Last week, data from publisher advertising alliance Ozone revealed that ad supply in the UK and US fell by 40 per cent year-on-year in the second quarter, as the rise of AI overview and chatbots eroded search traffic and thus ad revenue for publishers. As one of the UK’s largest online news publishers, Reach (which owns Mirror, Express and a range of regional and local titles) is vulnerable to these digital trends. In its half-year results update yesterday, the group reported a 9% year-on-year decline in revenue for the first half of 2026, with digital revenue down 11%.
However, the company’s digital capabilities also make it highly responsive to these changes, operating its own ad tech products and implementing its own AI tools. Reach CEO Piers North said on an earnings call that the company’s business is moving “further away from relying on referral traffic” and that the company is working on the assumption that Google’s traffic is “unlikely to recover.”
As a result, publishers are focusing on “original content, paid subscriptions, high-quality video, social engagement, off-platform distribution, and various moves in the AI licensing space.” And North says the strategy is already starting to yield positive results.
“Our focus area is to give us greater control over how our content is consumed and used by other parties,” North told investors. “In other words, we are actively building a more sustainable digital business model, and that is starting to pay off. For example, we are seeing lower-margin off-platform revenue increase by more than 90%, we are progressing new licensing deals, and some of the regulations around how technology platforms interact with other businesses in the UK are steering us in the right direction.”
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The CEO noted that off-platform (such as views on YouTube and Facebook) and the video side of the business are becoming increasingly important sources of revenue, as page views on the platform are down 40% year over year. Over the same period, social video views increased by 55%, and the company said its investment in video is “attracting more agency work” because it can deliver more complex briefs. Executives also noted the importance of local journalism in the age of AI.
“This is something that AI machines can’t reproduce, because even the best large-scale language models don’t know what just happened at the end of the road,” North says.
And Reach is focusing on “streamlining content creation,” including video, by leveraging AI for newsrooms and advertising teams. The company says its new publishing platform, Launchpad, will integrate all of its AI tools, including its contextual advertising solution Mantis (and recently announced Mantis Video) and editorial AI product Guten.
“This means content creators and journalists on the go can use AI to provide headline options, use data for ideation, content originality and value, pull images from archives, edit, upload videos, and deliver it all from mobile,” North explained.
North said Reach also partners with technology companies to license content for use in AI models, with both Big Tech companies and smaller, scalable payment models. The company signed a deal with Amazon AWS in March to make its content available for use in the tech giant’s AI products, paying it based on usage. North said the deal provides “recurring revenue” and the publisher is working on signing deals with other major platforms in the second half of the year to monetize the use of its content by AI companies.
“The industry obviously refers to this practice as scraping, but if policy, regulation, technology and markets can catch up with these developments, there will be a fairer and clearer exchange of value for content businesses like ours in an AI world similar to the real-time bidding that has been happening in the advertising industry for decades,” North said. “We know our content has tremendous value, for our viewers and other companies, including AI companies, and the numbers prove it. And we are just at the beginning of monetizing this.”
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