All eyes forward

Media execs have big goals for 2026. They’re setting their sights on AI revenue and visibility opportunities, brand marketing pushes, plus a big year in U.S. politics and sports. 

They may have emerged bruised by a rocky 2025, which hit them with a new search landscape, AI copyright battles and a challenging advertising market. But as the year turns, there’s a sense of renewed resolve. 

At least that’s the tone for now, according to recent Digiday conversations and seven media execs from CNN, Forbes, Future, Hearst, USA Today Co., The Wall Street Journal, and Vox Media, Digiday spoke with for this story. 

AI advertising revenue opportunities

Publishers are increasingly turning to AI as a practical tool inside their ad businesses. Expect to see publishers integrate AI more deeply into their media buying, yield management and ad sales functions this year, using it to price inventory, package audiences more effectively and extract more value from fewer visits.

“In 2026, we’re moving past the ‘experimental’ phase of AI. At Dow Jones, our advertising focus is on using these tools to make our partnerships more precise,” said Josh Stinchomb, global CRO at The Wall Street Journal. 

The business publisher is integrating generative AI into everything from the initial client research phase to the way it builds and refines brands’ media plans in real-time, helping its ads business move faster with deeper insights that can improve performance, he noted.

Other publishers are experimenting with building in-house, media buying AI agents to help automate the process of analyzing, planning and curating RFPs — another area that will evolve this year.

This is all buoyed by the fact that publishing execs are seeing the first quarter of 2026 off to a good start, with ad revenue pacing better this month compared to previous years for some, thanks to premium video, and direct and PMP deals.

AI visibility gains and KPI changes

Publishers’ KPIs are shifting as traffic and scale fade as the key metric for a successful media business. Top publishing execs are orienting their businesses entirely around KPIs, like conversion and engagement metrics, including subscriptions, registrations, and overhauling sites to make them stickier so that even if they get fewer visits, they’re more valuable. What this ultimately means for goals and targets facing SEO and audience teams this year remains unclear, but it’s likely to become apparent soon.

Resources are also now being funneled into tracking newer metrics like AI visibility, or how often a publisher is mentioned or cited in an AI search tool. Media execs are working with third-party tools — or building their own analytics — to get a better understanding of how, when and why they’re being mentioned across AI products.

U.K.-based publisher Future recently built its own AI visibility measurement tool to do just that. The insights from that tool, called Future Optic, is key to the company’s editorial and branded content strategy this year, according to Future CRO Michael Peralta. 

“We’re only on first base on some of the stuff that we’re doing around AI and working with LLMs, so that’s a big deal for us for [this] year,” he said.

Brand marketing push

AI visibility measurement tools aren’t the only thing publishers are putting more resources behind. With search and social algorithms deprioritizing news, publishers are revisiting brand marketing, as they can no longer rely on organic traffic or discovery from platforms.

“One of my big goals [for 2026] is for [people] to really know us as Future… We have [all of these different brands], and we also have scale,” Peralta said.

The Financial Times debuted a marketing campaign for its subscription product on Wednesday, across TV, out of home, audio, digital and social. Publishers like Hearst, NBC News and Reuters ratcheted up their brand marketing last year, debuting expansive campaigns across platforms. The Economist also told Digiday it had big plans to bolster its brand marketing, in part by promoting access to more content for free to increase registration and subscription conversions. More media companies will funnel money into these campaigns to draw attention to their companies and the content they produce.

“In a world of content commoditization, our biggest priority is to succinctly communicate how our brands, shows and podcasts add unique value to consumers and customers,” said Geoff Schiller, Vox Media CRO.

Video expansions and creator collaborations

News outlets like Time, CNN, The New York Times added more vertical video to their sites and apps at the end of last year, to appeal to audiences and marketers accustomed to consuming content and buying ads in this format on social media feeds. For Time and Recurrent Ventures, video ad revenue will be one of the biggest growth drivers of their businesses in 2026. Likewise, Guy Griggs, svp of ad sales and client partnerships at CNN, said his top priority for 2026 is to expand and monetize more brand-safe online video and streaming content.

At the same time, publishers are building their own networks of creators they can invest in to collaborate on personality-led video, to drive more video ad revenue and audience engagement. Publishers like Yahoo and Future are focused on expanding their creator networks this year.

“I think we’ve got a really good right to win in the retail media space, particularly with our high-intent audience. We can work with influencers and advertisers at scale [with our branded content business]. I think that’s going to be a big deal for us,” Future’s Peralta said.

Hearst Magazines will expand more into its creator-driven, tentpole franchises this year, after seeing success from programs like ELLE’s Women in Hollywood, Bazaar’s Icons, according to Lisa Ryan Howard, global CRO of Hearst Magazines.

“[We will expand] social-first video-led storytelling events and scaled creator integrations to help our partners break through with high-impact programs both domestically and globally,” she said. 

In 2026, Hearst Magazines is also focused on selling what it calls “360 Bundles,” or ad sales packages that include content production, creator collaborations, and distribution across multiple channels, Ryan Howard added.

“More than ever, [we are] amping distribution offsite through social and video, live events, original editorial content collaborations, creator partnerships, newsletters [and] vodcasts,” she said.

Meanwhile, Forbes is focused on expanding social and video content, creators and talent partnerships and event franchises, according to Leann Bonanno, the publisher’s chief sales and marketing officer.

“In 2026, one of Forbes’ key business priorities is advancing a content strategy built for how audiences and advertising partners engage today — across digital, social, video, AI-driven discovery, and live experiences,” she said.

Big election, sports year

Like all the election years before it, the U.S. midterms this November represent a potential windfall of audience and ad revenue growth opportunities for news and politics publishers.

USA Today Co. (formerly Gannett) is one of the news media orgs banking on this in 2026.

In an election year, committing to a “facts-forward approach” for both center-right and center-left voters — is its focus, according to Kristin Roberts, USA Today Media president.

This summer, the FIFA World Cup will be held in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, providing another opportunity for USA Today Co. to increase its sports coverage this year from both its local and national brands, Roberts added.

What we’ve heard

“Honestly, I think the days of just expecting a fully curated experience of what editors think you should see that day in kind of stacked headline format [on a homepage] — I think those days are over. It just is going to feel archaic to people. So I do think that they expect us to go the extra mile to learn more about them and give them results that are tailored to things they’re interested in.”

— Nina Gould, chief innovation officer at Forbes

Numbers to know

66%: The decline in the price of BuzzFeed’s stock in 2025, down to $0.93 on Dec. 31. 

17,163: The number of job cuts at U.S.-based media companies (TV, film, digital publishing and broadcast) in 2025, an 18% increase from 2024.

3.88%: The year-over-year increase in display advertising revenue for members of the Association of Online Publishers (AOP).

$50 million: The size of the investment from billionaire David Hoffmann in newspaper chain Lee Enterprises.

What we’ve covered

Here are some of the stories you may have missed during the holiday break:

Why publishers are building their own creator networks

• News publishers like CNN, Yahoo, The Washington Post, Future and Bustle Digital Group are curating groups of creators to form networks and membership programs that they can use to collaborate on personality-led video and written content.
• Faced with collapsing referral traffic, platform algorithm changes, waning relevance among younger audiences and the growing dominance of individual creators, publishers are turning to creators for help – and oportunity.

Read more here.

How Cloudflare’s Matthew Prince became publishing’s unexpected defender

• Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince initially dismissed publishers’ fears about AI crawlers, but after seeing how AI companies were scraping way more content than the traffic they were sending back to sites, he began championing tools and strategies to help publishers protect their content and business models.
• Prince has pushed for changes like pay-per-crawl controls and regulatory pressure on tech giants, positioning Cloudflare as an unexpected advocate for publisher leverage in negotiations with AI platforms

Read more here.

All the major deals between publishers and AI tech companies in 2025

• Digiday tracked all the major AI content licensing deals between tech companies and publishers as a wrap in 2024. We did it again for 2025. 
• 2025 started out with agreements between Axios and OpenAI, and The Associated Press and Google, and ended with new deals from Microsoft and Meta.

Read the timeline here.

No playbook, just pressure: Publishers eye the rise of agentic browsers

• Publishers are watching agentic AI browsers closely because they’re a new kind of middleman: instead of sending readers to sites, they can read, summarize and act on information inside the browser itself.
• That could further cut publishers out of both clicks and the audience relationship, just as AI search is already doing. But for now, those fears remain largely theoretical. 

Read more here.

The biggest SEO lessons in 2025 for publishers

• AI-powered search rewrote the rules of SEO last year with diminishing click-through rates and referral traffic upending decades of SEO strategies. 
• Publishers shifted from optimizing headlines and keywords to brand visibility and attribution tracking to appear in AI search results: KPIs are changing, more AI search data is becoming available, and publishers are looking beyond search to grow their audiences and revenue.

Read more here.

What’s in and out for publishers in 2026

• Even for battle-worn publishers well accustomed to rewriting their playbooks amid major industry disruptions, 2025 was pretty rough. 
• The stomach-dropping moments are easy to pinpoint: copyright hell thanks to AI engines’ unscrupulous scraping, and the erosion of referral traffic — largely caused by the emerging competitive AI search landscape. 

Read Digiday’s guide to what’s in and out for 2026 here.

Here are the biggest moments in AI for publishers in 2025

• 2025 the year AI went from being a future concern for publishers to being part of their daily reality. Generative AI was weaved into traffic analyses, licensing negotiations and product development.
• Clicks from search waned. AI answers increasingly replaced blue links that drive people to publishers’ sites. Some companies struck AI content licensing deals, while others blocked AI crawlers, pursued lawsuits or shipped AI-powered products of their own. 

Read more about the moments that defined how publishers adapted to the AI era here.

What we’re reading

OpenAI’s new journalist academy signals AI is reshaping newsrooms

OpenAI’s new Academy for News Organizations signals an admittance from the tech company: AI is reshaping newsrooms, according to The Media Copilot.

GQ editor Will Welch steps down

Will Welch is leaving GQ after seven years as its top editor, to work in Paris with Pharrell, the musician and men’s creative director of Louis Vuitton, The New York Times reported.

TV show America’s Test Kitchen buys Food52

Cooking TV show America’s Test Kitchen is buying Food52 after the recipe site filed for bankruptcy. The offer is worth $6.5 million, Bloomberg reported.

Data from Wired users and subscribers allegedly leaked

A hacker is claiming to have leaked a database of 23 million records associated with users and subscribers of Wired (the Condé Nast tech magazine), including personally identifiable information like email addresses, phone numbers and mailing addresses, SiliconAngle reported.