This State of the Industry Report, produced in partnership with Piano, explores how publishers engage with social media, specifically paid social media, what strategies they use, the challenges they encounter and how they plan to overcome them.
As social platforms become more fragmented and organic reach continues to decline, publishers and media companies are leaning more heavily on paid social to meet specific business objectives. But without clear, effective strategies in place, paid campaigns risk falling short — leading to missed goals, budget overruns and underwhelming performance. Determining the most efficient and impactful ways to deploy paid social is ever-critical.
To successfully manage paid social campaigns that deliver impact while separating publishers and media companies from competitors and providing value to consumers, teams need a strategic approach that combines leveraging data, testing and thoughtful campaign design.
“Generally, media companies don’t have a ton of money to spend on paid marketing,” Michael Silberman, executive vice president of media strategy at Piano said. “When they’re doing paid marketing, they’re looking for really efficient channels, and social is a really efficient channel. They can’t typically afford a big display or branding budget. Given the audience we’re talking to, it makes a ton of sense [they’d allocate significant spend] because it’s such an accessible channel for publishers to use when they have a specific target they’re trying to reach or a particular conversion goal they’re trying to achieve. So, it’s no surprise that a relatively high share of budget goes to paid social marketing.”
In this State of the Industry report, Digiday and Piano surveyed 105 publishers about how they engage with social media — what platforms and tools they use, how they determine what content to feature in paid campaigns, etc. — the challenges they encounter and the hopes they have for the future of paid social media marketing.
As Silberman alluded to, the majority of our respondents are allocating 21%–40% of their total media budget to paid social (62% said so), followed by 33% in the 1%–20% range, aligning with industry expectations.
“It’s great to see that paid social is no longer experimental — it’s foundational now,” said Craig Pentland, svp of client services at SocialFlow by Piano. “When we first started working in this space, there was a lot of hesitation around investing in paid social. Seeing how publishers are now dedicating real resources to it has been incredibly validating. It’s rewarding to watch paid social become such a core part of overall business strategy.”
For 2024–2025, 71% said their paid social budget has increased somewhat, while for 2026, 68% of respondents expect their budget to increase significantly, signaling paid social’s substantial role in publishers’ strategies.
Silberman attributes some of this shift to publishers no longer being able to rely on organic sources as they once could.
“They can’t count on getting the kind of traffic they used to from Facebook or Google,” Silberman said. “If they still have particular traffic goals to reach and business goals to drive against, they will need to shift toward sources they have control over, and paid media is the ultimate source you can control. You get to target the exact audience you want and drive it to the exact destination you want. Publishers are becoming more like other marketers who can’t necessarily count on organic traffic when trying to achieve particular marketing goals. It’s also not a surprise given the evolution in how platforms have been treating publishers for organic reach.”
Publishers are seeing a positive return on their investment, and because of that, they’re willing to allocate more money to scale further. And that’s one of the beautiful things about paid marketing: Once a tactic delivers successfully against desired goals, spending more money will produce more of those results.
As for how paid social budgets are allocated across platforms, 42% mostly focus on one or two platforms, 29% say allocation varies significantly by campaign and 28% have a balanced distribution across multiple platforms.
These strategies generally depend on publishers’ specific goals, and Pentland cautions against believing there’s a one-size-fits-all strategy.
“It’s important to be able to quickly shift between platforms based on your top KPIs,” he said. “Your campaign goal, who you’re trying to reach and the content you’re promoting all factor into that. We always encourage publishers to diversify rather than rely too heavily on one platform, so they can stay flexible and optimize as they go.”
The majority of respondents have a medium-sized social media team of 6–10 members (79%), followed by 17% selecting a 2–5-person team, 3% a team of one, and only 1% indicated a team of 20 or more.
For additional context, respondents were asked about their organization’s size. The most popular response was organizations with 51–500 employees (86%), followed by 501+ employees (10%) and 0–50 at 4%.
“These results really show how demanding social media has become,” Pentland said. “Most publishers can’t rely on just one person anymore — it takes a small team, even if it’s not huge. At the same time, we’re not seeing fully-staffed 20-person departments either. A lot of teams are operating in that middle zone, trying to keep up with a constantly evolving space. If your team feels small compared to your goals, the key is having the right tools to streamline organic efforts and a strong agency partner to help with paid. That’s what helps publishers stay agile and effective.”
On top of this, it’s important to note that social media teams within publishers are responsible for organic and paid efforts, covering editorial and sponsored content, and any special projects, including partnerships. So, this can further split these teams’ attention, potentially explaining why some of these publishers aren’t able to execute on what’s needed to push the company forward.
The platforms chosen for paid media efforts are rather wide, though nearly all (93%) selected Facebook — unsurprisingly — followed by YouTube (84%), TikTok (80%) and Instagram (64%). Snapchat and Reddit were at the bottom with 25% and 11%, respectively.
“Facebook paved the way, and Meta remains the strongest platform for reach, targeting, versatility and direct response attribution,” Pentland said. “We often recommend automatic placement campaigns on Meta because it identifies the users most likely to take action — eliminating the need to manually choose between Facebook and Instagram. YouTube is still valuable, but we’re seeing it lean more toward brand-building than direct-response. TikTok is rising fast and delivers strong, cost-efficient engagement. Instagram continues to be a top choice for driving interaction, especially through Stories, but overall, Meta and its associated placements still lead in performance and precision targeting.”
The tools our respondents are using to manage paid social campaigns are mostly social media management and automation scheduling tools, such as Hootsuite and Sprout Social (74%); analytics and attribution tools (GA4, AppsFlyer) at 64% and creative optimization and A/B testing tools (Canva, Smartly.io) at 62%.
For organic social campaigns, the most used tools are those for analytics and attribution at 67%, followed by analytics and performance tracking (Brandwatch, Rival IQ) at 61% and AI and automation (ChatGPT, Zapier) and community management and engagement tools (Agorpulse, Discord) tied at 54% each.
Notably, performance tracking isn’t at the top for paid efforts; however, this could be due to respondents considering analytics and attribution tools as essentially the same as analytics and performance tracking.
“Performance tracking is what we look at constantly and is the cornerstone of any paid strategy, so it’s surprising not to see that at the top,” said Pentland.
When selecting content to promote via paid social, 77% do so based on sponsored content promotion, 72% by performance of organic content and 64% by specific campaign goals. The lowest on the list, at 23%, was relevance to current events or trends.
“Sponsored content is both the content you’re promoting and the objective, which is driving the audience to the sponsored content, making total sense why those are high on the list,” Silberman said. “The next is looking at the performance of organic content and using that to build a paid campaign, which also makes sense. Typically, one of the things you look for is to combine both paid and organic to get a higher ROI on a particular campaign you’re running. If a post you’re boosting also gets some good organic traction, it just makes the campaign that much more efficient, so that’s obviously an important tactic, but the fact that sponsored content was at the top of the list makes perfect sense.”
As for using paid social to promote pieces tied to trends or current events, there are several reasons why this tactic is at the bottom for our respondents.
“Promoting trending or current event content through paid social isn’t always easy,” said Pentland. “Trends can move so fast that by the time you build and launch a campaign, the moment has already passed. On top of that, platforms often take extra time reviewing content that’s tied to news or sensitive topics, which can delay or even prevent promotions. Even when the content is spot on, these challenges can make it hard to move quickly enough to really take advantage of the opportunity.”
Overwhelmingly, the primary objective our respondents said their paid social campaigns serve is to acquire new subscribers and customers, with 50% saying so. The rest are split across the remaining answers, though only 16% focus on retaining their existing subscribers/customers with paid efforts.
“If you’re putting in the effort to acquire new subscribers, we believe retention deserves just as much effort, if not more,” Pentland said. “The challenge is that retention is a lot harder to measure. When we run retention-focused campaigns with publishers, one of the biggest hurdles is figuring out how much impact those efforts are actually having on keeping subscribers.
“That said, we’ve seen real success with marketing and remarketing from a retention standpoint, especially when you can tap into first-party data,” he continued. “Promoting your top-performing stories to your existing subscribers can be a smart way to keep them engaged. It’s even more effective when you use your CRM data to retarget those audiences through a well-planned retention campaign.”
Several strategies appear to be successful in driving conversions for our publisher respondents: 90% say custom audiences, such as website visitors and email lists, followed by 73% selecting interests, behavior or intent.
“Your targeting strategy should really align with your overall objective,” Pentland said. “Contextual targeting can work well at the top of the funnel when you’re trying to reach a broader audience and drive more traffic to your site. From there, the focus shifts to nurturing those visitors and retargeting them effectively. The more precise we can be with targeting, the better the results. That’s why we lean heavily on custom audiences — CRM data, site visitors and retargeted audiences — because those consistently deliver the strongest performance.”
Our publisher respondents are mostly split between reviewing and adjusting their paid social budgets and strategies weekly (44%) and bi-weekly (38%), indicating they understand the importance of refreshing these tactics.
“Publishers ask us this all the time — how often should we adjust our strategies?” Pentland said. “It really depends on the type of campaign. For quick sprints, like branded or sponsored content, you should be checking performance at least weekly and making fast changes if needed. For subscription campaigns, patience is key — these platforms need time to optimize and find high-value users. Whatever the campaign, the most important thing is to build in a regular review cadence and be ready to act on the data. That’s how you drive real results.”
While respondents have a good sense of how often to review their strategies and budgets, the focus for informing and optimizing paid campaigns is gathering a few different kinds of data and using AI to get the most out of it.
Nearly 90% are using data analysis and reporting, unsurprisingly followed by AI and automation tools (78%), social listening tools (70%) and performance analytics and tracking (68%).
“Those tools are definitely essential,” Pentland said. “But we always remind publishers that not everything can or should be automated. AI and analytics are powerful, but there’s still real value in human insight — things like sentiment analysis or simply reading through comments can reveal how content is landing. When you pair smart automation with hands-on review, you get a much fuller picture of what’s working and why.”
As publishers embrace automation, it’s clear that the challenge is maintaining control over message, mission and measurement. The top five selected KPIs our respondents prioritize for paid social success are: cost-per-click (76%), cost-per-acquisition (71%), CTR (70%), conversions (subscriptions, sign-ups) at 60% and ROAS (58%).
While it might be surprising that conversions/subscriptions aren’t at the very top, considering this question covers everything paid social efforts entail, a large portion of those marketing efforts go toward supporting sponsored content, which has completely different success markers. So, this verifies that publishers have many other things they’re focusing on and that paid social can support a variety of goals and KPIs.
“These results speak to the complex landscape and the multiple objectives publishers are balancing with their social media channels,” Pentland said. “ While subscriptions may be the ultimate goal for many, different campaign types and priorities often shift the focus, which explains why conversions aren’t always the top KPI.”
While there are many other things publishers can do to monetize their content effectively, the key takeaway when using paid media or adjusting paid media strategies is to align KPIs to campaign goals.
“The cost-per-click aligns perfectly with sponsored content,” Silberman said. “All you’re trying to do is drive impressions and do so at the lowest cost possible. So, there is some alignment between those metrics in terms of their share and the objectives and their share, so I think that part makes sense.”
Regarding performance attribution for paid social campaigns, the most difficult challenge our respondents cite is complexity with multi-touch attribution models (43%), followed by delayed or incomplete conversion data (24%).
“Multi-touch attribution models are often hard to apply successfully, so it’s not surprising to see them at number one,” Silberman said. Regarding delayed or incomplete conversion data, “that one aligns directly to some of the changes that Apple made with ATT and the changes that Facebook made as a result, where the conversion window dropped from 30 days to seven days: If you’re trying to drive a conversion like a subscription, that might happen long after the original campaign was run.”
Given how many publishers rely on Facebook for paid media efforts, this is certainly a big problem. Silberman offered a few tips, however.
“The solution specifically with Facebook is that there’s a conversions API that you can feed server-side conversions back,” he said. “That’s one of those things we often test with publishers to do that kind of conversion tracking and better attribution for a full-loop of that conversion. That’s possible when you track every element of a campaign through to the actual conversion. The main thing is using whatever tools exist, depending on the network, to track conversions as accurately as possible.”
Managing and optimizing paid social media campaigns poses more challenges for our respondents, with the top three consisting of rising advertising costs (49%), keeping up with platform and algorithm changes (43%) and privacy regulations (41%).
“Rising costs, algorithm shifts and changing privacy rules are a lot to keep up with,” said Pentland. “But one of the best ways to navigate all of that is by leaning into your first-party data. Taking the time to build and activate it makes your campaigns more efficient and targeted, which helps offset rising costs and tighter targeting restrictions. We also recommend reusing strong creative across platforms — the tools make it easy now, and it’s a smart way to reduce production demands while keeping campaigns fresh and consistent.”
The top three biggest challenges our respondents have when trying to achieve their marketing objectives through organic social media are balancing virality with brand consistency (39%), content saturation and competition (37%) and monetization and revenue generation (33%).
“This first one really is a balancing act — you don’t want to pursue viral content that’s going to bring in people that have no actual connection to your brand, that isn’t a brand fit, that doesn’t sit in your brand voice — brand and editorial tone have to come first, ahead of virality,” Silberman said. “There was a period 10 years ago when everyone was chasing viral content and sacrificing brand to do that, but now there’s not as much to be gained by chasing virality, so you should just put brand first.
“Because social networks are crowded spaces, you’re competing not only with other publishers but influencers, folks just doing content creation without necessarily building any kind of publisher brand, so that’s the reality of the space publishers are operating in,” he continued. “One way to think about this is to create content that aligns with whatever the platform is and the audience on that platform, while still connecting back to the publisher brand.”
Silberman also underscored the importance of driving content back to publishers’ owned-and-operated sites where they can monetize much more effectively than on any third-party platform. This is another challenge inherent to some platforms that are less efficient at driving audience engagement — they don’t drive traffic back.
While publishers face some tough challenges, they have some ideas on rectifying these for improved social media marketing strategies.
Our respondents plan to overcome challenges in measuring paid social performance by integrating cross-channel analytics and data centralization (67%), implementing multi-touch attribution and incrementality testing (59%), leveraging AI-driven analytics and automation (54%) and automating and streamlining reporting (54%).
To overcome the challenges publishers face in achieving their objectives through organic social media campaigns, the top solution is collaboration with influencers and partners at 83%. Improving audience targeting and community engagement (69%) and maintaining consistent and authentic branding (66%) follow close behind.
As publishers seek collaborations to help the performance of their organic media, it’s important to ensure their audience doesn’t view such posts as paid content if it isn’t.
“If you’re going to partner with an influencer or collaborator, it needs to feel authentic, especially if it’s a longer-term relationship,” Pentland said. “Audiences are quick to pick up on content that feels forced or overly promotional, especially when it blurs the line between organic and paid. If it’s not actually an ad, it shouldn’t look or feel like one. Publishers are being really intentional about choosing the right partners and making sure the message aligns with both their brand and the influencer’s voice. That authenticity is what maintains trust and keeps the audience engaged.”
Looking to the future, our publisher respondents see paid social evolving in many ways, with more AI and automation in campaign management and more experimentation with AI-generated and personalized content tied for first at 81%, followed by an increased focus on performance and ROI at 77%.
“Every time we open a platform’s ads manager, it feels like there’s a new AI feature being rolled out,” said Pentland. “There’s no question paid social is becoming more automated — and that can be a good thing in terms of efficiency, but publishers still need to protect their editorial voice. You’ve built a relationship with your audience, and that can’t be handed over to algorithms. Automation can help you scale, but it’s the human that keeps your content grounded and your audience coming back.”
While AI can certainly aid in reducing costs and increasing performance efficiency, it’s still important for publishers to diversify their media mix and remain flexible. Relying on any one social media platform only harms their performance. Cross-distributing, cross-promoting across networks and analyzing where performance is best to then automatically push spend to those audiences, networks and that creative — all of the above — is how publishers become more effective with paid media.
“It’s about making it easier to manage because the social networks keep proliferating, the audience is fragmenting, so making it as easy as possible to find the right platform and then optimize across multiple platforms,” said Silberman. “That’s certainly how we think about the problem and see the biggest opportunity for helping publishers be as efficient and effective as possible.”
Paid social has secured its place at the center of publisher strategy — delivering measurable results across subscriptions, lead generation and branded content. What was once a short-term campaign tool is now a powerful driver of audience and revenue growth. Lean teams are working with greater precision, backed by smarter tools, richer data and increased investment. As automation, AI and attribution evolve, publishers are well-positioned to unlock even more value. Paid social isn’t just working — it’s gaining momentum.
As organic reach declines, publishers are doubling down on paid social media to drive subscriptions, branded content and audience growth — 62% of publishers are dedicating 21%–40% of their media budgets to paid social, and most expect budgets to rise further in 2026. Facebook remains the dominant platform, but YouTube, TikTok and Instagram also play key roles.
Custom audiences and first-party data are the most effective targeting tools, while AI and automation are helping streamline campaigns and improve performance. Still, challenges persist — rising costs, attribution complexity and algorithm shifts top the list. Despite this, publishers continue to adjust strategies weekly or bi-weekly, leaning on analytics, testing and creative optimization.
Retention efforts lag behind acquisition, and organic campaigns struggle with content saturation and balancing virality with brand consistency. To counter this, publishers are investing in influencer collaborations and personalized content. Looking ahead, they expect paid social to become even more AI-driven, ROI-focused and integrated across marketing channels. For lean teams navigating fragmented platforms, paid social is no longer optional; it’s essential.
About Piano
Piano’s Digital Experience Platform empowers organizations to understand and influence customer behavior. By unifying customer data, analyzing behavior metrics and creating personalized customer journeys, Piano helps brands launch campaigns and products faster, strengthen customer engagement and drive personalization at scale from a single platform. Headquartered in Amsterdam with offices across the Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific, Piano serves a global client base, including the BBC, CNBC, Rabobank and The Wall Street Journal. Piano has been recognized as one of the fastest-growing, most innovative technology companies in the world by The World Economic Forum, Inc., Deloitte, American City Business Journals and more. For more information, visit piano.io.
