Cost cuts and growing digital revenue helped Reach to increase its annual profits in 2024 as it released its results for the year.
The UK’s largest commercial news publisher in terms of total monthly audience grew operating profit by 6% in 2024 to £102.3m on total revenue down 5.3% to £538.6m.
Operating costs were cut by 6.5% (or £36m) to £439.1m and Reach said it plans to make further cost cuts of up to 5% this year.
On a like-for-like basis, excluding the 53rd week in the 2023 financial year, revenue was down 4.2% and operating profit was up 6.9%.
Print still comprises 75% of revenue for Reach, which publishes more than 100 newspaper titles including the Mirror, Express, Daily Star, Manchester Evening News and Birmingham Mail.
Digital revenue grew overall by 2.1% to £130m and print revenue fell 7.3% to £496.7m.
The digital revenue trend was positive throughout 2024. Reach began the year with digital revenue decline of 8.5% in the first quarter but ended it with digital revenue growth of 7.7% in Q4.
Chief executive Jim Mullen said: "2024 was a robust year for Reach, with our teams continuing to deliver on our plans, and driving a return to growth both in digital revenue and in page views in Q4.
"While we have seen a challenging macro environment and the ongoing dominance of the tech platforms, our strategy, and the plans we put in place for the year, have continued to create value and further our transition to a more resilient digital business.
"We have continued to expertly manage print, and our early but necessary actions on costs meant we exceeded our cost-saving target of 5-6% and delivered a strong operating margin of 19% (FY23: 17%).
"Throughout all of this, we continued to serve our audiences free-to-access news, which has proven more important than ever in a year of historic elections across the world, social unrest caused by disinformation, and ongoing questions about the power of the platforms.
"Millions of people in this country are not in a position to pay for news and making ad-funded news sustainable will ensure that it remains accessible to all. Thank you to all our teams for delivering a robust year and passionately serving our audiences."
Reader data drives higher advertising yields
Mullen said that the "Customer Value Strategy" had led to 19% growth in the value of each online page view helped by growing use of customer data.
Reach revealed that online page views where Reach has first-party customer data were worth nine times the value of page views sold anonymously on the open programmatic advertising market. These "data-driven" revenues now comprise 45% of Reach digital income.
E-commerce up 39%
E-commerce income grew 39% year on year helped by products like the OK! magazine Beauty Box which now has 15,000 subscribers.
Reach moved further into direct e-commerce with the launch of its own online shop Yimbly in mid 2024.
Reach has moved into B2B sales with by licensing its own adtech platform Mantis to publishers including Ladbible Group, Immediate Media, National World and Netmums.
Mullen cited Google Discover as a key source of traffic for the group as overall online page views fell 14% year on year but grew in the final quarter by 6%.
In October 2024, Reach journalists were encouraged by managers to write more stories per day in order to boost page views. In January, Mirror journalists were given individual page-view targets.
Website upgrades
Poor user experience and intrusive ads have been a frequent criticism of Reach websites but Mullen said this is being actively tackled.
Mullen said: "In 2024, we trialled a new website platform on the Liverpool Echo, which improved page loading speeds, removed the page shifting issue and increased page views per visit.
"We have since launched this platform on the Manchester Evening News, Daily Record, Birmingham Live, and the Daily Star, with page loading speed tripling on those sites and page views per visit up 2%.
"The teams also recently introduced the new platform on the Mirror site and we will continue to roll out across our other sites through 2025."
AI drives nearly two billion page views
Mullen said in-house AI writing tool Guten is being used to repurpose weather bulletins into stories for local news websites. It has also been used to automate article uploading and image selection.
AI-written articles, which are reviewed by journalists before publication, drove 1.8 billion page views in the year Mullen said.
There was no change in the provision made for settling claims over illegal newsgathering and phone-hacking at the Mirror titles with £9.1m paid in 2024 and a further provision of £9.1m remaining.
See the Reach full-year results statement for 2024 in full.
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