After all the innovations of the last 30 years, the media industry is returning to basic propositions that went out of fashion. It’s looking to make money by selling advertising and selling subscriptions. Google and Facebook dominate advertising, but brands still want to buy space in trusted publications and connect directly with readers.
The resurgence in advertising is most clearly seen in television and streaming, where companies are expanding their advertising businesses. When customer numbers began to plateau four years ago, Netflix needed to find new ways to maintain growth, reduce churn and generate more cash. After years in which its top executives had scoffed at the idea of advertising revenue, it introduced a lower-price subscription at £4.99 a month that came with ads. A year after launch, the subscription with ads had 15million active users a month.
Amazon Prime Video followed in February 2024. Controversially, subscribers were suddenly getting commercials whether they wanted them or not. They would have to pay an extra £2.99 per month to remove them. Amazon is, of course, technically resourceful: viewers can now buy products advertised in these slots directly from Amazon while watching. Jeff Bezos needs to fund his next space mission somehow, and The Washington Post is not going to help him get there.
To date, Apple TV is the only major paid-for streamer that has not introduced a designated advertising tier. It does, however, have ad breaks during live sports programming. Indeed, one of the reasons Apple and its rivals are acquiring expensive sports rights is that they provide high-value programming for advertisers. The other is that they bring in new customers, who need to sign up if they want to watch their favourite teams.
As well as (re)introducing commercials, services are starting to work together and offer bundles, allowing viewers to watch several streamers for one set price. Disney is doing this with several of its products. Yes, it is remarkably similarly to the old cable television model.
Advertising is also the driving force behind YouTube, once a laptop watch and now hugely popular on television screens. It was the fourth mostused TV navigation platform in 2025, according to Barb, the British organisation that measures audiences and television ratings. There are some subscription services, but many creators on the platform make their money from brand deals and programmatic advertising. The bigger the audience, the more money those two things generate, just as it always was on television.
The print world made different bets, going with subscription, advertising models and, in the case of The Guardian, a yearning to be free to all subsidised now by voluntary subscriptions or suggestions that readers might be kind enough to make a donation. The interesting one has been the Daily Mail, which thrived for years by going for maximum views around the world in the hope that advertising revenues would rise to surpass costs. Then it launched its subscription product Mail+ in January 2024, putting many of its stories beyond the reach of non-paying readers. Those banner ads have not gone anywhere, though. Payment plus advertising. Just like when you bought a newspaper or magazine.
The attraction of ad revenues has had an impact on writers who have taken advantage of the technology to launch their own publications. Whether it be streaming or Substack, we were told that, after an era in which traffic was everything, the next phase was all about subscriptions. With this shift came the promise of independence. No more being beholden to companies that might pull their ad dollars if you upset them.
Riches were to be found in niches, so the saying went. People would pay for content focused largely around one topic, particularly if it was essential to their professional life. The success of businesses such as Puck shows this to be true. But there is only space for so many such outlets, the top tier of which costs nearly £200 a year.
Many who persuaded readers to sign up for their newsletter have found that subscriptions are not enough to make the product sustainable. Creators and publishers realise how hard it is to convince readers to authorise another monthly payment. They are looking for advertising opportunities to make up the shortfall. The environment we have ended up with is starting to look remarkably like the one we thought we were leaving behind.
My own newsletter, The Addition, originally had a £50 annual subscription rate. Not a huge amount, but a (deliberate) piece of friction between the reader and the work. As the person behind the product, you can’t imagine why anybody would not hand over such a paltry amount. Yet, however good the reporting, however punchy the punditry, it’s easy for people to say no. In those conditions, every new customer acquired feels like a major victory.
So we go to advertising, perhaps combined with affiliate marketing, where the creator earns money if people buy products via a specific link. It can work better than chasing new paying subscribers, it is less frustrating, and it offers the opportunity to make your work available to more people.
We have seen several successful start-ups that might have leant fully into subscriptions develop advertising and sponsorships as crucial parts of their monetisation strategy. 404Media, a tech site founded by refugees from the Vice-owned Motherboard, has adverts, together with the means to remove them by taking out a subscription.
Profit is possible without a paywall
Semafor, founded by the former Buzzfeed News boss Ben Smith and the former Bloomberg News business supremo Julian Smith, has no paywall. It runs events, many of which are expensive to attend, and popular free newsletters, backed by big-name sponsors. In early January 2026, the company announced it had secured almost $30 million in new financing and had reached profitability (on a running basis, discounting original investment) after three years.
In an email to readers in April, Smith highlighted an upcoming event, Semafor World Economy. “The main thing I’ve learned is that journalism isn’t just the product,” he wrote. “Great reporting and great reporters are what give you authority in the first place to host a group like this – including more than 500 top global CEOs, nine cabinet secretaries, a dozen top White House officials, 20 G20 finance ministers and central bank governors, about 20 per cent of the US Senate, and more than 300 journalists.”
Smith added that “journalism powers the machine, but it’s wildly far from sufficient”, highlighting what he calls the various “surfaces” of his company’s journalism, delivering all manner of monetised products. One of them was even a physical installation on a wall. While the number of brands that can pull off events at this scale is limited, the core model is innovative, encouraging, and requires lots of support from advertisers.
Podcasting is an increasing “surface” of journalism. Although some shows, such as Ed Balls and George Osborne’s Political Currency and The Rest is Entertainment from the Goalhanger stable, have started to add subscription tiers that offer extras, most of the revenue for podcasts comes from advertising. Just as it always was on commercial radio. These advertisements can be both programmatic, served by the podcast platform itself, or sponsored spots read by the hosts. Listeners have simply come to expect them.
The drive towards paywalls and subscriptions came, at least in part, because ad revenue for outlets had collapsed, hoovered up by Google and Facebook/Meta. (Of course, news outlets had previously been told that running ads served up by Google AdSense and similar programmes would save them.) As this trend developed, we all thought we could build our own bespoke media bundles comprising journalism, entertainment and sport at a price point we were comfortable with. It was a utopian idea.
I explain in my latest book, Streaming Wars, how much consumers have benefited from the choice and flexibility subscriptions have allowed. However, it is also true that only part of that vision of the future has come to pass. You can now get everything you want, whenever you want, but it involves lots of subscriptions, the need to jump between apps, and a lot of money. That is frustrating for those who just want to get things easily.
As ever, sport provision is at the heart of the issue. To watch every televised match in the Premier League and Champions League during the 2025-26 season required subscriptions to Sky Sports, TNT Sports and Amazon Prime Video. Even if you don’t care about Europe’s premier club football competition, you still needed the first two to watch every televised
Premier League game. In response, the Premier League is testing out its own “Premiflix” style service, with a launch in Singapore next season. According to YouGov, there might be some appetite for this in the UK, too. In March last year, the pollster found that 42 per cent of football fans would sign up to such a service.
Crucially, 32 per cent said they would cancel their existing subscriptions if Premiflix were to launch, with the same number keeping them. Furthermore, 84 per cent of Sky subscribers who are football fans, 61 per cent of TNT Sports subscribers, and 16 per cent of Amazon subscribers revealed that the presence of top-tier English football has at least some influence on their decision to retain these channels. It all indicates interest in consolidation, and highlights how important football is to the existing rights-holders, not least because of how they can advertise against it.
We are being told that everything is too fragmented and too expensive. Readers and viewers complain about too many subscriptions in order to get what they want. Viewers demand that services play nice with one another. Yet customers will put up with advertising if it helps them get the work free, or at least at a reduced price. MNTN Research found that 38.5 per cent of viewers were open to watching some commercials in return for a cheaper streaming subscription. Furthermore, 17 per cent of viewers prefer free streaming services even if that means they come with ads.
While 20.9 per cent were willing to pay a higher subscription cost to avoid advertising, 52.6 per cent of consumers said that increases in price were the top reason they cancelled a streaming service. Worth bearing in mind, though, that 15.8 per cent walked away from a service because it had too many adverts. A balance has to be struck, even more so now, given the number of options available to consumers.
One issue affecting the advertising space is reduced access to third-party cookies that track users online. Chrome, the largest browser, still has them, despite promises to stop. Other browsers, such as Apple’s Safari, no longer do. That has made marketers think about advertising in a different way. Media companies having first-party data, truly knowing who reads, watches and listens to their journalism is crucial.
It would be naïve to suggest things are back where they were. Yet plenty of fundamentals remain. Most media cannot rely on a single revenue stream. Customers are fed-up with premium subscription and, will tolerate advertising to keep outgoings down. Brands want to get products in front of customers and remain willing to pay to do so. Maybe we will find a new equilibrium. A mix that means people can afford the media they want while enough money goes into the industry. While subscriptions continue to play their part, we’ve not moved away from an ad-funded ecosystem, and probably never will.