Media Briefing: What media execs are prioritizing in 2025

Last year was defined by improving ad revenue, AI licensing deals (and lawsuits), referral traffic challenges, the cookie-pocalypse that wasn’t and newsroom shakeups. 

This year, publishers will reinvest in growth opportunities — and try to leave behind a dependence on platforms for traffic and revenue. Here’s what media execs will prioritize this year:

Growing engagement for subscription and ad revenue

The number one business goal this year for companies like Business Insider, Hearst Magazines and BuzzFeed is to grow engagement to help boost subscription and ad revenue.

For publishers like Business Insider, more engagement on platforms like its site, app, newsletters and live events can help convert casual readers into subscribers, and attract premium advertisers this year, according to Maggie Milnamow, CRO at Business Insider and svp of group sales at Axel Springer.

Lisa Ryan Howard, who oversees the advertising business at Hearst Magazines as global CRO, said engagement is the company’s “North star” for developing audience and advertising experiences.

Hearst Magazines saw “significant growth” in its direct-sold ad business last year, primarily due to the expansion of Hearst’s large ad formats and a new predictive AI targeting tool, which is now included in almost 30% of Hearst Magazine’s campaigns since launching last summer. Hearst Magazines’ direct digital business was up nearly 20% year over year in 2024, according to a spokesperson, who did not provide exact figures.

Ken Blom, chief business officer at BuzzFeed, said the company is focused on building engaging products — such as comments and discussion hubs, games and AI-powered generators and filters — to help BuzzFeed build better advertising and content marketing “around higher quality moments.”

Execs at Financial Times want to understand its audience better, and to use first-party data and marketing tech to create more personalized experiences across its website and apps, said Fiona Spooner, managing director of the FT’s Consumer Revenue Group.

Boosting subscriber bases

A number of publishing execs told Digiday that the focus this year will be growing their subscription businesses, including those at Bloomberg, The Atlantic and The Wall Street Journal. 

A Digiday+ Research study published in November found that 83% of publisher professionals said in Q3 that they’ll put at least a very small focus on building their subscriptions business in the next six months, up from just 67% in Q3 last year.

Karen Saltser, Bloomberg Media CEO, said the company has three “North stars” for growth — total revenue, monthly cross-platform audience and paying customers — but subscriptions is the through-line.

“For us, video, audio and events are drivers of engagement for potential and active subscribers. And the healthier that audience is, the more value we bring to premium advertisers. Those relationships still make up a significant part of our business,” Saltser said.

The company will continue to iterate on its subscription offerings this year, she added. For example, last month Bloomberg introduced a newsletter bundle subscription for its tech coverage, which was the first time the publisher has offered paywalled content separate from the full Bloomberg site and app subscription.

Meanwhile, The Atlantic hit its goal of 1 million subscribers last year, and the focus this year will be to continue to grow subscriptions as well as build on the profitability that the company reached in early 2024, according to Alice McKown, publisher and chief revenue officer, and Megha Garibaldi, chief growth officer.

Nolly Evans, gm of The Wall Street Journal Digital, said the publisher will continue to focus on growing subscriptions this year, after The Wall Street Journal grew its digital-only subscriptions by 10% year-over-year to 3.9 million subscribers, as of its third quarter earnings.

Selling more advertising sponsorships

Publishing execs at BDG, Future, Newsweek and Vox Media said they aim to grow direct ad revenue through editorial collaborations and event sponsorships.

Seventy-one percent of publisher pros that responded to a Digiday+ Research study said they’ll put a large or very large focus on building their direct-sold ads business in the next six months.

Newsweek is also looking to expand its “rankings” business — where it highlights the best places to work and invest, for example, said Danielle Varvaro, Newsweek’s head of sales.

BDG will invest in more branded social programming and talent collaborations, according to Wesley Bonner, head of social and audience development at BDG. Geoff Schiller, Vox Media CRO, said the company wants to continue to grow sponsorships for its editorial franchises after experiencing year-over-year growth in this area in 2024.

Elizabeth Bagdasarian, svp, U.S. commercial at Future who primarily oversees sales across the company’s fashion, beauty and homes titles, said diversification is her main priority this year. That means offering sponsorship opportunities across Future’s portfolio including in-person experiences, newsletters and livestream shopping. It could also mean more AI products. Future’s Who What Wear publication launched an AI chatbot last year that serves recommendations tailored to readers’ budget and style specifications. Products like that chatbot can be sold to advertisers, such as having a retailer sponsor a chatbot that generates holiday gift ideas, Bagdasarian said.

Expanding reach

The U.S. presidential election last year helped boost reach and engagement for some publishers, and media execs hope to keep that momentum going this year.

The Hill is focused on expanding its videos, podcasts, events and memberships in 2025 to reach more audiences, according to Taylor Scott, head of product. Video views and podcast listens experienced double-digit growth in 2024, he noted, without providing figures.

At The Economist, the goal is also reach — to help boost subscriptions and engagement. That means upgrading The Economist’s app to offer a better and more personalized user experience and invest in more brand marketing, according to Luke Bradley-Jones, The Economist’s president. He noted The Economist had “record traffic” across its site and app, and just last week the publisher had its highest week of new subscribers since 2021.

Reach is also top of mind at the BBC. “My primary goal in 2025 is intentionally straightforward: expand the reach and relevance of the BBC here in the U.S., and more broadly outside of the U.K.,” said Ben Goldberger, gm and executive director of editorial content at BBC Studios. 

Sara Badler, who became chief advertising officer of North America at Guardian News & Media last September, said her goal this year is to have her new revenue team “dramatically grow awareness around everything the Guardian and its huge American audience has to offer.”

What’s out in 2025? 

So what are publishing execs leaving behind this year? Five execs told Digiday they are continuing to move away from a reliance on other platforms for traffic and revenue.

“Chasing higher volumes is not as much of a priority as it was last year,” said The Hill’s Scott. “2025 is not an election year and there simply isn’t enough audience interest to exclusively sustain our business. What this year does offer is a complex political news cycle of policies and legislation coming from the government that affects everyday citizens.”

McKown and Garibaldi at The Atlantic said they are moving away from “volatile” traffic platforms and focusing on direct relationships with its audience.

“No one owes publishers free traffic or free revenue,” said Jon Roberts, chief innovation officer at Dotdash Meredith. “We have to be essential to our readers and our advertising clients.”

What we’ve heard

“I would love to see the industry start to react even more quicker to cultural moments and trends [versus] needing long lead times to plan and produce. In the era of culture and brands living on social, we have to be quicker and move as fast as the consumer expects.”

— Chris Anthony, CRO at Gallery Media Group

Numbers to know

200: The number of journalists at The New York Times’ sports site The Athletic that want company management to recognize their newsroom union to join the Times Guild.

40%: The amount of The Washington Post’s content that is deemed “unsafe” by advertisers, due to issues of news avoidance.

4%: The percentage of total staff The Washington Post is laying off, on the business side.

4,000: The number of journalism job cuts in the U.K. and U.S. in 2024, down from 2023.

What we’ve covered

Publishers set sights on softer news and more social media in preparation for a second Trump era

• When Donald Trump becomes president later this month, some news publishers will focus on softer news stories to more social media monitoring and engagement to cover his second term.
• But other publishers say it’s still too early to make any notable changes to editorial strategy and find it unnecessary to shift resources or coverage plans yet.

Read more about how publishers are preparing for Trump’s return here.

Revenue tactics and TikTok were some of 2024’s biggest topics for publishers

• According to Digiday+ Research studies, revenue tactics and TikTok were some of the topics most on publishing execs’ minds last year.
• Direct-sold ads, branded content and subscriptions will be publishers’ biggest focuses heading into 2025.

Read more from the Digiday+ Research survey 2024 round up here.

A timeline of the major deals between publishers and AI companies

• A wave of deals between AI companies and publishers was first kicked off by an agreement between the Associated Press and OpenAI in July 2023, with new deals announced nearly every month in 2024.
• Publishers signed deals with companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, ProRata and Perplexity.

See a timeline of deals between publishers and AI here.

Referral traffic from Google Discover increases in 2024 amid the steady decline of referrals from social

• Publishers saw increases in traffic from Google Discover — and Google Search’s generative AI feature hasn’t had a negative impact on the traffic to publishers’ sites.
• Other than Facebook, social platforms like Instagram, Reddit and Threads are all driving marginal traffic to publishers’ sites these days.

Read about how publishers’ referral traffic changed in 2024 here.

What we’re reading

Meta is bringing political content back to its social platforms

Meta is bringing political content back to Facebook, Instagram and Threads after phasing political content out of those feeds in 2021, as part of larger changes to its content moderation policies, TechCrunch reported. This content will be served to users based on their personalized signals and provide more controls.

Google’s new TV will summarize news content 

Google unveiled the latest version of its TV operating system at CES, which uses the company’s Gemini AI assistant to summarize the biggest news of the day, scraping news stories from across the internet and headlines from news channels’ YouTube videos, TechCrunch reported. It is planned to launch at the end of this year.

Time staffers concerned about coziness with Trump

Interviews with a dozen current and former staffers reveal concern over owner Marc Benioff’s embrace of incoming president Donald Trump, and changes to the business in the past few years that focuses on developing close ties with powerful people, according to the San Francisco Standard. 

Reuters, Gannett to sell bundled subscriptions

Reuters and Gannett are teaming up to sell bundled subscriptions this quarter, targeting smaller media companies that want access to more content. The bundle will be sold by Reuters and Gannett will get a share of the revenue, according to Axios. The subscriptions will include news coverage, photos, graphics and video but won’t include access to games and puzzles from Gannett’s newspaper brands.

Editor’s note: This story was updated to reflect Hearst Magazines‘ 2024 direct digital business growth, provided after publication.