The Ozone Project, an online advertising network owned by UK news publishers, has claimed revenue increased by 61% in 2022.
This compares with overall online ad revenue up 7.4% last year according to the Advertising Association.
Ozone is a limited company owned by News UK, Reach, Guardian News and Media and Telegraph Media Group.
It has around 100 staff, sells advertising on behalf of some 35 publishing groups and aims to provide a way for news publishers to compete and offer a similar scale to the likes of Facebook and Google in the UK.
Despite last year’s growth, publishers collectively take a tiny slice of the UK’s estimated £30bn annual advertising economy as compared with Google and Meta. The two tech giants likely made around £10bn ad revenue in the UK last year, around ten times more online revenue than all the UK’s newspaper, magazine and online news publishers combined.
Ozone had more than 400 advertisers in 2022 and claimed an overall reach of 42.4m users per month (Ipsos Iris) equating to 85% of the UK population.
Buzzfeed UK, HuffPost UK, Mumsnet and Autovia are among the latest publishers to sign up to Ozone which sells online display advertising and pre-roll video spots. It also runs the Biddable Management Service, a tool to help small and medium publishers increase their programmatic advertising revenue.
Ozone has announced new investments from its publisher shareholders.
Ozone CEO Damon Reeve said: “We’re delighted to have started 2023 with an even deeper commitment from our founding publishers. The investment enables us to build on the exceptional performance we’ve seen in the past 12 months and focus on delivering better service, products and tools to our advertiser and publisher partners.”
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