Digiday Media Strategies London

Registration opens and our team will be ready to greet you. Please stop by to check in and grab your badge and enjoy some coffee and networking before sessions begin.

The editorial team will set the stage for the day.

In this scene-setting keynote, Christian Broughton, CEO of The Independent, breaks down how AI has concretely reshaped the publisher balance sheet over the past twelve months, from the continued erosion of referral traffic and the rise (and volatility) of licensing deals, to the real costs and opportunities of AI scraping and how commercial planning has had to adapt in response. This will be a grounded, numbers-informed look at where publishers actually stand today versus where they were a year ago, setting the stage for the rest of the day’s conversations on strategy, monetization and what comes next.

What is your content really worth to AI – and what happens when you stop relying on Google to tell you? People Inc.’s Chief Innovation Officer Jon Roberts goes inside their work with Microsoft’s content marketplace to show how usage and pricing signals are reshaping the value of premium content. He’ll talk candidly about what they learned from deliberately weaning their brands off Google traffic, and how that forced a rethink of where growth really comes from. Finally, we’ll look at how People is building for the next wave of audiences – human and agent – and what that means for how publishers package, price and deliver their content.

As AI agents start to mediate how audiences discover and consume news, The Economist is rethinking both how it builds products and who it builds them for. In this talk, Josh Muncke will outline three AI-driven initiatives, sharing concrete examples and the lessons learned – from unexpected adoption patterns to ideas that didn’t land. He’ll also give a progress update on The Economist’s agent-building efforts, exploring the distinction between building AI-powered products designed for AI agents to consume.

Few publishers were earlier or louder than the Mail in sounding the alarm on AI search and Google’s AI Overviews. Now, they’re bringing hard numbers. In this session, the Mail’s Carly Steven shares fresh results from GEO testing, what’s actually working to protect and grow traffic, and how their early measurement groundwork is shaping a more resilient search and audience strategy.

Grab a coffee and get to work! Publisher VIPs will join our editors to jot down and start discussing their most pressing challenges to fill out our Town Hall Challenge Board while the rest of our attendees take a moment to schedule their 6-Minute Meetings live onsite.

The 6-Minute Meetings are designed to help connect participants with innovative technology platforms and build valuable business relationships.

Recharge with lunch and network with peers before we kick off the town hall.

An open, publisher-led discussion under Chatham House rules. We’ll review the Challenge Board and dig into your most pressing issues. 

Search and social no longer send readers your way so how do you get paid? In this conversation, Abs Ahmed, director of subscriptions at Times Media, unpacks how the publisher is looking at diversifying reader revenue beyond subscriptions, reaching new audiences without undercutting core memberships and using AI across the subscriber journey to keep readers engaged when the old traffic playbook no longer works.

As AI reshapes how audiences discover and consume content, publishers face a fundamental choice: compete in an increasingly commoditised content environment, or double down on the direct relationships that drive lasting value. Fiona Spooner, md for consumer revenue at the Financial Times, shares how the FT is protecting and growing its subscriber base amid this shift, from paywall and access strategy to rethinking acquisition, retention and pricing as content discovery becomes increasingly AI-mediated. Expect practical insights into the trade-offs and decisions shaping how a premium publisher keeps readers paying and staying in an AI-driven ecosystem.

Take a break, grab a coffee and connect with fellow attendees.

Mail Metro Media’s creator unit has become a key revenue and audience driver. Managing director Hannah Blake will break down how the team structures deals, pays creators and makes the model pay off, and why this strategy is now as critical for reaching young audiences on social platforms as it is for insulating the business from AI-driven shifts in search.

As publishers look for new sources of growth, there is still untapped value in the audiences they already have. Low or limited identity signals can make valuable impressions harder for buyers to recognise, reducing competition and ultimately publisher yield. Intent IQ’s Yoad Shloosh and Teal’s Matthew Whaley will look at what the data tells us about the scale of this missed opportunity, how better identity resolution can restore value to under-addressed inventory, and what that means for publisher revenue.

CNN International Commercial is pushing its publishing products beyond traditional ad models to unlock new, durable revenue lines. In this session, Faisal Kamali will unpack how CNN evaluates where existing products can be retooled, bundled or extended into new commercial offerings. He’ll explain how this approach fits the industry’s wider shift away from overreliance on search and social, and why building product-led revenue streams is central to publishers’ next phase of growth.

For 20 years, digital publishing has been built around one assumption: a human discovers content, clicks a link and arrives on a publisher’s site. AI is breaking that model. Publishers now have multiple consumers of the same intellectual property — human readers, AI answer engines, autonomous agents and content/data partners — not all of whom generate a pageview. That makes zero-click more than an SEO problem; it’s a product and business-model redesign challenge. This session asks: If the pageview stops being the atomic unit of publishing, what replaces it?

The discussion will explore how publishers can build for a post-traffic world, from structured content, data, APIs and licensing to AI citations, direct audience relationships, commerce and agentic transactions — shifting the conversation from how publishers preserve the old traffic model to what we should build in its place.

Digiday moderators will recap the event’s key takeaways.

Join us for an evening of cocktails and networking following the day’s program in the chic and fun Croc Bowling Alley of the Ham Yard Hotel. There will be bowling shoes available to those that want to fit in a game with peers.