Additionally, the U.S. presidential election last fall brought a healthy boost of traffic and new subscribers to publishers, and many publishers welcomed the “Trump bump” to help alleviate referral traffic challenges. Political news coverage and its related ad revenue has continued to be a boon for publishers well into the first quarter of 2025.

“The year so far has been quite positive for our business overall, for the advertising business, so we’ve been off to a really good start,” said Josh Stinchcomb, evp and chief revenue officer at Dow Jones. “We’ve benefited from companies’ messaging to D.C. in particular. … We still do cover wraps on print editions in D.C. and they’re sold out every day. So, there’s a lot of D.C.-focused messaging going on, which has been a nice boost for us.”

While the majority of publishers are optimistic about their own companies’ prospects this year, according to a fourth-quarter 2024 Digiday+ Research survey, they’re not as optimistic about the industry as a whole. Sixty percent of publisher professionals told Digiday that they agree that they’re optimistic about their companies’ prospects for 2025, but 41% said they disagree that they’re optimistic for the media industry as a whole.

Dow Jones’ Stinchcomb said he remains optimistic about 2025 and a political news cycle that continues to draw in readers and ad dollars. But he noted that economic fluctuations could derail that optimism at any moment. “The volatility of news is generally a good thing for a news outlet. Traffic and other things have been quite positive,” Stinchcomb said. “Advertising is very sensitive to recession and interest rates. If the economy goes sideways, that could throw this year in a different direction, but my conversations with CMOs towards the tail end of last year and even early in this year have been quite bullish on the year, which has been good to hear, so I’m staying optimistic on that front.”

Bearing all of this in mind, Digiday+ Research’s second annual report on publishers’ revenues examines the current and future state of the group’s revenue streams, from traditional ad revenue to events and subscriptions.

Digiday+ Research surveyed 38 publisher professionals about their revenue streams, including ads, events and subscriptions. Digiday+ Research also conducted individual interviews with publishing executives responsible for strategic decisions at their companies. They included executives from:

• The Guardian
• Dow Jones
• Forbes
• Business Insider
• News Media Alliance

Digiday’s survey found that traditional revenue channels like direct-sold display ads and programmatic display ads are giving way a bit to other revenue sources for publishers this year. While direct-sold display ads are still publishers’ top revenue source, its weighted average among survey respondents dipped slightly this year from 4.07 in 2024 to 3.75 in 2025. Direct-sold display ads were followed by branded content and programmatic display ads in Digiday’s survey, with weighted averages of 2.91 and 2.67, respectively.

This year’s survey results show that publishers are less dependent on one dominant revenue stream than they have been in years past. Multiple revenue streams showed a decline in their weighted averages in 2025 based on publishers who said they make money from them in comparison to 2024. Subscriptions saw the smallest decline from last year to this year, dropping only -0.88 in weighted average scoring. Selling products saw the most significant decline this year, with its weighted average dropping -1.11. Programmatic ads saw the second-largest decline in 2025, with its weighted average falling -1.01 compared with 2024.

The point here is that Digiday’s survey found that there has been some equalization of publishers’ revenue streams in the last year. According to Josh Stinchcomb, global CRO at Dow Jones, when one revenue stream like subscriptions does well, it can buoy other sources of revenue.

“We are subscription first and all of our brands are paywalled properties,” Stinchcomb said. “As business products, they command high subscription prices, and we have great retention. As a result, that’s an important part of our business. It’s also the source of our value in the advertising space because we have largely logged-in consumption. We know a great deal about the impressions and that allows us to target with precision. It allows us to draw insight into what various communities and cohorts are interested in, both from an editorial and advertising perspective. The strength of the subscription business is also a strength of the ad business.”

Stinchcomb added that he sees potential for future revenue growth in a variety of channels. “The fastest growing part of digital advertising is video,” Stinchcomb said. “ [It’s] a relatively small contributor today, but growing quite quickly. Newsletters have been strong in terms of growth and also monetization of those newsletters. We’re finding that advertising in newsletters, and to promote branded content, perform exceptionally well. That is a highly performant environment for branded content and, as a consequence, we see high sell-through against newsletters.”

Kyle Vinansky, svp of global sales at Forbes, said that Forbes’ business is divided into two parts — advertising and subscriptions —  and that other revenue streams have been experiencing growth as well. “Some of the biggest growth right now is coming from affiliate partnerships that are pacing about 13% ahead of last year,” Vinansky said. “Our digital subscriptions, while still small compared to some in the competitive set, are pacing 23% ahead of last year. And the core advertising businesses, the digital and the print, are rather stable. They’re very large segments of the revenue, but we don’t see them as necessarily the highest growth areas for the new year.”

As Stinchcomb and Vinansky noted, subscription revenue is key to their businesses. According Digiday’s survey, publisher pros said they will maintain their focus on building their subscription businesses in the coming months, with the weighted average of publishers who said they’ll focus on that part of their business dropping only -0.17 compared with last year. On the other hand, programmatic ads, a top-performing revenue source, saw a -1.07 drop in its weighted average this year, meaning publishers will focus less on building that part of their business in the next six months.

Nataki Williams, svp of finance and operations at The Guardian US, said The Guardian has made a concerted effort to build its subscription business over the past year. This year, the publisher also plans to put a similar emphasis on increasing its affiliate commerce revenue. “We focused this past fiscal year primarily on our subscription business and changes to it,” Williams said. “We launched newsletters, and that was extremely successful for us. We anticipate more of the fruits of our labor this upcoming fiscal year. We started to explore an affiliate business. Even though affiliates are an established revenue stream, we have been slow to enter the market. I would say for a lot of these new lines of business, newsletters, affiliate revenue, this year was more of an exploratory year, and it was good at exploration.”

Digiday’s survey found that events rank fifth among publishers’ revenue streams this year, one spot higher than in last year’s survey. However, the survey also found that publishers aren’t placing as much emphasis on growing their events businesses in 2025 — its weighted average dropped -0.48 in terms of the percentage of publishers who said they’ll focus on that part of their business this year.

Forbes’ Vinansky said publishers may not be focusing on events as much this year because putting on events requires significant resources like staff. “It’s a very labor-intensive part of the business,” Vinansky said. “We have a dedicated ForbesLive team that travels the globe — in-house production teams, design teams, everything that you would need to execute these events. If you’re outsourcing [production] and not in a situation to have those teams, it can be challenging to scale events.”

“There is also oversaturation,” Vinansky added. “We focus on the quality of attendees at our events above all else. If we’re putting together an event for CIOs, 100% of the room is CIOs or CTOs, and that’s a big differentiator for events. … It’s those tent poles that are happening globally and the quality of the attendees. Other people in this space may not have those two benefits of the team structure, or the quality of audience. It’s a difficult business to be in.”

However, even despite the challenges of events, some larger publishers have plans to increase their investments in that revenue source this year.

Business Insider CRO Maggie Milnamow said the publisher is planning to launch a live journalism events business called BI Live in the coming months. “There is a group of people unsatisfied with events in the B2B and some B2C spaces,” Milnamow said. “And we can find a way in there that’s compelling, and bring our journalism to live audiences to help our advertisers connect with audiences in a way that they’re not right now. The events business will grow at a higher rate than the rest of our ad business.”

Dow Jones’ Stinchcomb said that events have been an important revenue stream for the company over the past five years. “[Events] are inherently profitable because of sponsorship, but they are also great ways to engage our community,” Stinchcomb said. “They are great for our newsroom to network with executives, and they’re great branding for the journal.”

“We used to have walking advertisements for the Wall Street Journal in the form of print newspapers,” Stinchcomb added. “And, as that channel of awareness diminishes, events fill some of that gap by creating a tangibility and equity for the brand. Events serve us on several levels. Despite what seems to be an increasingly crowded environment of events, our business has stood up and grown.”

However, Stinchcomb did warn that producing events comes with its own difficulties. “Events are relatively expensive and it’s a lot of work,” he said. “If you don’t have the confidence to pull the right audience for what you need to get done, I can see why there’d be trepidation. I don’t want to say [Dow Jones] has it all figured out, but we’ve got a good ecosystem.”

With the state of consumer data so up-in-the-air, publishers’ newsletter strategies have continued to evolve over the last year, according to the executives Digiday spoke with for this report. Some publishers are using newsletters to engage with readers and convert subscribers, while others are using data gathered from newsletter sign-ups for ad targeting.

A year ago, Taha Ahmed, chief growth officer at Forbes, told Digiday that the publisher’s newsletter strategy was centered on building audience loyalty first. “An important piece of the loyalty strategy is newsletters,” Ahmed said. “It allows us to capture the right marketing opt-ins. [Newsletters] allow us to build a database of people and serve them content that they want to read, when they want to read. That has done really well for us. Businesses like the ‘Forbes Daily’ is over a million subscribers.”

When Digiday spoke with Forbes exec Vinansky this year, he explained that the publisher is able to create audience segments to target specific demographic groups using data gathered from newsletter subscribers. “For everybody that engages on the site or across our platforms, we have user behavior habits and first-party data,” Vinansky said. “When you start getting into paid subscriptions or newsletters, you begin to get more demographic data. We’re storing all of that data in a centralized location to activate it as needed for different parts of the business. For instance, if we have a partner wanting to do a custom newsletter send, we can pick different segments of that audience to meet their objectives because we have the appropriate marketing opt-ins for all those different users.”

In addition to creating customized newsletter sends, publishers can use the data they gather from newsletter subscribers for ad targeting. “Newsletters provide us with an opted-in, direct relationship with our consumers,” Deborah Brett, global chief business officer at Condé Nast, said in an email. “These readers are our most engaged, our most active shoppers, and our most likely to subscribe. The traffic they drive to our websites is also of the highest quality for ad placements. Condé Nast is focused in 2025 on continuing to evolve our Newsletter offering to personalize the inbox experience for the wide range of interests that our brands cover. From service content, to breaking news, this lane of communication has limitless applications when created with the reader in mind.”

Business Insider’s Milnamow said that newsletters present a unique opportunity to engage with and retain readers, as well as to target ads. “We see newsletters as a huge opportunity to come to readers and then bring them back to us for more,” she said. “We say business journalism doesn’t have to be boring. We try to have a more spirited approach and tone. … And we study the clicks and responsiveness. Also, understanding for advertisers what ads tend to perform well, what type of storytelling and how that’s rounded out in other parts at Business Insider. We continue to believe newsletters are a core part of our strategy now and well into the future.”

While newsletters can be a strong vehicle for driving ad revenue, The Guardian US’s Williams told Digiday that the channel also plays a critical role in building subscription revenue for The Guardian. “The biggest thing is that newsletters are helping us to find our market,” Willams said. “It contributed to our overarching email strategy, which just didn’t exist before. Where we’re seeing the fruits of that labor is in our subscriptions. We haven’t even fully developed the ads within the newsletters. The revenue that we’ve been getting from newsletters has been on the subscription side. This year it’s going to be about how we are going to strategically incorporate our advertising business within the newsletters. And then continuing to evolve the content and the types of newsletters. … Now that we’ve got our sea legs, it’s going to be more about incorporating advertising revenue and continuing to expand on the subscription revenue that newsletters are generating for us.”

Overall, newsletters can serve multiple functions for publishers, depending on their revenue and subscriber goals, according to Dow Jones’ Stinchcomb. “Newsletters serve a lot of purposes,” Stinchcomb said. “It’s great ad inventory, but also a great way to engage our subscribers and for retention. Anytime someone subscribes to a newsletter, it tells us something about them and what they’re interested in, which is helpful information that we can leverage. Newsletters have a strategic value that punches beyond their weight. The fact that they are great ad performers is a bonus.”

At the end of the day, publishers’ main product is content. And Digiday’s survey found that prioritizing high-quality content is the most important strategy for publishers this year when it comes to positive ad revenue outcomes — the largest percentage of publisher pros (69%) said quality content plays the most significant role in ad revenue uplift. Interestingly though, ad placement’s significance to publishers’ ad revenues fell from second place last year (when 64% of publishers said it played a significant role in boosting ad revenue) to seventh place this year (when just 28% said the same).

Instead, optimizing ad performance and data and analytics moved up the list of strategies that are most significant to publishers’ ad revenue this year — coming in second place (with 59% of publisher pros saying it’s significant to their ad revenue) and third place (with 55% saying it’s significant), respectively, up from third and fourth place in 2024. This bump in ranking may have been driven by advances in AI applications over the last 12 months, as both strategies benefit from the availability of AI technology (we’ll talk more about AI later in this section).

While data is critical to all publishers’ ad businesses, each different publisher’s paywall method can affect the way data is used. For example, The Guardian US charges for subscriptions, or donations, to create revenue, as mentioned earlier in this report, but it does not have an article paywall — readers can access an unlimited number of articles without restriction. As a result, the publisher primarily uses data to inform what specific articles and topics are highlighted for readers to help convert them to subscribers. “We need data analytics to understand who our customer base is and who is reading our content,” said The Guardian’s Williams. “But the focus is on subscription revenue because it is double our advertising revenue. It’s also coming from single contributions because we don’t have a paywall. The data analytics helps us better serve and execute our mission. To make sure that we are giving our customer base the information that they want. What are they looking at? What are they reading?”

On the other hand, while Dow Jones’ primary focus is also to drive subscriptions, the publisher does employ a paywall, in addition to charging a premium price point for subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal and Barron’s. As a result, paid subscribers account for most of its readership, Dow Jones’ Stinchcomb said, and the publisher can then use subscriber data to improve ad targeting to bolster its ad revenue stream. “Data is central to our ad proposition,” Stinchcomb said. “The most important manifestation is our ability to segment and target audiences, which we have a pretty good handle on because most of our readers are logged in. We can be quite surgical in getting messages in front of people that are in the right industry job function. It’s not really about scale. It’s about getting to the right people with the reasonable frequency and then having something interesting to say to them.”

“For us, it’s about precision,” he added. “We also know what executives from industry X spend their time reading. And so we can help guide ad partners. Here’s the data that shows you why this is the best way to reach the audience you care about.”

According to Digiday’s survey, first-party data continues to hold the most significant role in generating positive ad revenue outcomes. Last year, 82% of publisher respondents predicted first-party data would be the most significant type of data for positive ad revenue outcomes in 2025. This year, 86% said the same about first-party data in 2026. This is further emphasized by the difference between first-party data and the next-most significant data type, third-party, which only 7% of respondents said would play a significant role next year.

While first-party data has continued to grow in importance for publishers since Digiday began surveying publishers about this topic in 2023, it has become increasingly more difficult for publishers to monetize, according to Danielle Coffey, president and CEO at trade organization News Media Alliance. “Advertising revenue over time has become difficult in the digital space because the distribution mechanism has become so dispersed and dissipated over the internet you no longer have a stronghold on your audience first-party data,” Coffey said. “There’s many pages that you can advertise on. Over time, what we saw is that the relationship of the reader to the publication became less important because you could advertise to the reader in a cheaper space. You can follow the reader to the next website that will have a less expensive inventory to advertise. And so in the digital advertising ecosystem, we’ve had to adjust to maintain that first-party relationship with the reader. Publishers rely on credibility, so that they can build that relationship and monetize the consumption of content through showing ads to readers, which is more difficult in the digital space.”

The recent AI boom, however, has improved the ability of some publishers to use first-party data to optimize ad revenue. AI applications require enormous amounts of data, particularly first-party data, for training. Publishers with large amounts of first-party data can apply it to AI tools to help them optimize ads, with many seeing positive results. Business Insider’s Milnamow said AI has helped the publisher improve its ad process. “We’re a premier publishing partner with [AI agent platform] Firsthand AI,” Milnamow said. “Essentially you can personalize an ad experience based on who you know is on the page, what they’re reading, their interests, and do it in a dynamic way at the snap of your fingers, as opposed to taking quite a bit of time to load and back end work to the final creative.”

“What’s happened is you’ve gone from two-month lead times to a week,” she added. “What actually takes the most time is the review period. We’re still learning a lot but we see huge opportunities here. … We think that the best Business Insider is one that uses AI in strategic ways to improve our products, the experience and, ultimately, what you see every day. It’s really helped us understand things faster and more deeply than ever before.”

However, using AI applications to improve ad revenue outcomes can be a double-edged sword. AI applications used by external websites, like Google for example, can pull traffic away from publishers’ sites. “Yesterday’s primary way of getting our content to readers was through Google,” said New Media Alliance’s Coffey. “By and far, they’re 96%, 97% of search. There’s one company, and they’re the dominant way in which our readers come to us. Even that relationship has become more imbalanced over the years because so many readers stay within the walled garden of Google. That means less traffic comes to publishers proportionally. The problem is with AI and getting those two revenue streams — subscription dollars and advertising dollars — through the traffic they get from Google. The first top 10 links that are listed in Google, on average, get 8.5% click through. The rest just stay in Google. … You’re summarizing the content to completely satisfy the user’s demand, no more activity is needed. That’s the nature of AI.”

But publishers are working to strike a balance in the era of AI, Coffey added. “Publications embraced the idea that they could work with AI companies so that it wouldn’t mean harm to either industry, and those conversations were fruitful in many cases where publications struck business arrangements,” she said. “These marketplace deals have resulted in an exchange of payments for the use of news content primarily for real time, or what’s known as RAG, retrieval-augmented generation. If it’s a breaking story and nobody else is covering the topic, it has a particularly high value for AI search engines. Some have been lucky enough to have made deals around using their content to train AI models.”