News Corp Australia is proving news publishers can break free from the “empty reach” trap and build sustainable advertising revenue by prioritising audience engagement over vanity metrics — achieving direct traffic worth 10 times more than social referrals.

News Corp Australia’s Free News and Lifestyle Managing Director Pippa Leary shares the strategic blueprint behind their evolution.

First-party data as the foundation for direct relationships

INMA: The INMA Advertising Initiative identifies first-party data activation as our No. 1 priority, noting 86% of publishers cite it as their most significant asset for driving ad revenue.

You’ve built News Corp Australia’s strategy around the Adobe Experience Platform as your customer data platform. Can you walk us through how you’re using first-party data not just to recognise non-logged-in users but to fundamentally change how you demonstrate audience value to advertisers — particularly given your insight that “direct traffic is 10 times more valuable than anything coming from social and five times more valuable than anything coming from search.”

Leary: Here at News Australia we have built a privacy-compliant data platform (Intent Connect) that maximises 2.5 billion first-party signals captured by our CDP (Adobe Experience Platform) each month, enriching them with other second-/third- party sources (e.g. transactional data) to create compelling commercial audience segments that our clients can advertise against.

Direct audiences (those that type in our URL, bookmark us, or come from newsletters) tend to visit us every day and week, and therefore we know more about them than one-and-done traffic referred from social networks. 

Given their frequent visits, we can assign these frequent visitors a persistent ID and continue to enrich their profile based on first-, second-, and third-party signals. The more audiences visit and the more engaged they are, the more audience data we collect about them. Deeper understanding of consumption behaviours allows for improved content curation and personalisation. 

By enriching this first-party data with second- and third-party data, we also build more accurate “intent” segments we can sell to our clients.

For example, we enrich the profile of a travel intender (frequent content consumer in travel category who has been hashed or anonymised) with their latest activity reading multiple Bali travel recommendations, as well as purchase data from third-party travel providers. For clients wanting to sell Bali travel packages, we can reach these “travel intenders” even if they are reading sports news or an entertainment story.

Clients pay a higher yield for high intent segments (targeted advertising), which further supports revenue growth. In many ways, it becomes a virtuous circle of engagement, intent, and outcomes. 

“Engaged reach” and premium pricing defense

INMA: You’ve been vocal about News Corp Australia’s shift from “empty reach” to “engaged reach” metrics, telling the industry that continuing to prioritise reach over engagement could be “existentially threatening.”

This directly aligns with the Advertising Initiative's focus on demonstrating advertising effectiveness through meaningful measurement.

Can you explain the mathematics behind your engaged reach calculation and share specific examples of how this metric has helped you defend premium CPMs while competitors chase volume? What has the market response been from agencies and advertisers?

Leary: Anyone who has spent any time in the Free News and Lifestyle division here at News Australia will be able to tell you our overarching strategy: “We turn audience engagement into client outcomes.”

It’s important because it holds the clues to what makes our business successful. As a client-funded business, our success is measured by how effectively we turn audience engagement into any and every form of outcome our clients need: impressions, clicks, video views, online purchase, in-store purchase etc.

And the key here is the word engagement. If our audience is large but not engaged, we may see a huge reach figure (unique audience) but low engagement. This means the audience isn’t sticking around long enough to see an ad, click on a link, watch a video, etc. This means we aren’t delivering client outcomes. 

We realised reach alone does not equal revenue, and many publishers were stuck using metrics and KPIs that wouldn’t translate to successful outcomes for their clients. We could see in Australia the remaining news publishers were locked into a race where vast amounts of resources were being spent on SEM, SEO, and writing headlines that would act as click bait in social media — in the hope of creating referral traffic in enough numbers to be at the top of the “reach” table.

To us, this looked unsustainable and symptomatic of “empty reach.” 

We were not so naive to think reach is not important, but we believed that engagement had to be figured into the equation to demonstrate how well we were telling stories and transforming this to client outcomes.

So we hit upon a new metric that combined them both: “engaged reach.” Here we took the pageviews (a fairly good proxy indicator of engagement) and divided this by monthly unique visitors. 

When we plotted ourselves and our local competitors on this graph, it told a very different story, but one directly related to client outcomes. We saw some titles that fought with us neck and neck for reach suffering from very low engagement — an indicator that the marketing and growth teams are gaming SEO, exploiting social, or using SEM — but not telling stories that get the audience involved. 

Unsurprisingly, niche titles that we compete against in, say, sport or finance completely outstripped us in terms of engagement but struggled to compete with us in terms of “engaged reach” simply because of the sheer size of our audiences.

We managed to convince senior management that we should alter the editorial team’s KPIs to reflect “engaged reach” rather than “empty reach,” and the result has been pretty spectacular.

Kudos to our editorial leads — Mick Carroll, Kerry Warren, Kerrie McCallum, and Soraiya Fuda. Their teams responded quickly, writing deeper, more engaging stories. We’ve seen a corresponding rise in engagement, despite falling reach figures (we are losing social “one and dones” with low engagement so this hasn’t affected our pageviews). 

Following is an example of the formula we now use to gauge each of the drivers contributing to our digital revenue:

Despite losing social UAs, the shift to engaged reach is delivering year-on-year revenue growth through higher sell through rates, price, and revenue.

We are very aware that yields for display are stuck around the A$2-A$3 mark for single, untargeted ad units but will move to A$13-A$18 for targeted high-impact units, i.e., Scroll X. At the same time, video ads are getting A$20-A$25 CPMs, so any move to visual storytelling will also be rewarded with higher pricing. 

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