The Guardian increased revenue from programmatic advertising by 21% in a year following the introduction of its project to simplify how its advertising is bought and sold.
The publisher’s Curation at Scale initiative went live in September 2025 and focuses on improving its audience signals, simplifying programmatic buying routes and making pricing more consistent across international operations. It has also cut unsold inventory by around 54% year on year in the three months to March 2026.
[Read more: Guardian grows revenue to record £282m boosted by US operation]
Imogen Fox, global chief advertising officer at The Guardian, told Press Gazette: “We have a high-quality context, a high-value environment, and if you don’t get your setup right, then your inventory can become devalued… It’s very important that we maximise what we can get to invest back in our journalism.”
The Guardian partnered with Google Ad Manager during its 2025-26 financial year to improve its commercial proposition for programmatic advertising.
This was in response to the decline of third-party cookies, which used to help advertisers track users across websites and target them with relevant advertising, as the publishing industry moves towards a more privacy-conscious advertising model.
It also addressed problems caused by too many external vendors, inconsistent regional pricing, and limited information for advertisers about the audience they were reaching.
Curation at Scale won the Advertising Technology & Commercial Excellence award at the Future of Media Awards 2026, with judges commending how the publisher “found a way to make programmatic advertisers pay a premium to support quality journalism without compromising reader privacy”.
Curation at Scale is part of the Guardian’s “transformation project to be more global, more digital, and more experimental”, said Fox. In 2025 it was reported that The Guardian brought together its programmatic advertising teams from the UK, Australia and the US into a single global unit of around 22 people.
Duane Thompson, head of digital optimisation at The Guardian, told Press Gazette there was an issue of “too many middlemen sat between the advertiser and ourselves”.
“If you think of a shop with a really excellent product but unclear labels, several middlemen and different prices at all of those tills, the product itself still has not lost its quality, but the actual experience makes it harder for the market to value it correctly,” he said.
“The job that we had, when we think about kind of those inconsistencies, was to fix the labels, simplify the routes to purchase, and make the pricing itself more consistent.”
[Read more: ‘Brave’ advertisers who advertise next to news are seeing results]
Shortening the route to buyers
One change The Guardian made was to clarify the route through which advertisers bought online advertising by reviewing which companies were authorised to sell their inventory.
“We then introduced more direct payment and buying routes themselves, and removed all of the unnecessary friction in the middle,” said Thompson, adding that these “middle men” are comparable to “people that are picking away at money going from the advertiser to us…
“We just ensure that [advertisers] know where their money is going, who is involved, and that our inventory itself is being valued in the right way.”
Improving audience signals
Before Curation at Scale was implemented, The Guardian’s advertisers received limited information about readers, making it harder to understand audience intentions and meaning that advertising opportunities were less appealing.
Audience signals include contextual information about the articles readers visit and demographic information about audiences. Thompson said these need to be shared in a “safe, controlled way”.
When signals are missing or limited, the buyers know less and are more cautious about bidding for inventory.
“We wanted to ensure that we restored useful context that made buyers understand what our inventory offered but also ensured that those signals identified the individual readers themselves, but without compromising their privacy in any way,” said Thompson.
To address this, The Guardian audited and organised its audience information that it already held through its direct reader relationships, then looked at how it could provide buyers with more detailed signals using privacy-safe technology without handing over readers’ personal identities.
For example, advertisers could receive information that a reader had visited a sports page, rather than receiving a generic signal that they had visited a news page.
“It’s just giving the advertisers enough personal content for them to understand why our opportunity is the one that should be valuable to them,” said Thompson.
He added that this means buyers can make better-informed decisions and are “more likely to bid more competitively, which was shown in the results”.
Readers also benefit as the advertising is more “relevant” to them and from premium, recognisable brands, Thompson said.
Simplifying pricing
The Guardian has offices in the US, Australia and the UK but regional advertising inventory pricing was inconsistent.
The publisher also has “hundreds of pricing rules” within Google Ad Manager and floor prices that set the minimum acceptable bid for inventory.
“We streamlined all of those pricing rules to bucket our inventory in the most effective packages as we see them,” said Thompson. “If we price it too high, it’s not going to sell. If we price it too low, we’re undervaluing ourselves. So, we would make really informed decisions using data points, using internal analysis to ensure that those pricing rules were simpler, consistent, and easy for us to adjust.”
The aim was to create a more consistent approach to pricing across markets while retaining the flexibility to respond to data and changing demand.
Advice for other publishers
Thompson said The Guardian’s Curation at Scale is not a “template copy for another publisher to take on” as each publisher has its own audience, commercial model and technology setup.
However, he said other publishers could benefit from taking ownership of their audience data and understanding how inventory is represented and sold.
“I would tell other publishers to understand the audience and contextual signals that they already have,” he said. “I would suggest that they think about using or making them useful with really clear privacy safeguards in place, and to understand that whole supply chain. So, map that route from advertiser to publisher, and remove the intermediaries that are not beneficial for their business.”
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