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Abi Watson, head of publishing at media research firm Enders, argues that the FT’s move into personality-led YouTube franchises is less a bid for raw reach than a signal of a structural shift in audience development. 

The FT is unusually well insulated compared with most publishers: its corporate subscription base effectively acts as its own funnel, stressed Watson. Large professional services and accountancy firms buy institutional access, which then familiarizes young professionals with the brand long before they might pay for an individual subscription. “So when the FT decides it needs personality-led YouTube franchises, that’s not a publisher in distress reaching for reach,” said Watson. “It’s a publisher with an unusually defensible position accepting that discovery is now a creator economy problem, and that parasocial attachment to named journalists is doing work that SEO and brand alone no longer do,” she said. 

According to Enders Analysis, publishers are facing headwinds thanks to “structural assymetry” in how consumers interact with them vis-à-vis platforms.

As Enders Analysis notes, this leads to a situation in which “publishers are producing journalism, but platforms are capturing the majority of time spent with it.”

Meanwhile, as Enders writes, credit and compensation for original content “are coming further adrift”, with newsrooms that break stories “capturing less and less of the commercial reward it generates”.

As the report’s authors (head of publishing Abi Watson, senior research analyst Claire Holubowskyj, and media analyst Laura Darcey) explain, in the days of print news, scoops provided news organisations with hours, if not days, of competitive advantage, both in attaining audience and driving revenue based on that audience.

“However, today, exclusives rarely act as moats,” they note.

“OpenAI’s experimentation with CPC is driven largely by its need to maintain demand growth and build trust with advertisers, though declining CPMs and an expanding pilot are also factors,” said Claire Holubowskyj, senior research analyst at Enders Analysis. 

As Enders Analysis recently argued, habit has become the north star for publishers. Light users haven’t vanished — they’ve simply stopped arriving at the front door, with “what happened” increasingly answered upstream by platforms and AI summaries. The homepage now primarily services the already-converted; breadth alone does not create defensibility. Durable value, the analysts wrote, depends on occupying a recurring need state through vertical products, distinctive voice and community, and reinforcing it through authority and belonging. The Mail’s strategy is essentially a live response to that diagnosis.

“Netflix didn’t invent streaming, but they managed to perfect it a lot faster than anyone else,” Tom Harrington, head of television at Enders Analysis, said. “Netflix were, and still are, several years ahead of everybody in terms of the user interface, which basically means that they set the perception of streaming.”

The streaming giant has been seeking to grow revenue from new programming formats such as video podcasts, live sporting events and video games. “For a decade, it was quite easy for Netflix, they could have a pretty simplistic offering,” Harrington said. “Now, they’re fighting amongst everyone else for incremental growth.”

The market was less convinced by the growth story, particularly given Hastings’ departure, and shares fell nearly 10 per cent after the results. The problem for analysts is that Netflix is in uncharted territory. “There are no clear parallels on which to base potential penetration,” Harrington said. 

Analyst firm Enders Analysis underlined this at the end of 2025 by calculating that the UK’s largest alternative gigabit broadband networks (i.e. BT / Openreach challengers) collectively suffered losses of £1.5bn in 2024 (up from £1.304bn in 2023 and £755m in 2022) – driven by high interest rates and rising build costs.

“It’s very competitive,” said Claire Enders, a media analyst. “The audience who wants to hear about celebrities can now hear it from them directly. There are a lot of influencers who have taken the market from mainstream media.”

A report by Enders in April said that social media sites like TikTok and WhatsApp had become “primary spaces” for information, commentary and discussion, showing the extent of the new competition. “These environments are engineered for sustained engagement-infinite scroll, algorithmic reinforcement and low friction — in contrast to publisher sites,” it said.

An Enders note said that publishers were building up their columnists and star reporters as “creators in their own right”. It pointed to “publisher-owned personalities and episodic formats” as a means to attract and retain paying audiences.