I recently dove into the finalists for Best Idea to Grow Advertising Sales or Revenue for the INMA Global Media Awards and today will take a similar look at the Best Revenue Diversification strategies.

I looked at the 10 finalists across five regional/local and five national/international brands. A quick note: I’m focusing here on those with advertising-related or advertising-adjacent implications and briefly noting the others. Imtest/Funke, which also appears in category explored in this blog, is briefly noted rather than covered in full again.

Regional and local brands

• New Business Stream at Le Devoir (Le Devoir, Montreal, Canada) documents how the news company brought copyright management in-house in 2022, months before ChatGPT launched, and built a coalition that now represents more than 150 Quebec publications covering 50%+ of the market. Copyright revenue grew 244%, rising from 2% to 6% of total revenue. The coalition gives smaller publishers negotiating leverage with media monitoring companies, content aggregators, and AI crawlers they could not secure individually. Publishers who have not structured their content licensing are at risk of their journalism being ingested into AI systems without attribution or commercial return.
• Imtest/Vertical Hub (Funke Mediengruppe, Germany) is covered in detail in part one above. From a diversification perspective, the case demonstrates a deliberate shift from display advertising revenue toward affiliate commerce, licensing, and a centralised content hub — all built on the same editorial testing credibility.
• News Corp Price Harmonisation Program (News Corp Australia) is primarily a subscription story with an advertising-adjacent observation: Using first-party engagement data to identify high-yield audience cohorts and pricing accordingly is the same logic that underlies premium advertising audience products. The programmes’ retention results — 3.9% total cancellation rate, 78% save rate — also speak to audience quality that has direct value for advertisers.
• Diversifying Solutions to Become Growth Partners (NZME, New Zealand) is a commercial transformation framed around becoming a growth partner rather than a media vendor. In a year when New Zealand’s content-site advertising market declined 3.2%, NZME grew digital revenue 7.2%, lifted premium eCPM 14%, and retained 94% of clients. The entry presents six specific product executions: a dynamic insurance product in property listings (12,000+ downloads), an automated SME audio hub (140,000 downloads), first-party data-powered display (40,000+ site visits in two days, 5.05% CTR), retail store-visit attribution (Attribution Lift Index of 144%), AI-powered live odds in sports coverage (CTRs up to 40.7x above baseline), and an editorial leadership series with live event integration (3.12x reader attention, 45% new readers). Each product is a direct, revenue-producing response to the pressure on CPM-based display.

• Bombay Times Lounge (Times of India Metro Supplements, Mumbai) is a celebrity interview IP combining long-form video, live audience participation, and tiered brand sponsorship. Seven episodes averaging 2.25 million views each, with social promotional content reaching up to 15 million views per reel. Five premium brands integrated through set placements, branded segments, audience participation, gifting, and celebrity-brand conversations. Over INR150 million in revenue in the first six months. The commercial model was designed into the IP from the beginning: Each sponsorship tier creates a defined role inside the content, not adjacent to it.

National and international brands

• Financial Review for Business (Australian Financial Review, Sydney) introduces enterprise licensing products (headline feeds and content integrations) that allow organisations to embed AFR journalism into internal systems and AI workflows via secure, controlled feeds. The launch generated a multi-million-dollar sales pipeline, contributed to 15% year-over-year revenue growth, and shifted enterprise sales conversations from seat counts to data integrity, AI usage, and responsible licensing. The AFR was the first major Australian masthead to build this. Publishers whose journalism is being consumed inside AI systems without structured licensing are in the same position as those whose content was being scraped without attribution, and the AFR has found a commercial model for that environment.
• Bild Kaufberater (Bild, Germany) is an independent buying-advice and affiliate commerce platform built on the editorial testing credibility of Auto Bild and Computer Bild, backed by a dedicated physical test lab in Berlin. Over 130 million visits and €120 million in gross revenue in year one. The testing is editorially independent, and the commerce model represents a broader shift from selling space next to content toward driving transactions through content. 
• Lights. Cities. Action (Dainik Jagran, New Delhi) is the Jagran Film Festival, a six-month traveling event across 14 cities and eight states. Rather than asking audiences in smaller cities to travel to the festival, the festival traveled to them. AI handled operations at scale, with 3,500+ city-specific creative assets, 600,000+ WhatsApp audience messages, and zero-error registrations — freeing teams to focus on experience. Results: 583 screenings, 56 celebrity conversations, 540 million total reach, INR40 million in sponsorship revenue. Sponsors are embedded in the experience rather than attached to it. The operational model is the insight: AI-enabled scale made a 14-city property commercially viable without proportional cost increases.

• Everyone Needs a Fact-Checker: PolitiFact’s Post-Meta Comeback (PolitiFact, Florida, United States) responded to losing its Meta fact-checking partnership by building a B2B research division providing daily fact-checking for a major tech company’s marketing and advertising materials across multiple languages, as well as credibility assessments for TikTok’s STEM feed. The work drove nearly US$3 million in total revenue in 2025, substantially covering the gap left by Meta. PolitiFact is also being paid to verify the accuracy of advertising claims, work that reflects both the demand for accuracy in an AI content environment and the liability risk of distributing inaccurate claims at scale.
• Unlocking Growth with Flexible Access (The Washington Post) offers day passes, week passes, and pay-per-article options alongside subscriptions. While primarily a subscription story, the advertising-adjacent observation is that removing friction at the moment of value exchange expanded the paying user pool by 30% in controlled tests. That dynamic applies in advertising contexts as well.

Implications from the Revenue Diversification finalists

• Events are a durable revenue model, but the structure matters. Dainik Jagran and Bombay Times Lounge both show sponsorship value is highest when brands are embedded in the experience rather than placed alongside it.
• Dainik Jagran adds a second lesson: AI-powered operational scale can make a multi-city event property financially viable.
• NZME’s entry is the most comprehensive post-traffic playbook in both shortlists. Six products, each addressing a specific gap in the CPM-based model. The through line is treating first-party data, creativity, and attribution as a single integrated offer rather than selling them separately.
• The shift from display to commerce is very much underway. The Bild Kaufberater’s €120 million in year-one affiliate revenue and Imtest’s 128% digital revenue growth both point toward a model where publishers monetise the trust embedded in their editorial brands through transactions, not just adjacency.
• And last, it’s worth noting the content licensing conversation is becoming urgent. Le Devoir and AFR are both generating revenue by asserting clearer control over how their journalism is used by AI systems, enterprise clients, and aggregators. Publishers who have not done this work are approaching a moment where the absence of a licensing framework becomes a commercial liability. My colleague Jodie Hopperton covers this extensively through INMA’s Product & Tech Initiative.

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