The metrics that once sustained digital media — pageviews, impressions, click-throughs — are losing their currency with advertisers.

INMA’s recent Advertising Measurement and Effectiveness Master Class confirmed what many in the industry already sense: Buyers want evidence of genuine audience attention, not just proof of delivery. The publishers who can provide that evidence will set their own rates. The rest will sell on volume and hope for the best.

Ringier Axel Springer found campaigns priced on engagement delivered 42% uplift in brand perception. The Guardian’s research showed a 19-point effectiveness gap tied to ad environment quality. Newsworks demonstrated news brand campaigns capture 40% more attention than other sites.

The data supports the shift. What’s less clear is whether most publishers have the infrastructure to act on it.

The audience engagement is there

Audience engagement is not something most publishers lack. Readers are commenting, bookmarking, following topics, voting in polls, entering prediction games, and subscribing to newsletters.

The activity is there. The problem is it’s scattered across tools that were never designed to share data with each other.

One system tracks comments. Another tracks e-mail opens. A third handles logins. Each captures a fragment of the reader’s behaviour, but no single system recognises that these fragments belong to the same person. The engagement exists in abundance, but it can’t be assembled into a coherent picture that an advertiser would pay a premium for.

That’s the structural gap: Publishers can talk about engagement in general terms, but they can’t prove it at the level of specificity advertisers now expect.

What closing the gap looks like

The publishers with the highest engagement figures understand interaction points beyond the article drive stickiness. Press Gazette’s recent UK data showed Mail+ app users averaging 12.6 hours per month and The Times users at nine hours, driven by puzzles, curated editions, and personalised content alongside the news.

Many of the most effective interaction types require zero extra editorial content. Favourites and saves create preference signals. Topic and author follows let readers declare their interests. Poll responses and prediction game entries generate rich behavioural data.

Each of these, when recorded against a known user profile rather than an anonymous session, tells a story about attention affinity that an advertiser can understand and value.

The key is tying these interactions to identity. “Readers who have liked 5+ football articles and voted in a match prediction poll this month” is a segment an advertiser can price, grounded in declared behaviour rather than probabilistic modelling. Publishers can present engagement tiers as premium audience segments backed by real data.

Getting editorial and commercial on the same page

Monetising engagement is harder when the teams responsible for creating it and the teams responsible for selling it operate from different data sets. Newsrooms see what drives reading and interaction. Revenue teams see what drives subscriptions and purchases. The two views rarely overlap.

When they do, engagement becomes a commercial asset rather than an editorial talking point. Ad sales teams gain the ability to show an advertiser how an audience engages: with what content, at what frequency, through which channels, and at what depth.

This is the infrastructure challenge audience interaction platforms, including our own Glide Nexa, are designed to address. We’re seeking to connect identity, engagement, and first-party data so the signals publishers already generate become measurable, commercially useful, and able to be segmented.

The path forward

For news publishers looking to put this into practice:

1. Establish identity at the centre so readers are known across every touchpoint.
2. Deploy interaction points that generate signals tied to real users.
3. Let the data accumulate and segment naturally, then package those segments with the specificity and recency advertisers now demand.

The publishers recognised at INMA’s master class are already proving this approach works commercially. For the rest of the industry, the question is whether the infrastructure underneath their engagement strategy is ready to support it.

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