Strategic Intelligence: Publishing Sector Scorecard Q3 2025 Update

Q3 2025 saw a surge of digital media activity across the publishing sector, as companies sought to expand their monetization options.

Key Highlights

• Major publications have doubled down on digital subscription strategies: the New York Times has launched new family bundles, the Guardian revealed that 72% of its revenue comes from digital content, and the Daily Mail consolidated its online brands under one banner to drive sign-ups. Platforms have also been instrumental in shaping the digital media landscape this quarter. Meta rolled out new short-form video and ad formats, YouTube significantly altered its Shorts monetization, and Amazon and Apple expanded their streaming slates.
• Partnerships between publishing companies and the growing artificial intelligence (AI) sector have continued to materialize. In Q3 2025, Gannett struck a licensing deal with Perplexity. Publishers can open a whole new revenue line by licensing published content to generative-AI companies.
• However, among the excitement of expanding revenue streams, many companies’ digital media strategies have been shaped by regulation. Meta came under EU scrutiny over how news and political content is moderated on Facebook and Instagram, while Google faced heightened antitrust pressure tied to its adtech dominance. On the flipside, News Corp and other publishers renewed calls for stronger enforcement of platform bargaining rules in the US. This highlights how regulatory action increasingly defines digital distribution and monetization terms, directly influencing how publishers reach audiences and negotiate with platforms.

Scope

• This sector scorecard provides a top-down, comprehensive outlook for the key players in the publishing sector over the next two years, based on the key themes set to transform their industry landscape.

Reasons to Buy

• Companies that invest in the right themes become success stories. Those that miss the important themes in their industry end up as failures.
• The analyst's thematic research ecosystem is a single, integrated global research platform that provides an easy-to-use framework for tracking all themes across all companies in all sectors. It has a proven track record of identifying the important themes early, enabling companies to make the right investments ahead of the competition and secure that all-important competitive advantage.
• The analyst has developed a unique thematic methodology for ranking all major companies in all major sectors based on their relative strength in the big themes that are impacting their industries.
• First, we identify the top 10 themes transforming a sector across four categories (tech, macro, industry, and ESG). We also rank themes in order of priority by examining activity levels across 200 million alternative data signals, including patents, jobs, deals, filings, social media, and news.
• Second, we research each theme in detail, examining the value chain, key players, and trends. Additionally, we examine the impact of each theme across the 20 industries we cover. Our 200 million signals help identify the leading adopters of a theme in each sector.
• Finally, using our sector scorecards, we rank the companies most likely to succeed in a sector over the next five years.