‘Quality publishers are stronger together’ – Ozone offers strength in numbers

The annual global digital advertising market has been estimated to be worth around US$1 trillion. It reached nearly $300 billion in the United States alone in 2025, according to the most recent IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report: Full Year 2025. However, according to our most recent World Press Trends report, news publishers globally are capturing only about $15.7 billion of that amount, a tiny percentage of the total.

Created by news publishers for news publishers, alliances such as Ozone and France’s 366 provide publishers with a broad array of support to help them sell advertising today while also investing and experimenting with ways to strengthen their positions for the future.

Launched in the UK in 2018 by four large UK publishers (News UK, the Guardian, Telegraph Media Group and Reach plc), Ozone has grown massively, expanding to the United States and Europe.

WAN-IFRA Members can watch Danny Spears’s presentation on our Knowledge Hub as well as download his presentation slides.

The initiative began with the shared belief that “publishers create incredible value,” Danny Spears, Chief Operating Officer of Ozone, told our World News Media Congress participants. “The economic question is always whether we will retain that value or whether instead it will end up in the pockets of others,” he added.

The founding thesis, Spears added, was this: “Quality publishers are stronger together. And that was against the backdrop of a technology ecosystem, which has been constructed to systematically extract value from the publishing industry – which is a problem that is too large for any individual publisher to tackle alone.”

‘Obsessed’ with making it easy to invest in journalism at scale

Today, Spears said, Ozone has built relationships with 75 of the largest media companies in the world, including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, the BBC, People Inc., Deutsche Welle and Warner Bros.

While Ozone started in the UK, the United States is now their biggest market, and they are rapidly expanding into Europe, he said.

Ozone has long been “obsessed with making it as easy as possible for marketers to invest at scale into journalism,” he noted.

Also vital, Spears said, is that “publishers are rewarded for their contribution, both inventory and data assets while maintaining control of the underlying control of the first-party audience.”

New ‘Ozone Labs’ aiming to drive rapid innovation

Recently, the alliance launched Ozone Labs, a research and innovation vehicle created to address emerging issues as they arise.

Ozone Labs “deliberately sits outside of Ozone’s core business,” Spears said, “because these questions are too early for product development, but also too consequential for us to ignore as an industry.”

Specifically, Ozone Labs offers experiments aimed at driving rapid innovation, Spears said. For example, they offer hack days that are run with individual marketers and publishers.

Ozone Labs also has “longer-term experiments that are focused on where the industry needs to go. And critically, these findings are published. Our focus is on moving the industry,” he said.

“We need to build tools that allow publishers to address information asymmetry and we will always be vocal in calling out the need for publishers to move together because industry-level challenges are just too big to be tackled alone,” Spears said.

“As our industry is at a crossroads moment, we’re faced with both huge opportunity on one hand and huge jeopardy on the other. And it feels like the position we take as business leaders now – or indeed fail to take if we don’t act – will determine the future of our industry.”

Video: Highlights from the World News Media Congress 2026

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