As we continue navigating the “post-traffic era” for advertising, I find it useful to occasionally review and highlight the strategies publishers around the world are utilising to find sustainable paths forward. 

The Guardian and news publisher alliance Ozone, a collaboration of news companies in the United Kingdom, offer news worth following.

Ozone’s aggressive U.S. expansion

With Meta, Google, and Amazon alone capturing 60%-70% of the global ad market (higher in some markets), the question of news publisher alliances has come up quite a few times in my discussions with INMA advertising executives. 

While alliances can be challenging from a governance and revenue-sharing perspective, I urge publishers to see each other more as allies than competitors in today’s marketplace and to explore the possibilities offered by alliances, which is why I’m leading with this news.

After a quiet start, the publisher alliance Ozone is experiencing significant momentum in its U.S. market expansion, adding a wave of prominent American news companies to its platform after establishing itself as one of the few successful publisher collaborations to survive long term. 

Ozone officially launched its Audience Connection Platform in the United States in October 2025, moving beyond its U.K. origins where it was founded in 2018 by The Guardian, News UK, The Telegraph, and Reach. The platform has since evolved from a pure inventory play into a broader audience-connection platform that maps content consumption patterns across publishers to provide advertisers with aggregated behavioural insights. 

The U.S. expansion includes partnerships with major publishers: The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, BBC (US), CNN, Daily Mail, The Telegraph, The Independent, BuzzFeed, HuffPost, The Sun, The Guardian, The Mirror, and Dow Jones brands. Ozone expects to eventually reach 205 million Americans monthly.

To support this growth, Ozone is scaling its U.S. headcount from 10 to 50 employees next year, with new hires in Chicago to deepen relationships with agencies and brands, according to CEO Damon Reeve. The platform has driven more than £400 million (US$532 million) in incremental spend back into the U.K. publishing sector. 

"By offering a unique, scaled, data-led offering to brands, Ozone’s positioning as an alternative to the major platforms helps pull investment into the publishing category, driving incremental revenue for us all," said Hannah Buitekant, chief commercial, digital, and strategy officer at the Daily Mail, which joined Ozone in 2023. 

Reeve noted Ozone is also exploring new roles beyond advertising, including potentially helping publishers collectively negotiate with large language models for content licensing — addressing a current challenge where many publishers lack the scale needed for effective negotiation with AI companies. 

The platform has also expanded beyond display advertising into video monetisation, beginning with YouTube content at the start of 2025, and will soon expand into connected TV (CTV) to meet demands from future U.S. publishing partners. Ozone is additionally exploring how to better monetise Apple News, which drives “a huge amount of traffic” to publishers but remains “incredibly hard to monetise well.”

The Guardian’s strategic approach to fewer, better ads

The Guardian has taken a contrarian approach to advertising, turning down “millions of pounds every single year” by refusing ad formats that compromise user experience — and backing this strategy with research that demonstrates fewer ads can be more effective.

In October 2025, The Guardian unveiled research showing 73% of readers trust publishers who operate “low-ad environments” versus 56% in “high-ad environments.” The research included observations of 20 people browsing the Internet plus a survey of 1,800 Web site users. Readers in high-ad environments showed “signs of facial confusion” — “jaws dropping, brows furrowing and faces showing fear.”

The campaign, called FAME (Fewer Ads are More Effective), promotes the value of a less-is-more approach. “Audiences have the highest amount of trust in digital publishers within the low-ad environment,” said Lara Enoch, head of strategy at The Guardian. “And trust in the publisher has a direct halo effect on trust in the advertiser.”

The research identified pop-ups and “sticky” ads (which follow users as they scroll) as the worst offenders — “perceived as intrusive, distracting … [and] pushy.” James Fleetham, director of advertising at The Guardian, said: “Video pop-ups, interstitials in your feed placements that never actually load. There is ad stuffing everywhere … sucking the life out of [sites]. Surely this can’t be having a long-term positive impact on these publications?”

The Guardian’s approach appears to be paying dividends. In the year ending March 2025, advertising revenue increased 2% to £68.4 million (US$92 million), with growth coming from direct sales rather than programmatic. The publisher is also offering single brands 100% share of voice in specific environments — Tesco Finest currently has exclusive advertising in The Guardian’s cooking app Feast, with Tesco “renewing” the partnership due to “such compelling sales,” according to Global Chief Advertising Officer Imogen Fox. 

This advertising strategy complements The Guardian’s strong reader revenue performance, which grew 22% to £107.3 million in digital reader revenue, helping the publisher operate from a position of strength rather than desperation when making advertising decisions.

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