News media companies worldwide have adjusted their strategies as traditional advertising revenue has shifted.

During this week’s Webinar, presented by the INMA Advertising Initiative, members heard some of the ways companies are successfully pivoting from traditional revenue generation methods.

Gabriel Dorosz, lead of the Advertising Initiative, focused the Webinar on events, custom content, and format innovation. This shift is, ultimately about “what publishers offer advertisers that’s unique, special, and grounded in audience needs,” he explained.

Dorosz shared four examples about how these changes are being implemented:

• NewsCorp Australia’s pivot to prioritising direct traffic found this new audience is 10 times more valuable than social referrals and five times more valuable than search. By redefining success metrics to emphasise pageviews per unique visitor, the company achieved a 17-point gain in engaged reach year-over-year. (Learn more about their efforts in this Advertising Initiative blog post.)
• Adweek reported that the lifestyle blog Apartment Therapy expects a 26% revenue increase by utilising interactive tools sponsored by retailers such as Kohl’s and Walmart. Tools such as mood boards and room planners led to a 400% rise in revenue and strong advertiser retention, helping build lifetime audience value.
• A year-long study by The New York Times confirmed that deeply engaged readers are also more active lifestyle consumers. To leverage this insight, it created Brand Match, which combines Times content with first-party data to “create a completely unique audience through prompt design to new video ad units that are going to be salable across the Times portfolio.”

• Other publishers, including Hearst, Axel Springer, and News UK, are partnering with commerce and retail data platforms to enrich targeting. For example, Hearst now incorporates Amazon purchasing data, while News UK is partnering with retail media network Ocado to match retail shoppers with anonymised audience segments.

Branded content and event revenue are also surging, Dorosz noted. Condé Nast reported US$600 million in product sales from content commerce alone in its most recent study, and news platform Semafor reported that its events now generate up to 50% of total revenue.

Replacing subscription revenue

The changes in digital subscriptions and Web traffic have prompted Editora Globo to double down on events, branded content, and diversified revenue streams.

The company is a division of Grupo Globo — Brazil’s largest media group — and has been undergoing a decade-long transformation from a collection of separate entities (newspapers, magazines, and radio stations) into a unified media powerhouse, explained Frederic Kachar, CEO and managing director of Grupo Globo.

Its flagship brands — O Globo (general news), Valor Econômico (finance), CBN (radio), and Vogue Brazil (lifestyle) — are leaders in their segments:

“All these brands, combined, generate almost 100 million followers on social medias, over 60 million unique visitors per month, and over 600 million pageviews per month,” Kachar said.

Those flagship brands are also supported by dozens of niche verticals ranging from agribusiness to parenting: “We have the biggest digital brands in Brazil.”

However, after successfully transitioning from print to digital during the 2010s, the company faces a new hurdle: a declining Web-based business model.

Kachar noted that while overall digital audience figures remain stable in Brazil, traffic to traditional Web sites — especially in the “news and information” category — has dropped notably since the pandemic.

“This audience is shifting to another platform, which is the social networks,” he said. “Obviously, there’s a shift in news to social networks, but we’re struggling much more in lifestyle.”

The company had focused its digital transformation on the Web, Kachar said, but now, “we have to do a new transformation to a new platform in digital and diversify revenues.”

Subscriptions slow whilst advertising shifts

Compounding the issue is the slowing growth of digital subscriptions. The company is currently rethinking its subscription value propositions to counteract stagnation. Meanwhile, advertising remains strong, contributing 69% of the company’s revenue, but it is evolving across four areas:

1. Print ad revenue. Surprisingly, print continues to show modest growth, although its potential for the future is limited.
2. Digital media advertising. This surged early in the decade but has now plateaued, reflecting the stalled growth of traditional Web traffic.
3. Custom digital projects (like branded content and affiliate marketing). “This is still growing, but the speed of growth is lower than two or three years ago.”
4. Live events. This area is “booming,” Kachar said. “After the pandemic, everyone wants to go experience.” Things like debates and other live events are generating strong results and making sponsors happy, but there’s a downside: “Events carry much higher costs than other formats.” Despite this, they are becoming a cornerstone of Editora Globo’s revenue strategy.

Events as a business driver

Events aren’t anything new for Editora Globo; the company has nearly a century of experience, including organising Rio de Janeiro’s first Carnival parade in 1933.

However, in the current media environment, events have shifted from being merely ways to boost the brand to being considered essential revenue generators.

Kachar shared that there are two types of events, each with its own strategy.

Owned IP events are recurring, large-scale events created and branded by Grupo Globo, often ticketed and designed to capitalise on major sponsorship opportunities. “We do these on an annual basis and usually they have tickets, large audiences, and we sell sponsor quotas to different advertisers,” he explained.

Examples of this type of event include Rio Gastronomia, Brazil’s largest gastronomy event, which spans multiple weekends in Rio and São Paulo, featuring top restaurants, live music, kids’ activities, and cooking workshops. It attracts over 125,000 attendees and more than 40 sponsors, with efforts underway to hit a new revenue record in the next edition.

Another popular event is the Best CEOs Awards, presented by Valor Econômico and organised in partnership with global headhunting firm AESC. This annual event identifies and honours top Brazilian executives by sector and has become a coveted award in Brazil’s business world. “This is what we call the Oscars for executives in Brazil,” Kachar said.

Although the winners’ companies can’t participate as sponsors for ethical reasons, the event still draws major advertisers: “They see value to be in the arena where the best CEOs will celebrate with their boards and their families,” Kachar noted.

Customised events function differently and are one-off or short-run events created in collaboration with sponsors to address specific themes or policy issues, often with a journalistic angle.

For example, in preparation for COP30, to be held in Brazil in November, Editora Globo hosted the COP30 Climate Countdown, a series of five debates sponsored by environmental organisations. These sessions featured federal ministers and thought leaders discussing ways to ensure Brazil’s summit avoids the shortcomings of previous international climate meetings.

For its Sustainable Cities debates, the news media company partnered with Italian energy company Enel to organise high-level forums on urban sustainability. São Paulo’s lighting infrastructure was a significant theme, and the events featured political figures and executives committed to green innovation.

These customised events generate extended visibility through pre-event editorial coverage, live streaming, and post-event analysis.

The path forward

Looking ahead, Kachar said there are plans to expand the company’s owned event IPs through acquisitions.

“There are some IPs in other segments that would make sense for us to have at Globo, because we have this expertise of doing events,” Kachar said. “So I would say for the future, on top of reviewing and bringing new value propositions for the existing events and how to expand the customised events, probably we will do some acquisitions of other events in other segments to have a broader portfolio in the company.”

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