it provides a shared set of evidence for determining when journalism has demonstrated that it may warrant additional organizational investment, while allowing each department to pursue its own objectives.
Three signals are stronger than one
Every published story is evaluated across three audience discovery pathways.
Google Analytics represents engagement across owned and direct audience channels.
Social platforms measure audience recommendation.
Google Search measures algorithmic discovery.
A story that succeeds through direct readership, social recommendation and search discovery provides evidence of audience demand across three different forms of audience discovery. That convergence provides stronger evidence than exceptional performance within any single channel because it reduces the likelihood that performance resulted from one distribution advantage alone.
The three audience pathways come together in a simple Venn diagram that serves as the model’s first decision point. Every published story moves through the same evaluation process, regardless of topic, author or beat. Stories that perform well across all three audience pathways provide the strongest evidence of broad audience demand. Those stories become the highest priority for additional organizational resources. These stories also provide a common decision signal that every department can use to advance its own objectives.
Informed value decisions
The model does not determine editorial value or public-service importance. Editorial judgment remains the foundation of every newsroom. Instead, the model identifies where audience evidence suggests additional organizational investment may create greater impact. When a story reaches that threshold, departments can respond in ways that support their own objectives. For example:
Audience expands newsletter promotion, increases distribution and invests in paid amplification to extend audience growth.
Product features the story more prominently throughout the reader experience, incorporates it into topic pages and recommendations and strengthens reader habit and retention.
Marketing extends the story’s reach through additional promotion, community partnerships and brand awareness initiatives.
Membership and development leverage the story within fundraising campaigns, donor communications and membership appeals because it has already demonstrated broad audience demand.
Editorial leadership analyzes the reporting characteristics, subject matter and audience behaviors that contributed to the story’s performance and applies those insights to future editorial planning.
Stories that perform well across two audience pathways still provide meaningful guidance because every combination reveals a different opportunity. Although these stories do not satisfy all three decision criteria, each combination identifies where additional organizational attention may create the greatest opportunity for growth. A story that performs well across search and social media may deserve greater homepage visibility, newsletter promotion or product placement to increase loyalty among existing readers. Each combination helps explain audience behavior, identifies the next opportunity and guides the most appropriate organizational response.
For example:
Imagine a newsroom publishes an investigation into groundwater contamination. The story performs well across Google Analytics, social media and Google Search. The model identifies the story as a candidate for additional organizational investment. Audience expands newsletter promotion. Product features it across the homepage and recommendation modules. Marketing extends distribution through partnerships and paid promotion. Membership builds a fundraising campaign around the reporting. Editorial studies the story to identify characteristics that contributed to its performance.
From audience insights to organizational investment
This model offers one approach worth testing in modern news organizations. Although it remains hypothetical, its underlying premise reflects trends that have already begun to emerge across the industry. Reuters Institute’s foundational research found that many organizations had analytics tools but lacked a systematic connection between the data and decision-making. Even where access existed, organizational structure and culture determined whether the evidence produced action. More recent academic research reached a similar conclusion, finding that organizational expectations and management practices often determine whether analytics influence organizational action.
News organizations increasingly use audience data to inform editorial strategy, audience development, product innovation and long-term business sustainability. Research published by the International News Media Association (INMA) in Beyond the Dashboard highlights how leading publishers use audience metrics to guide organizational strategy and business outcomes rather than treating analytics as standalone reporting tools.
The cross-channel decision model addresses a challenge many news organizations already recognize. Every newsroom already possesses audience evidence. The greater opportunity is to establish a repeatable decision process that helps every department recognize the same audience signal and coordinate organizational investment around journalism that has already demonstrated broad audience demand.
/ An inside look at the business of digital content
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