The advertising industry is facing a major breaking news problem, with the abundance of stories – from Trump’s tariffs to the war in Ukraine – drawing audiences but not advertising spend as brands become increasingly squeamish about hard news content.
According to the latest WARC Global Advertising Trends Report, globally, newsbrand adspend is forecast to fall to $32.3bn this year, a 33.1% decrease from 2019, and is forecast to remain flat through 2026. For magazine brands, spend is forecast at $3.7bn in 2025, a 38.6% slump since 2019.
Alongside content and safety concerns, brands are favouring global digital platforms like Google and Meta for targeted, scalable ads.
The report examines the shift in advertising spend from professionally-produced content to user generated content (UGC) and ‘creator-journalists’ willing to operate within digital platform ecosystems.
Despite high audience interest, serious news stories are frequently demonetised due to keyword blocklists deployed by brands concerned by reputational risk.
As brands avoid placing ads alongside content deemed controversial or distressing, they are favouring softer content like sport and lifestyle over “hard” news.
In fact, only 3.7% (£177m) of total UK TV ad spend was allocated to news programming in 2024, according to Nielsen. In the US, pharma brands have become increasingly integral for news broadcasters, accounting for 12% of national TV ad sales.
This evokes longstanding questions about the value of news as a content category, and whether brands should focus agnostically on targeting audiences.
The difficulties facing news media come at a time when advertisers increasingly favour user generated content (UGC) from influencers and creators, which offer low production costs, direct audience engagement, and alignment with platform algorithms.
Traditional media, which invests upfront in journalism and operates under stricter content standards and to tighter regulations, has struggled to compete. This shift is particularly damaging to the ad-funded news industry, which has long warned that shrinking investment in professional journalism risks a decline in civic literacy, and weaker defences against disinformation.
By next year, professionally produced content is forecast to account for less than half of content-driven ad spend, according to GroupM. Platforms like TikTok and podcasts are fuelling the rise of creator-journalists, as is the rise of AI-generated content which also accelerates this trend.
Traditionally, the biggest business sectors advertising in news media included automotive, retail, finance, and telecoms. With a broad reach and significant budgets, they relied heavily on print and local news to promote products and services at scale.
Over time, however, this mix has shifted. Automotive and retail spend moved toward digital and performance-based marketing. As news publishers adapt, they are increasingly targeting tech, healthcare and direct-to-consumer brands and niche B2B advertisers seeking trusted environments.
Over the past decade, online news consumption has surged in the UK and US, widening the gap with offline formats. This year online consumption is forecast to command nearly half an hour more usage than offline in the UK, while the gap is estimated at 16 minutes in the US.
Newsbrands have responded to the changing market by investing in technology, developing plans for AI, and building out multiplatform strategies to offer brands and agencies a cohesive proposition.
To further allay advertiser concerns around brand safety, publishers like Reach and News UK have developed in-house tech solutions to avoid inappropriate blocking. CNN has developed a neuro-linguistic AI tool that analyses context across text, audio, video, and galleries to assess brand suitability.
Media agencies are also evolving their approach. Some have introduced new measures like “quality CPM” (qCPM) in an effort to better reflect the effectiveness of campaigns placed against professionally-produced journalism.
Even so, GroupM global president of business intelligence Kate Scott-Dawkins concluded: “As spend from the long tail of advertisers continues to outpace growth from the top 200, UGC is likely to dominate even more.”
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