In the year following its IPO, Reddit has defied our expectations, reporting five straight quarters of positive adjusted operating income and strong growth.
Profitability stems from disciplined cost management alongside exceptional user growth, with a focus on advertising performance and limited distractions.
The platform's human-generated conversations are proving valuable in the AI era, but AI strength could become a vulnerability if synthetic content overwhelms authentic discussion.
The USA is reshaping the global economic order in defiance of trade treaties; however, the rest of the world is observing trade treaties and absorbing the shock of the tariff wall erected around the US market.
The UK is relatively spared among the 90 origins hit by the USA's tariffs on imports of goods, which do not apply to services' exports to the US, twice the value of goods, including media (e.g. TV programmes) and advertising services.
The timing of the deteriorating global outlook is poor due to the headwinds facing the UK economy that are impairing the recovery of advertising in 2025.
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Trump II is already proving to be a more serious threat to an independent, robust news media than Trump I.
Trump’s direct power around news media is limited, but the threat comes from an unprecedented politicisation of federal regulators, enforcement and procurement—to favour friends and punish enemies.
Opposition to Trump II is weaker and more divided than the broad ‘resistance’ to Trump I. Big tech companies are going for a close embrace, hoping to steer policy to their advantage—while others bend the knee to avoid punishment.
The requirement for accurate audience measurement led to the creation of separate industry JICs— developed by media owners, agencies, advertisers and trade bodies—used for planning and as credible trading currencies.
However, now as brand advertisers need to be able to optimise campaigns across all audiovisual—and ideally all display—they want full cross-media measurement, and are therefore investing in the Origin platform.
But not all ‘views’ are equal; context is important. While most advertisers understand this, there is a risk that some ascribe the same value to all AV. Broadcasters are understandably wary.
US big tech companies are deploying hundreds of billions of dollars to remake the global economy in their image, as enviable growth contrasts with layoffs and low morale.
The cost of using AI models will fall in 2025 and make more AI applications possible. Regulation is caught between pressure from Trump and investigations that must go on, such as digital markets.
Microsoft and Google have tied their fortunes to AI. Amazon and Meta stand to realise business gains from AI, while Apple is the outlier: capex declined in 2024 as it focuses on iPhone and services.
Use of publisher content to train AI models is hotly contested. Unacknowledged scraping, licensing deals, and lawsuits all characterise the publisher-AI company relationship.
However, model training is not the whole story. More and more products rely on up-to-date access to content, and some are direct competitors to publisher offerings.
Publishers can’t depend on copyright to deliver them the value of their IP. They need to track which products are catching on with users for licensing deals to make sense for them, and to ensure their own products keep up with the competition.
Classified advertising is estimated to have grown circa 7% in the UK in 2024, and forecast to grow 4% in 2025. Specialist platforms own these marketplaces, with both consumer and industry network effects the driving force behind platform strength
Online platforms are gradually becoming vertical-specific search providers, with dominant players Rightmove and Auto Trader looking for further growth through integrations up and down their respective value chains
The properties vertical is bouncing back as buyers adjust to ‘higher for longer’ interest rates, while recruitment sees ongoing polarisation amidst ongoing uptake of employer-facing AI. Autos, insulated from interest rates, grapples with the looming sector shift of EV quotas
From the depths of 2023, advertising expenditure on legacy media rose moderately in 2024, on the back of an uptick in real private consumer expenditure thanks to lower inflation and reduced costs of credit—the outlook for legacy media is about the same for 2025.
Online stands apart from legacy media due to the growth of ecommerce—driven by both goods (over 26% of retail sales) and services such as travel, as well as intense competition among platforms (Amazon, Shein, Temu)—with double-digit growth in 2024 set to continue in 2025.
Television remains the most effective medium for brand advertisers—despite the decline in viewing—with broadcasters’ digital innovation and SVOD ad tiers providing greater targeting alongside the mass broadcast reach.
The proposal from DCMS to expand the pre-digital “public interest” regime that requires clearance for changes in the equity stakes in print newspapers to online news publishers lacks a firm rationale in 2024.
A plethora of online sources dilute the influence of news brands and their proprietors over British people’s political views, in particular the platforms (X, YouTube, TikTok and Facebook) hosting self-publishing influencers, politicians and political advertising.
The UK's expanded future regime, if enacted, will further chill the appetite of investors for stakes in commercial media, reduce their value and ability to raise capital, and stifle beneficial consolidation.
President Trump will likely impose much higher tariffs on most imported goods, which could ignite retaliation by major trading partners and reverse decades of post-war globalisation.
America's biggest tech brands are vulnerable: we assess $570 billion of exposure to sales in China and the Chinese supply chain for six large companies generating over $2 trillion in revenue.
Apple and Tesla are major investors in China to supply that market, and demand for their products could be blown off course by a wave of anti-US sentiment.