Shortly after Google announced its plans to deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome back in 2020, UK news publishing group Reach announced a new ‘customer value strategy’, designed to prepare the company for a post-cookie future. The strategy centred on capturing customer insights and data in order to serve audiences more relevant content, while using that same data to target ads and drive up digital ad revenues.
While third-party cookies no longer look set to disappear from Chrome entirely, Reach executives say the strategy has delivered strong results for the publisher regardless. Reach’s full year financial results show that while total revenues fell by 5.3 percent, to £538.6 million, digital revenues were up by 2.1 percent. And within digital, its data-driven revenues which are driving growth.
Data-driven revenues (i.e., digital revenues fuelled by Reach’s first-party data) rose by seven percent year-on-year in 2024, more than offsetting a two percent drop in non data-driven revenues. Forty-five percent of Reach’s digital revenues now come under the ‘data-driven’ banner.
There are a number of factors at play here. Reach is able to charge higher prices for data-driven ads, and yield for data-driven inventory has increased in recent years. Data-driven revenues are also less sensitive to page view volume (which has been a key issue for publishers, as changes to tech platforms’ algorithms have led to declining traffic referrals.
Another side benefit, pointed out by CEO Jim Mullen, is that the customer value strategy has seen Reach publications forge closer relationships with audiences. And this in turn is helping Reach-owned newspapers become less dependent on search traffic, which is at risk of drying up as search engines promote AI-generated news summaries within their interfaces.
Asked about the threat of AI summaries on an investors call, Mullen acknowledged they do pose a potential challenge. “Is there a risk that people get stuck in an AI loop? Yes there is,” he said. “Everyone who’s searching on Google or any other search engine at the moment will see that roughly at least a third of the page is generative AI, and then you get the list below it. I think it’s really important that publishers and journalists get close to their readers, so for something which you are particularly interested in, which is important to you, which you find engaging, you know where to go to.”
“The customer value strategy was not delivered to […] fight back against generative AI, it was there to fight back originally against cookies,” he said. “But it just happens to turn out that it helps us deal with this generative AI loop.”
Beyond the handheld camera
For the time being at least, the majority of revenues sit outside of the data-driven category, and there were some positive signs for these revenue streams too.
Open marketplace programmatic yields stabilised in 2024, having fallen the previous year. Mullen said this is good news, though he’s waiting to see if the trend holds in 2025. Page views meanwhile were up year-on-year in Q4, though again, unpredictability in the market makes it hard to forecast whether growth will continue this year.
Reach has also seen investments in social video paying off. Reach now claims to have 100 million followers across its accounts, and social video views grew by 12 percent year-on-year in 2024. Mullen said he expects Reach’s investments in professional studio capabilities will start paying dividends in terms of driving further growth.
“Clearly we need to have our own capabilities to produce high quality video,” he said. “And I’m not saying that handheld video production by a journalist, which they have been doing brilliantly for a couple of years, isn’t good enough. But to walk into a studio with state-of-the-art equipment, to invite — whether it’s sports stars or politicians — to a studio which is sound proof and confidential is clearly a requirement.”
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