From Renting to
Relationship Capital

Premium publishers are now reaping the consequences of an insidious addiction. It developed slowly, over twenty years, felt entirely rational at the time, and could now finally kill them.

When I moved from television to digital in 2006, the imperative was to maximise reach, and maximise consumption. Understandable logic: more readers meant more advertising revenue, which funded more journalism. Little did we know how the advertising model would evolve with social media.

At ITV News in 2011, we built a mobile first news site designed for social sharing. Stories were built incrementally from atomic updates in what was probably the first scrollable feed in UK news. Users could share any update in the feed, distributing multiple entry points for social audiences to find ITVNews.com content. It was revolutionary, it grew fast, and we were proud of it.

At NBC News in 2015, we were launch partners for Facebook’s Instant Articles feature, through which Facebook users could consume NBC News content in a native Facebook experience without leaving Facebook. We doubled video consumption, but we couldn’t monetise it. And we also didn’t really know what that audience was doing in any more detail. I remember a tense meeting with Facebook in which I said we wouldn’t continue unless we could get the audience metrics and a share of the ad revenue. Neither was forthcoming and we parted ways.

By 2017 at Future Plc, over 70% of our traffic to sites like TechRadar came from Google searches. Whenever Google made a change to their algorithms, we’d have to scramble to maintain the same referred traffic. The dependency was total, and all we could do was manage it.

Fast forward to 2026. Google now surfaces answers directly in search results, without users clicking back to the source. Search traffic to premium publishers has plummeted. Meanwhile, 70% of advertising spend on digital goes direct to big tech — Meta, Google, Amazon — leaving an ever-shrinking slice for everyone else.

Premium publishers were had. For two decades, they handed their most valuable asset — trusted, expensive-to-produce journalism — to platforms that used it to build their own businesses. Publishers were losing control over how their content was seen and where it was monetised, and not realising its value.

And now the cycle is repeating, except the terms are worse. Large language model AI is fast becoming a primary destination for audience queries. Publishers’ content underpins the answers these platforms give. Yet AI platforms currently deliver less than 1% of traffic back to source publishers. At least Google used to send people somewhere. AI just answers.

Audiences now report getting the majority of their content via social media, yet they trust social media less and less. This shouldn’t come as a surprise: social media has infiltrated our daily habit so deeply that countries are now writing laws to keep children away from it.

Misinformation and disinformation are rife, as non-journalists publish unverified content with gay abandon, deliberately sensationalised to appeal to the vicious circle of polarising social media algorithms and the audiences who reshare it. The platforms exert little to no editorial due diligence over its veracity — we’re only platforms, not publishers, they protest — while their products are engineered to deliver a dopamine hit of entertainment that overrides any concern for the quality, let alone the veracity, of what’s being consumed. And with the means of production now in everyone’s pocket, anyone can publish anything, and by jove they do — lots of it.

The result is rising sea levels in the ocean of slop. And yet the demand for quality hasn’t disappeared. Audiences are still looking for trusted content on third-party platforms like Instagram and Spotify, and trusted providers can build strong audiences there. Trust has never been at more of a premium.

The challenge is getting your content discovered, and then realising the value of it.

Audience is a proxy for value. Its value isn’t realised until someone has paid you for it.

We’ve seen this play out across almost every digital business of the last twenty years: build the market first, monetise later. The assumption is that scale creates options. It does, but only if the relationship is deep enough to convert into something durable.

Strong businesses have diversified revenue streams, and publishing is no exception. In the early days of the internet it was all about advertising, then sponsorship — both are examples of businesses paying for access to the publisher’s audience. Between roughly 2016 and the early 2020s, a different model emerged. Publishers like Future Plc rode the wave of e-commerce affiliate revenue, channelling the purchase intent of consumers expressed through search queries through buying-advice content and on to online retailers, taking a commission on the way through. This relied on world-class search engine optimisation to occupy the top positions for high-intent queries. At its peak it worked beautifully, turning editorial output into something measurable directly against commercial outcomes.

But advertising, sponsorship, and e-commerce are all indirect forms of monetisation, and all are at the mercy of external factors. As the supply of content increased, the cost of advertising against it fell. As search engines surfaced more answers within their own world, publishers found themselves increasingly disintermediated from the purchase funnel they used to own. In both cases, the publisher-audience relationship was not deep enough to prevent the attrition.

Subscriptions aren’t new — they’re the backbone of print. My first subscription was to Science magazine in 1980. As Managing Director of Music at Future Plc, I’d hear from subscribers to Classic Rock magazine who after 30 years of subscribing still got the same buzz of excitement when their magazine flopped through the letter box. That’s passion right there, a repeatable, forecastable revenue stream, and a deep long-lasting relationship.

But many publishers have struggled to grow a subscription audience in the digital world, partly because audiences have come to expect their content for free — a conditioning publishers largely created themselves in the early days. In an effort to lure subscribers, they fall into the trap of discounting, and then have to pedal harder to combat the churn. Once again, the relationship isn’t deep enough to persist.

The same thread runs through every model. A shallow audience relationship — whether it’s one mediated by platforms, priced by algorithms, or acquired on discount — cannot sustain a business through external disruption.

Enter our old friend, the funnel. The funnel rose to prominence in the marketing world with its three layers of awareness, consideration, and purchase: all about transactions, and getting customers to part with cash. But what if we looked at the funnel through a different lens — one of relationship-building?

The standard conversion funnel treats subscription as the destination. Get someone over the line, job done. But subscription is not an end — it’s a beginning of something new.

A funnel which exists solely to convert strangers into payers is only doing half its job, leaving you to do the remaining half, which is to refill the funnel with the payers who churn out all the time. The funnel’s complete job is to convert strangers into people who trust you enough to pay, and then to deepen that trust until the relationship becomes habitual, valuable, and hard to walk away from. There’s a lot more trust behind recurring revenue than a one-off payment. And a one-off payment can either be a stepping stone to recurring revenue, or a failed trial. Every product decision, editorial investment, and commercial initiative should be evaluated against a single question: does this deepen the relationship?

A deep and persistent audience relationship is built on trust and respect, beyond the value exchange.

Trust has to be earned by the publisher, through consistently delivering on the promise. The publisher who does what it says, produces journalism worth reading, and turns up reliably builds something that takes years to create and very little time to destroy.

Respect, as always, is a two-way street. Publishers have to respect the audience not just through the quality of their journalism, but by not abusing the relationship — for example, by allowing an advertising experience that is overly interruptive and disruptive. Advertising doesn’t have to be a bad experience. Done well, it can be a genuinely positive one.

The relationship develops in three stages.

That’s not how relationships work. You don’t ask someone to marry you as soon as you meet.

There is a stage that sits before the committed subscription: short-term access. A day pass. A week pass. The ability to try something properly before deciding whether it’s worth a recurring payment. I can go into a shop and buy a can of Coke without being obliged to pay monthly for a crate of 24. The digital equivalent is consistently underused, treated as a discount mechanism, when it’s actually one of the most important conversion tools in the funnel.

This is a customer relationship like any other. It takes time to build, and far less time to break. Not every audience member will take the relationship as far as the publisher might want, and that’s OK. Not every person in a supermarket buys a crate of Coke every month, but lots of cans of Coke get sold every month.

Platforms have a legitimate role in this model. Two of them, to be precise.

At the top of the funnel, platforms bring awareness and discovery, reaching people who don’t know you yet. They’re a marketing tool for publishers, like handing out free trial size mini cans of Coke at Waterloo station. Platforms are genuinely useful and publishers should use them without apology — after all they’re using you without apology too. The goal at this stage is simply to be found.

At the far end of the funnel is the committed subscriber who reads your daily newsletter, listens to your podcast, attends your events. They represent some of the deepest subscriber relationships a publisher can build, and they can be fulfilled as well on platforms as on your own properties.

It’s far more difficult, nigh on impossible, to acquire, nurture, and convert an audience on someone else’s platform and still end up with a direct, owned relationship. You can’t.

Between awareness and committed relationship, there is a crossing point: the moment someone goes from knowing you to registering with you, and then from registering to paying you. These moments have to happen on your infrastructure, in your data environment, under your control. When someone registers on your platform, you get a named individual, declared interests, behavioural data, and a direct line. When someone subscribes on your platform, you get a payment relationship, and a first-party data asset that strengthens every other part of the business, including the advertising proposition.

When these moments happen on a platform, you get a follower. You know almost nothing about them. And when the platform changes its algorithm, its terms, or its business model, that relationship changes with it.

The register-and-purchase moment is the most important moment in the funnel. Frictionless platform sign-ins — like logging in with a Google email — is a poor substitute for real registration. Similarly subscribing to an app via an App Store gives you less knowledge about your customer. Publishers should seek to bring the registration closer to them by inviting users at the right moments to verify their email, set a passkey, and complete their profile. This is a trust journey within a trust journey.

The end state this model points toward is straightforward. A publishing business where direct subscriber revenue is the self-sustaining core, and where other revenue streams — advertising and e-commerce — are complementary.

This is not an anti-advertising argument. The advertising proposition improves as the subscriber base deepens: a known, loyal, data-rich audience is worth more to an advertiser than an anonymous, high-volume one. The path to a stronger B2B position runs through a stronger B2C one.

But the goal for any publisher serious about long-term sustainability is a business that could survive without advertising revenue, and so doesn’t have to make decisions as though it couldn’t.

No single product decision or campaign gets you there. It’s the cumulative result of treating every stage of the funnel as a relationship-building opportunity, owning the moments that matter, and measuring success not in impressions but in trust.