Digiday+ Research: How Dow Jones, Forbes, The Guardian and other publisher revenue streams are shifting in 2026

Bearing all of this in mind, Digiday+ Research’s third annual report on publishers’ revenues examines the current and future state of the group’s revenue streams, from traditional ad revenue to events and subscriptions.

Digiday+ Research surveyed 56 publisher professionals about their revenue streams, including ads, events and subscriptions. Digiday+ Research also conducted individual interviews with publishing executives responsible for strategic decisions at their companies. They included executives from:

• Condé Nast
• Dow Jones
• Forbes
• The Guardian

Digiday’s survey found that publishers’ top revenue streams based on a weighted average are direct-sold ads (3.22), branded content (2.62), programmatic ads (2.36), events (2.34) and video ads (2.17).

In particular, events have grown as a revenue source for publishers since 2025, according to Digiday’s survey. Events increased from a weighted average of 1.8 in 2025 to 2.1 in 2026 overtaking subscriptions as respondents’ fourth revenue source.

Leann Bonanno, chief sales and marketing officer at Forbes, said the publisher is expecting nearly double-digit overall revenue growth in 2026, with slightly higher growth in the integrated media business, which includes print, digital, live events, social, newsletters and programmatic. 

“As a company, we’re projecting roughly 9% growth year over year. From an integrated media perspective, we’re projecting 12% growth,” Bonanno said. “The areas where we see the most growth are video, social, live events and branded content. That’s really how media consumption has changed. As we worked in 2026 to build out our budget and plan, we had to rethink our media mix and where we would grow in certain areas.”

Video ads also remained a consistent revenue source for publishers year over year, holding steady in fifth place with a weighted average of 2.17 in 2026. 

“Video, from a percentage perspective, is probably still the fastest growing part of our digital ad business, admittedly off a relatively low base, but really strong year-over-year growth,” said Josh Stinchcomb, evp and chief revenue officer at The Wall Street Journal and Barron’s Group, which are both owned by Dow Jones. “Revenue from our partnership with LinkedIn through the BrandLink program is on track to double this year. … We’ve also just launched a big push into vertical video on our app. … It’s become a bigger part of the newsroom’s video strategy, especially as the app has become increasingly important as a point of consumption and a manifestation of the Journal brand.”

Deborah Brett, global chief business officer at Condé Nast, said in an email that the publisher has deliberately evolved its revenue strategy over the past year to be less siloed, while continuing to focus on strategic growth channels. 

“Our direct-to-consumer lines of business remain a top priority, growing our subscriber base. And in 2026 we expect commerce to play a greater role than ever, connecting across all forms of media,” Brett said. “What’s evolving is the degree to which all revenue lines are now being built around the same core asset: direct, high-intent audience relationships. Subscriptions, commerce, events, and advertising are all part of a unified strategy designed to maximize lifetime value and brand trust.”

Digiday’s survey found that while subscriptions remain a reliable revenue source for publishers, subscriptions’ weighted average among survey respondents declined for the third year in a row. Subscriptions’ weighted average dropped from 2.07 in 2024 to 1.91 in 2025, and remained about the same at 1.92 in 2026. Subscriptions are now publishers’ sixth revenue source, after events, according to Digiday’s survey. 

Despite the decrease in weighted average, publishers’ digital-only subscriptions have continued to grow since 2023, according to Digiday’s February 2026 analysis of subscription and paid reader revenue trends among major news publishers. The bulk of that growth came from bundling other verticals, newsletters and premium briefings to raise average revenue per user and reduce churn. Digiday’s 2025 Subscription Index found that as a whole indexed publishers increased subscription prices by 5% year over year from 2024 to 2025.

“Total digital-only ARPU [average revenue per user] grew year over year to $9.72 as we stepped up subscribers from promotional to higher prices and raised prices on certain tenured subscribers,” New York Times CFO Will Bardeen said in a Feb. 4, 2026 earnings call. The Times increased its bundle price from $25 to $30 last year.

Stinchcomb at The Wall Street Journal and Barron’s Group said that while print readership has been on the decline, it dropped less than expected in 2025 because of political news coverage. “We have a lot of print readers on the Hill, and there’s a perception or a reality that print ads are effective for advocacy, policy shaping and messaging,” Stinchcomb said. “When there’s a lot of D.C. focus, we tend to see a bit of a resurgence in print.” 

Stinchcomb said he doesn’t necessarily expect that resurgence to continue throughout 2026. For now, the publisher is focused on growing other revenue streams. “For us it’s about great professional expert branded content for our partners. It’s about events and then, in the digital space, the shift from display to video and audio and getting sharper around targeting and data,” he said.

When Digiday asked publishers what percentage of their organization’s revenue will come from ads in 2026 and 2027, about one-third of survey respondents (29%) said they expect 41%-60% of their company’s revenue to come from ads this year. Fifteen percent of respondents said they expect 61%-80% of their company’s revenue to come from ads in 2026, while 19% of respondents said they expect almost all of their organization’s revenue (81%-100%) to come from ads.

Looking forward to 2027, slightly more than one-quarter of respondents (26%) said they expect about half of their revenue (41%-60%) to come from ads, while 18% of respondents said they expect 61%-81% of their organization’s revenue to come from ads. And the same percentage of respondents (18%) anticipate that the majority of their company’s revenue (81%-100%) will come from ads next year.

Nataki Williams, svp of finance and operations at The Guardian U.S., said that while the publishing industry is facing significant headwinds, she expects The Guardian’s ad revenue to increase this year. “We are in an industry that is not experiencing a lot of growth. Ads is under pressure, but we’re still expecting year-on-year growth in our ad business,” Williams said. “We are expecting almost 20% growth in our reader revenue business. In an industry where there’s a lot of skepticism, we are really excited about how we’re continuing to build our audience and connect with our readers overall.”

When Digiday asked publishers which parts of their business they are focused on building in the next six months, survey respondents said they are most focused on building direct-sold ads (3.67 weighted average), followed by branded content (3.17), video ads (2.28), subscriptions (2.67) and programmatic ads (2.61). Publishers’ order of importance for building these parts of their business matched their top-performing revenue streams.

The biggest shift in this year’s survey results was that events overtook affiliate commerce as an area of focus for publishers. Events’ weighted average increased from 2.16 in 2025 to 2.42 in 2026, while affiliate commerce’s weighted average dropped from 2.42 in 2025 to 1.28 in 2026.

Forbes’ Bonanno said that while events can be labor intensive to produce, they continue to be a strong revenue channel. “[Events] allows us to bring the best of the Forbes brand to life and convene influential communities, so we are only doubling down,” Bonanno said. “This makes a large portion of our overall integrated media business, and we’re projecting 12% growth for the events business.”

Forbes produces more than 100 events annually, and events support other revenue streams, according to Bonanno. “It anchors a lot of our bigger partnerships, because brands work with us to have these in-person experiences and then build their partnerships around that,” she said.

Dow Jones is also expanding its events business across publications and locations, including hosting an inaugural WSJ Tech Live event in Qatar in December 2025 and an inaugural WSJ Invest Live event in February 2026. “We’re also looking to increase use of environments and locations and hold excursions, whether that is the F1 race in Qatar or a golf outing in Florida,” Stinchcomb said. “Those are still structured networking times, but ones that get people out and about and taking advantage of the cool experiences that we have access to.”

Several of the publishers Digiday interviewed for this report pointed out growing momentum in nascent revenue channels like newsletters and podcasts. These revenue streams are typically used to support broader business strategies, but the publishers noted their potential for individual growth.

Forbes’ Bonanno is expecting significant revenue growth from newsletters this year. Forbes has dozens of newsletters across a range of topics, from daily news roundups to C-suite editions, and specialized finance, technology and lifestyle briefings. The publisher offers its clients the ability to bundle newsletters to reach target audiences, according to Bonanno.

“We’re projecting 40% year-over-year growth with newsletters,” Bonanno said. “We spend a lot of time understanding our audience and their behavior across the Forbes experience, whether that’s coming to a live event, subscribing to a newsletter or engaging with the morning brief on Forbes.com. Then sharing those personas and user journeys with our partners to say, ‘if you want to reach the CIO that comes to Forbes, here are the ways you can connect with the audience you’re trying to reach.’”

Forbes is not the only publisher using newsletters as a tool within a larger business strategy. Condé Nast relies on its newsletters to increase reader engagement, subscriptions and affiliate commerce. “There’s no better way to build a direct connection with the audience than to land in a person’s inbox,” Condé Nast’s Brett said in an email. “Newsletters drive reader revenue as well as engagement. They play a critical role in the subscription lifecycle, and our great shopping newsletters, based on brand trust and authority, help to drive our affiliate business.”

“Our brands are adopting newsletter-first thinking into their content strategies,” she added. “In some cases, that connection to a particular journalist, their beat and analysis, has become part of the exclusive subscriber offering.”

While most publishers use newsletters to preview news content, Stinchcomb at The Wall Street Journal and Barron’s Group, said branded content also performs well. “That’s typically how our partners want to use newsletters,” Stinchcomb said. “If you were to subscribe to The Wall Street Journal or Barron’s newsletters, you’d see that the vast majority of the advertising is branded content — either a prompt to click through and read a longer branded article or video.” 

Like newsletters, podcasts are a growing revenue channel for publishers. “The industry is looking at podcasts again, not just as an audio product, but a blended video and audio strategy,” Bonanno explained. “Whether you want to watch on YouTube or listen while driving. And that’s what we’re offering our [advertising] partners — that there’s a multi platform opportunity to align around a franchise.” 

“We’re also talking about how we can leverage live podcast recordings and turn those into unique events,” she added.

Stinchcomb said podcast ads have been a fast-growing part of The Wall Street Journal and Barron’s Group’s businesses over the past few years. “We did see a dip at the end of 2025 in podcast advertising, which was not unique to us, but the first couple of months of this calendar year have been back to the same growth rates we were seeing historically,” Stinchcomb said. “There is increasing momentum around video podcasts, both from a consumption perspective and from an advertising perspective.” 

The Guardian is also investing in podcasts, launching a new podcast with the goal of expanding editorial content beyond the publication’s website, according to Williams. “We’re still in the early strategy stages because we want it to be very Guardian,” Williams said. “I wouldn’t say that it’s advertising led. Obviously there will be ads, but right now we are focused on the content side. … How do we expand beyond the website, and how do we expand beyond hard news? That is where the podcast and The Filter [affiliate commerce site] come in.”

Overall, publishers’ focus on building their affiliate commerce business declined this year, from a  weighted average of 2.42 in 2025 to 1.28 in 2026. That puts affiliate commerce in second-to-last place as a revenue stream publishers intend to build over the coming six months. 

The rise of zero-click search continues to affect publishers’ referral traffic, with many publishers reporting traffic declines in 2025, according to Digiday’s annual report on how publishers use AI. And when AI platforms like Google’s AI Overviews answer queries with summaries rather than links, it negatively impacts publishers’ affiliate commerce revenue by eliminating the need for users to click through to product reviews and recommendations.

Stinchcomb at The Wall Street Journal and Barron’s Group said the publisher has been grappling with how to offset the effects of zero-click search. “We’ve been spending a lot of time trying to understand the move from SEO to GEO and help our partners understand how to get their brand messages across in a way to be cited more in AI search results,” he said. 

“In the same way that publishers have been feeling the impact of Google search traffic, brands themselves are going to find it increasingly complicated to drive people to their websites,” Stinchcomb added. “So, what can we do in terms of how we talk about ourselves as brands? That’s something we need to understand, and we can bring guidance to partners on that front.”

However, not all publishers are feeling the effects of zero-click search. The Guardian’s Williams said referral traffic has actually improved. “Over the past year, we’ve seen deeper engagement with our content, which is the opposite of what we expected,” Williams said. “In the last three months, our Google referrals have been up versus our baseline.” 

“It has more to do with the fact that Google isn’t really doing news summaries,” Williams explained. “It’s a summary of links, as opposed to giving an answer. When it comes to news, people still want to read the information.”

The Guardian recently expanded its affiliate commerce business in the U.S. with the October 2025 launch of its affiliate commerce website, The Filter. “There’s still plenty of opportunity within affiliate because people love reviews,” Williams said. “An AI [search result] might tell you high-level [information]. The affiliate business allows you to get in-depth reviews. People know us as a trusted source, so why not expand into areas outside of news? An affiliate is a perfect place to do that.” 

To combat the negative effects AI is having on most publishers’ referral traffic, some publishers are experimenting with how AI can be used to increase audience engagement, improve ad targeting and attract more advertisers.

Survey respondents were almost evenly split on how effective AI is at modeling non-endemic audiences for those purposes. Fifty-one percent of respondents said AI is somewhat effective at identifying and modeling non-endemic audiences, while 46% of respondents said it is not very effective or not at all effective.

Forbes has been using AI referral traffic data from SEMrush and Similarweb — such as the prompts that led to a Forbes article being cited in an AI answer — to create audience cohorts of the people who come to its site from AI platforms.

“We create cohorts, meaning we understand the types of searches and the types of people that resonate,” said Forbes chief innovation officer Nina Gould on stage at the Digiday Publishing Summit Europe in Lisbon, Portugal, in October 2025. “We don’t target them or track them currently when they come back. So it isn’t a [personally identifiable information issue] at this point. It’s just data points for your audience and data points for your editorial team.”

Publishers are also exploring how to incorporate AI into the media buying process. “The next big thing to focus on is using AI to automate media plan creation and proposal response,” Stinchcomb said. “Being able to ingest a brief or an RFP, understand targets, KPIs and have the benefit of the hindsight of every campaign and how it performed against different audiences to develop the ultimate media plan is compelling. We are working on how we build and roll that out this year.” 

Overall, Condé Nast’s Brett said she expects more practical applications of AI in the coming year. “If 2025 was the year of AI hype and fearmongering, we expect 2026 to be the year when we can really put the tools to use to better serve our consumers and our clients, in meaningful and measurable ways,” Brett said in an email.