This Media Briefing covers the latest in media trends for Digiday+ members and is distributed over email every Thursday at 10 a.m. ET. More from the series →
This week’s Media Briefing looks at news publishers’ pitch to the ad market at the IAB NewFronts, amid continuing challenges to get marketers to invest more ad dollars in news, and an uncertain economic environment.
News publishers have spent years banging the same drum: that hard news is safe for brands and essential for democracy. But for all the talk, advertisers still flinch. Now, tired of noble pleas falling on deaf ears, publishers refuse to back down but know they need to sharpen the message.
Some have used the IAB NewFronts, which kicked off this week in New York City, to hammer home the need for advertisers to up their investment.
An IAB NewFronts news spotlight session on Wednesday featured execs from the Guardian, NBCUniversal, Yahoo and The Washington Post. The New York Times will host its own presentation at the IAB NewFronts later today for the first time since 2019.
A common tactic this year is to pitch content that isn’t hard news or politics. At the Yahoo NewFronts presentation on Tuesday night, Yahoo News svp and gm Kat Downs Mulder announced a deal with AI news platform Goodable that would aggregate “wholesome” and “heartwarming” good news content. Marcia Lesser, vp and head of sales at Yahoo Ads, later told Digiday this would provide additional inventory that Yahoo can sell. She added that advertisers’ aversion to news content has “exacerbated” recently.
“From an exposure and open dialogue perspective, this is top of mind… when we speak with clients and agency partners, it’s topical,” Lesser said at the IAB NewFronts session on Wednesday. “It has to move from conceptually agreeing and aligning with this to, ‘What actions can we talk from the publisher and marketer side to move forward and improve the situation?’”
The New York Times — in addition to showing off its full product including non-news content like Cooking, Wirecutter and Games — will present its expansion plans for its generative AI ad targeting tool, BrandMatch, to its NewsFronts audience on Thursday.
The Guardian is on a similar tear. The message that publishers have more to offer than war, politics and other hard news topics is core to the Guardian’s pitch this year. It will be pushing its lifestyle and other content that’s an easier sell.
“How do we talk about that [its full range of content] more for the brands that don’t want to be around news?” said Sara Badler, the Guardian’s North America chief advertising officer. “[And for] brands that do want to be around news or aren’t convinced yet — it’s really just, this is where people are reading, this is where people are showing up, and you should be a part of it… It’s kind of this silly thing that we keep saying, ‘Oh, we don’t want to be a part of the thing that’s happening in our country.’”
The Guardian also plans to hire more than a dozen new editorial roles as it expands in the U.S. The publisher synced its NewFronts presence with the launch of its new mobile app, which users can customize to their own writer and topic preferences, and features a new puzzle game hub, along with a new, more consistent home page design across its U.K., U.S. and Australia sites.
Yet, publishers are facing some grim realities. Sheryl Goldstein IAB evp and chief industry growth officer, highlighted that investment in news is practically at rock bottom. Before 2016, 20% or more of one ad agency’s budgets went to news publishers, Goldstein said. Now that’s less than 4% of its budget, according to Goldstein.
And publishers’ earnings calls this week have painted an equally troubling picture, with the cloud of tariffs-induced uncertainty casting a shadow over forecasts. IAC reported flat digital advertising revenue for Dotdash Meredith in Q1 2025 year over year, with CFO Christopher Halpin citing a softening of programmatic pricing likely caused by the Trump tariffs. Gannett also had flat digital ad revenue year over year in the quarter.
Goldstein conceded that publishers’ message to advertisers needs to change. Pushing advertisers to put budgets behind news publishers to support democracy isn’t enough to convince the buy side. “From last year to this year, we’ve learned… we need to focus [the message] on, ‘How news can make a difference in my [a buyer’s] media plan, and the outcomes [and ROI] we can get from it.’ As opposed to, ‘It’s good for the world,’” she told Digiday.
Lou Paskalis, CEO of marketing consultancy AJL Advisory, believes advertisers need to adopt a complete “behavior change” to put more ad dollars behind news publishers. “It’s almost like a political campaign of its own to get people rethinking about news advertising,” he said.
Independent agency group Stagwell is in publishers’ corners. It launched the “Future of News” initiative last year to bring more awareness to ad buyers about an inequality in investment going to news publishers. And it will host a free-to-attend, NewFronts-style event this October to do the same.
Stagwell’s study of 50,000 people last May showed that ads placed next to hard news like gun shootings and politics performed as well as ads next to “positive” business stories, on par with sports and entertainment stories. The agency set a goal in March to increase its ad spend in news media by 22% year-over-year in 2025.
“Our goal is to get news considered on equal footing with sports and entertainment when people consider placement of media. There should be no systematic discrimination against news,” Stagwell chairman and CEO Mark Penn told Digiday.
But publishers are trying to prove the unduplicated reach of news consumers. Goldstein, Paskalis and the publishing execs in this story touted the incrementality of news audiences — these are readers not easily available elsewhere, they argued. And the publishing execs at the IAB NewFronts news session talked up the brand suitability and targeting tools they can offer advertisers to ensure their ad placements are showing up next to relevant and brand safe content, they said.
Elephant in the room: keyword blocking
Publishers have long had a tough time convincing advertisers that their content is brand safe, an issue that kicked up in 2020 around polarizing coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement. “The brand safety conversation went off the deep end… Keyword blocklists kept getting bigger and bigger,” said Penn.
Keyword blocking remains a blunt tool that is a thorn in publishers’ sides. Goldstein said she spoke with an agency that only recently discovered it was still blocking the keyword “Ariana Grande” ever since the attack at her concert in 2017, despite the fact that she’s been in the news cycle recently as the star of the movie “Wicked.”
But here’s the rub: how much do the majority of buyers really care? “The easier thing to do is block news,” said Mike Treon, head of connected TV & video strategy at independent ad agency PMG. “The demand side is going to err on not having to deal with it. We have to find the balance between investment and level of risk and what that is, and really understand what that is at a granular level — brand by brand and publisher by publisher.”
What we’ve heard
“[Programmatic advertising] is a more resilient form of revenue… I would expect it to be a higher percentage if we ended up in an unexpected macro kind of downturn. But it will be important regardless of what happens in the economy.”
– BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti discussing investing in more programmatic revenue in an uncertain macro economy, during the company’s Q1 2025 earnings call on Wednesday.
3 Qs with Condé Nast’s CRO
Unlike its usual splashy New Fronts presentation, Condé Nast will show two of its documentaries at the event today: “I Am Not a Robot” from the New Yorker and “Making of the Met” from Vogue. But much of its focus was on a 150-person dinner for advertisers at the New York Public Library held Wednesday night. Each table was centered around a Condé Nast publication with special guests — GQ had actor Jon Hamm, and Vanity Fair had CNN anchor Dana Bash, for example.
Condé Nast CRO Elizabeth Herbst-Brady – who joined the company nine months ago — spoke to Digiday about its pitch to marketers at this year’s IAB NewFronts and why the event is important.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
How is Condé Nast approaching the NewFronts this year, and what is the message to marketers?
The current media marketing landscape — with all the fragmentation and noise, concerns about misinformation, the impact of AI — consumers and clients alike are more and more focused on the need for credible, understood brands with integrity and authenticity… We reach over a billion consumers worldwide… [Last year,] we delivered $600 million worth of sales of products off the backs of our editorial.
Does this smaller event mean Condé Nast is spending less money on the NewFronts this year?
This year, we felt that… this is where we wanted to focus [our efforts]… We’re still as committed to video and all the various formats that are important, and we just thought that this would be an interesting and fun and only Condé Nast experience… Costs were not a part of it, is what I can tell you.
How much revenue can you attribute to the NewFronts?
I don’t look at any one moment and say, “This is how much money I made.” I’m having a constant conversation with my clients and consumers. That’s 365 days a year. I do think what is nice about a NewFront is the moment when people are paying attention. And if I think it’s incumbent upon the partner to show up with something that is relevant and important.
Numbers to know
2.3%: The year-over-year increase in BuzzFeed’s digital advertising revenue to $20.9 million in Q1 2025.
12.4%: The year-over-year growth in The New York Times’ digital advertising revenue to $70.9 million in Q1 2025.
1%: The year-over-year growth in Dotdash Meredith’s digital advertising revenue in Q1 2025.
1.3%: The year-over-year decline in Gannett’s digital advertising revenue to $83.4 million in Q1 2025.
20: The number of people let go at Polygon following Vox Media’s sale of the gaming site to Valnet.
What we’ve covered
Here are the numbers to know about AI in publishing
- Digiday has sifted through the data to find the numbers that help show where publishers stand now when it comes to AI, as the technology has an increasingly clear impact on publishers’ traffic and their ability to control content scraping.
- Chartbeat data shared with Digiday shows referrals from ChatGPT are growing, from 363,000 page views to 3,700 publishers in August 2024 to 5.3 million page views in April 2025.
See more of the key numbers here.
What Google and the DOJ are proposing for ad tech antitrust remedies
- Google and the Department of Justice proposals for how to dismantle Google’s grip on online ad sales were mapped out on Monday in written filings.
- Here’s what the DOJ and what Google want, and what those outcomes would mean for publishers and advertisers.
Read more about the filings here.
Creators and brand dollars are flocking to LinkedIn
- Executives at ad agencies Dentsu and Ogilvy confirmed that they had observed individual brands’ spending on LinkedIn marketing grow in the past year amid a general influx of interest in influencer marketing across the board.
- Meanwhile, B2B creator management firm The Wishly Group has gone from managing six LinkedIn creators in August 2024 to 30 creators on the platform in April 2025, with its average number of campaigns per month increasing from 20 to 75 during the same period.
Read more about the creator boom on LinkedIn here.
X CEO Linda Yaccarino cast X as the anti-media media company
- X has nearly amassed 600 million monthly active users (MAUs) globally, Yaccarino said at the Possible conference in Miami last week. Nearly a third (31%) of that user growth is coming from Gen Z.
- She claimed X has “bypassed” legacy media, and compared publishers’ fact checking abilities with X’s “Community Notes,” crowdsourced fact checks and context from the user base.
Read more about Yaccarino’s claims here.
‘It’s dead’: Publisher confessions on the future of Google’s Privacy Sandbox
- Publishers say the writing’s on the wall: with little incentive left to support it, Google’s Privacy Sandbox is effectively dead.
- For some, it’s time to move on. For the Sandbox loyalists, the close collaborations they developed with Google and other partners testing alternatives over the last five years are lasting relationships.
Hear more about what publishers had to say anonymously about Privacy Sandbox here.
What we’re reading
Google is using publishers’ content for AI training without permission
Google is using publisher content for its generative AI search feature AI Overviews, even if publishers have “opted out” of being used to train Google’s large language model, Bloomberg reported.
The Washington Post pivots events strategy
The Washington Post wants to bring in double-digit revenue growth by hosting fewer, bigger events, specifically targeting B2B audiences, Adweek reported.
Valnet sues TheWrap for $64.5 million
Valnet, which owns sites like Screen Rant and Collider, has sued TheWrap for $64.5 million in damages over an investigative article about Valnet’s exploitative working conditions, TheWrap reported.
President Donald Trump orders an end to federal funding for NPR and PBS
Public broadcasters are prepared to fight back against President Trump’s executive order to end federal funding for NPR and PBS, The Washington Post reported.
How a generative AI tool is powering news wire services
Generative AI tool NoahWire is powering news wire services for sites like Tomorrow’s Publisher, which uses AI and human editors to curate and produce articles about the future of news, Nieman Lab reported.
