Why 2025 Is the Year Publishers Finally Turn Attention Into Revenue
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In 2024 the news was...
Reflecting on Press Gazette Future of Media Event 2024, when we approach the end of 2025 while digital publishing is going through its most important plot twist in a decade.
Executives at Newsquest Media Group, The Telegraph, Forbes and InsurAds share advertising strategy insights on #Publishers alternatives despite Google #cookies U-turn.
Morgan Stevenson, Digital Director said Newsquest Media Group had “done very well pushing our direct sales with lots of local businesses. That’s predominantly what the Newsquest model focuses on”.
Gareth Cross, Digital Director from The Telegraph, said that over the last year “we have seen our areas of focus, our direct-sold, grow. We’ve seen our partnerships grow, and digital revenues, from an advertising perspective, are up. And they will grow again this year”.
Kyle Vinansky, CSO at Forbes said "we continue to grow our registered users, but we view that as multifaceted – it’s people that attend our events, it’s people that subscribe to our newsletters, it’s people that subscribe for digital or print access.”
Nuno Brilha, Global CMO & CRO at InsurAds said the Attention Management Platform as the capability to also support reader-revenue subscription services as part of a recently-launched strategic partnership with Mather and its content and analytics platform, Sophi.
Google's reversal on third‑party cookie deprecation felt, for many publishers, like a strange kind of relief. But the real story isn't about cookies at all. It's about what happened because publishers thought cookies were going away: they built better, smarter, more resilient businesses.
And that shift has opened the door to something far bigger: Attention is becoming the core currency of publisher revenue.
This is the strategic inflection point we focus to work at InsurAds – and where I believe the entire industry is heading, whether it realises it yet or not.
The Cookie U‑Turn Was a Wake‑Up Call, Not a Reprieve
When Google stepped back from killing third‑party cookies in Chrome, many publishers didn't celebrate – they grimaced. By then, the smartest operators had already spent years building first‑party data strategies and rethinking their dependence on opaque, third‑party programmatic pipes. That preparation is now paying off.
I've spoken with executives from groups like Newsquest, Forbes and The Telegraph who all say some version of the same thing: five to ten years ago, even very large publishers knew surprisingly little about their audiences. Today, they are operating as data‑rich platforms with deep insight into user behaviour, propensity, and value.
Industry benchmarks confirm this shift:
- Over 70% of publishers now identify first‑party data as the main driver of improved ad performance, and that number is still rising.
- Revenue strategies are moving from "fill as many impressions as possible" to "understand every user and every visit."
This is the foundation on which attention‑based monetization is being built.
Why Attention Is the Performance Metric That Matters
For years, the industry optimised for what was easy to count:
- Impressions
- Click‑through rate
- Basic viewability thresholds
The problem is simple: none of these truly reflect whether a human being actually paid attention.
Recent outcomes data makes the gap impossible to ignore:
1. Attention‑based strategies have delivered 40%+ gains in upper‑funnel metrics and over 50% improvements in lower‑funnel performance for brands.
2. High‑attention ad exposures have been associated with more than 2x conversion lifts and drastically lower cost per action.
In other words: not all "viewable" impressions are equal. This is exactly the problem we set out to solve at InsurAds. Rather than approximating attention from samples or panels, our Time & Attention Management Platform measures:
- Real‑time, unique user attention down to the millisecond
- Live, dynamic audiences of engaged users instead of averages
- True Ad Revenue Per User (AdRPU)potential across each session
For publishers, this unlocks a new kind of inventory: guaranteed attention, not just potential visibility. For advertisers, it offers something the industry has been promising for years but rarely delivering at scale: pay only when someone actually pays attention.
From "More Ads" to "Better Experiences": The UX Pivot
One of the most important mindset shifts happening inside premium publishers right now is deceptively simple:
"Ad experiences should engage, not enrage."
The Telegraph embodies this philosophy. When certain formats under‑perform or damage user experience, they don't just add more inventory to compensate – they remove or redesign them. The result: fewer, more impactful ad placements and, critically, growth in direct‑sold advertising revenue.
This is supported by wider research:
- A significant majority of internet users report feeling overwhelmed by the volume of ads they encounter online.
- Reducing clutter tends to increase overall attention on the units that remain, raising their value to brands.
At InsurAds, we build that philosophy into product design:
- By measuring attention in real time, the platform identifies when a user is over‑served (annoyed) or under‑served (revenue left on the table).
- Campaigns are dynamically optimised so that each impression has a purpose – what we call "zero‑waste advertising" – where inventory is only consumed when attention is actually secured.
I've always framed attention not as a vanity "new KPI", but as the operational backbone of a better user experience and a more premium, trustworthy advertising environment. The two go hand in hand.
The Subscription Mindset – Applied to Advertising
One of the most interesting innovations emerging from leading publishers is the subscription model for advertisers. Newsquest, for example, has developed bundled, high‑performing campaign structures for specific verticals and sells them on a recurring, subscription‑like basis. That alone now represents 16–17% of their ad revenue.
At the same time, the overall revenue mix is shifting:
- Five years ago, advertising represented around 42% of revenue versus 22% from subscriptions.
- Today, that split has moved toward 38% advertising and 33% subscriptions, with many publishers nervous about advertising's volatility.
The real opportunity is not "ads vs subscriptions" – it is Total Audience Monetization.
This is the strategic space where we're placing our bets at InsurAds:
- Through our integration with partners like Mather Economics and Sophi, publishers can combine real‑time attention metrics with first‑party revenue models.
- Instead of treating every visit the same, they can calculate Ad Revenue Per User (AdRPU) and decide, in real time, whether that user should see:
Attention stops being just a way to sell media. It becomes a decision engine for the entire monetization strategy.
What Forward‑Thinking Publishers Are Doing Now
For publisher CEOs, CROs and strategy leaders, the playbook emerging from this shift is clear.
Here are the moves that define the most advanced operators:
- Owning the audience relationship Invest in consented, high‑quality first‑party data and contextual intelligence. Make it the spine of every commercial conversation.
- Elevating attention to a core KPI Go beyond "viewable" and start reporting on time in view, engagement depth, and attention per user. Use it as a common language between editorial, product, and commercial teams.
- Redesigning the ad experience Remove clutter. Focus on fewer, "hero" placements powered by verified attention. Treat every impression as a scarce, premium asset, not a commodity.
- Building advertiser "subscriptions" Package high‑performing, attention‑backed formats and strategies into predictable, recurring offers. Create revenue you can forecast with confidence.
- Optimising Total Audience Monetization Connect attention data with paywall, subscription and CRM logic. Decide in real time whether a user is more valuable as an ad impression, a subscriber, or both.
Final Thought: Lead the Attention Economy, Don't Chase It
The industry has spent years optimising what can be counted instead of what actually counts. In 2025, that excuse is gone.
In 2025, that excuse is gone. In the new #AISearch world of 2025, that excuse is gone, and measuring true ad performance is business critical, and #Publishers have embraced #attention as a core performance metric – not just for #mediasales but for developing a actual #totalaudience strategy.
#InsurAds #GCPP #AttentionEconomy #AttentionMetrics #AttentionData #TimeandAttention #DigitalAdvertising #AdTech#Programmatic #PublisherRevenue #DigitalPublishing #CurationHD #ReaderRevenue #MediaMonetization #GooglePartner
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