Last week, data from publisher ad alliance Ozone revealed that ad supply in the UK and US fell by 40 percent YoY in Q2, as the rise of AI overviews and chatbots eat into publishers’ search traffic – and by extension, their ad revenues. As one of the UK’s largest online news publishers, Reach (which owns the Mirror, Express, and an array of regional and local titles) is vulnerable to these digital trends. In yesterday’s half-year earnings update, the group reported that revenues declined by nine percent YoY in H1 2026, with digital revenues down by 11 percent.
But the company’s digital capabilities also make it highly responsive to these shifts, running its own ad tech products and increasingly embracing AI tools of its own. In the earnings call, Reach CEO Piers North said the business was moving “further away from a reliance on referral traffic”, and is working on the assumption that Google traffic is “unlikely to recover.”
As a result, the publisher is focusing on “original content, paid subscriptions, quality video, social engagement, off-platform distribution, and a range of moves in the AI licencing space.” And according to North, this strategy is already starting to see positive results.
“Our focus areas are making sure we have more control on how our content is consumed and used by other parties,” North told investors. “In other words, we’re actively creating a more sustainable digital business model and that is beginning to pay off. For example, whilst lower-yielding off-platform revenues have grown over 90 percent, we are getting going with emerging licencing deals and some of the regulation around how the tech platforms engage with other businesses in the UK is moving us in the right direction.”
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The CEO noted that the off-platform (such as views on YouTube and Facebook) and video sides of the business are increasingly important sources of revenue, since platform page views have declined by 40 percent YoY. Over the same period, social video views rose by 55 percent, and the company said its investment in video is “attracting more agency work” due to its ability to deliver more complex briefs. The executives also referenced the importance of local journalism in the AI era.
“This is what the AI machines cannot replicate because even the best large language model doesn’t know what happened at the end of your road just recently,” said North.
And by using AI in its newsrooms and advertising teams, Reach is focused on “streamlining content creation”, including in video. The company said its new publishing platform, Launchpad, will combine all its in-house AI tools, including its contextual ad solution Mantis (and the recently announced Mantis Video) and its editorial AI product Guten.
“This means as a content creator or a journalist on the move, you can use AI to give you headline options, use data for ideation, content originality and value, grab an image from our archive, edit, upload video, all distributed from your mobile,” explained North.
Reach is also engaging with tech companies to licence its content for use in AI models, according to North, both with Big Tech firms and smaller scalable payment models. In March, the company signed a deal with Amazon AWS to allow its content to be used in the tech giant’s AI products, with compensation based on usage. North said the deal is providing “ongoing revenues”, and the publisher is working on closing deals with other major platforms in H2, in order to monetise the use of its content by AI companies.
“The industry obviously has referred to this practise as scraping, but if policy, regulation, the tech and the markets can catch up to these developments, it will mean a much fairer and clearer value exchange for content businesses like us in an AI world akin to the real time bidding that we’ve had in advertising for decades,” said North. “We know our content has tremendous value. The numbers validate that to our audiences and to other businesses, including AI firms. And we’re just at the start of monetising this.”
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