Reach is “moving away from volume” in its editorial output to focus on original content as financial results for the first half of 2026 showed traffic and revenue both down.
The UK’s largest commercial news publisher has set its “near-term focus” on growth in digital subscriptions, “quality video” and striking AI licensing deals – chief executive Piers North told Press Gazette.
All top-level print and digital revenue categories were down in the six months to 30 June and staff have been told job cuts are expected in the second half of this year. Reach’s share price fell by nearly a quarter following the 22 July results announcement making the company worth £144m at time of writing.
Reach’s half-year results showed revenue down 9% year on year to £232.9m and pre-tax profit down 5% to £40.3m.
Within the revenue decline, print was down 8% year on year and digital was down 11% which North said was “not the outcome we worked towards”.
But North said there was “resilience in the business overall” despite a “pretty stark” drop in website traffic.
Google referral traffic falls 55%
The Google referral traffic drop of 55% contributed to a 40% decline in website audience, although page views were said to have stabilised in the second quarter.
Reach brands include the Mirror, the Express, the Daily Star and around 100 large and small local news titles across the UK from the Manchester Evening News to Surrey Live.
Indirect digital revenues (from programmatic advertising or social media) fell by 16%, although the impact from the traffic decline was said to have been softened by improved revenue from social media and other platforms.
Reach said its strategy has been focused around “building stronger connections with our audiences and increasing quality video output, attracting larger advertising budgets and diversifying our revenues away from the more volume-dependent programmatic streams”.
As a result, despite the traffic drop, Reach said its RPM (revenue per thousand page views) increased by 49%.
A “diversified revenues” category – including subscriptions, affiliates, e-commerce and partnerships – grew by 2.5%.
Overall direct revenue (from direct engagement with a consumer or advertiser) was down 4%, but Reach said it was up 6% when excluding advertising from local businesses which was impacted by a “decision to reprofile and address this lower margin segment to focus on larger accounts”.
More original content in future
North told Press Gazette in the results that the publisher’s “future will be less about volume and more about original content, distinctive brands and securing better returns”.
This is a major move for a publisher that has previously given reporters page view targets and urged them to file multiple stories per day..
North added: “We are moving forward with a renewed editorial brand focus, and our teams will be moving away from volume and instead focusing on producing original content, on topics distinctive to their brands. It is a more targeted approach and it is showing early promise with our subscriptions push. Additionally, we are supporting this brand focus with marketing investment.”
Other publishers have recently been taking a “less is more” approach valuing quality over quantity including The Times, Axios, Hearst UK and The Telegraph. In many cases concentrating on producing less but better content has resulted in page view growth.
North told Press Gazette: “Our scale has always meant that just in terms of our sheer size as the largest commercial publisher, we’ve always produced a significant volume of content. We are still going to be a huge publisher.
“We have a big editorial resource, we have a number of strong brands, but clearly, when we are creating our content we are going to have to focus less about the volume, which obviously was there to attract the referrals in…
“We’ve always done some fantastic original content. We’ve got distinctive brands. We’ve got to focus more on that and make sure that we get better returns. And that better returns will either be from subscriptions, clearly, as we push into that space more, but also obviously securing better ad returns and ad yields.”
Digital subscriptions have ‘strong start’ but ‘long way to go’
North said the digital subscriptions rollout, which was first announced this time last year and began to launch with the Manchester Evening News in November, was still in the early stages but they are “very pleased” with the progress so far.
It now has 40,000 paid online subscriptions across 15 brands (a 16th, Hull Live, launched this week) and North said they are on track to meet their target of 75,000 online subscribers by the end of this year (in addition to 60,000 subscribers for print subscriptions and e-editions).
Reach as adopted premium paywalls on many of its website, in which much of the content remains free but certain articles are subscriber-only. Paying subscribers also see fewer adverts.
North said: “We rolled out on big, medium and small brands. We’ve had some real successes in the areas that you’d expect, some of our bigger brands like Manchester Evening News and obviously the Daily Express, but what’s been heartening is the progress we’ve seen, for example, in Wales Online or indeed the Stoke Sentinel if you go to a different level. Stoke Sentinel only released a month or so ago, but it’s had a really strong start.
“So we’ve been delighted with the progress that we’ve made. We’ve got a long way to go. We talk internally a lot that in a way we rolled out paywalls and not subscriptions. We’ve still got a lot of work to do on the technology, on the features, the promotions, the offerings that we give out to our subscribers.”
Reach said it will launch more subscriptions in the second half of the year but will slow down the rollout and begin to focus on “finessing the proposition and proactively marketing our offerings”.
North also revealed that Reach is trialling paid community websites for small brands that traditionally only had a print presence.
It is starting with the Southport Visiter, the Ayrshire Post and The Journal in Newcastle and is using a new content platform built internally called Launchpad.
“They’re going to be paid-for brands,” North said. “So they are not there to deliver ad inventory per se. They’re there to see whether we can have a a number of smaller sites that obviously have a much smaller team working on it, but may be able to give life and give new progress.
“We’ve talked a lot about connecting with audiences, and this is just another way to do that, reaching into areas where we’ve been strong in print traditionally, but haven’t found the business model for digital.”
Reach to increase video output in news and sport
Despite the plan to reduce article volumes, there are plans to increase video output over the rest of this year.
North said this includes “everyday journalism”, categorised as short-form video for the websites and social feeds, as well as repeatable formats made with the help of a Studio team and video facilities that opened last year.
Reach said Daily Expresso from the Express was the most-watched UK news show on Youtube in June, beating the likes of The Telegraph’s The Daily T, The Rest is Politics and The News Agents.
“We obviously want to replicate more of those types, so we’ve got plans to increase the slate as we go into the back half of the year,” North said.
“Obviously, football and news is kind of our heartland. We’ve got the new Premier League season coming out. We’ve got our All Out Football network of podcasts/videocasts. We cover all the major teams in the Premier League, including down to the likes of Hull and Coventry, which of course are newly promoted, so excited about that.
“So we will continue to ramp up our output, but clearly we need to do it in a managed way to make sure that we’re you know getting the best return.”
AI licensing deals
North said AI licensing is an “increasingly relevant area for us” which is beginning to bring in a small amount of revenue.
Reach announced a deal with Amazon AWS in March which allows its content to be used in the Nova AI model and Alexa assistant with compensation based on usage.
North revealed Reach has also signed a deal with a financial services business and said they are seeing “promising early revenues from real-time LLM marketplaces like Tollbit, which have established a more sustainable framework for AI firms to legally access our content on a pay-per-use basis, with small but scalable payments”.
He told Press Gazette: “I think there’s going to be sort of three areas where you’re going to have a tiered approach. You’re going to have the large AI companies where you can do large, almost direct deals. Then there’s other smaller businesses, and we’re currently working with a financial services information provider, again providing our content so they can add context to their data, and then I think what’s really interesting is I suspect what we will see is a start to the real-time content marketplace.
“So obviously we’ve had real-time bidding in the ad market for a long time, and I suspect what we’ll see is that is going to start to develop for AI, where large volumes of information are traded at small prices on a real-time basis, and we currently have a partnership at the moment with a couple of players in this space which we’re building out. We’re starting to see revenue flow. Now it’s very, very small at the moment, it’s nascent, but I do think that is an inevitability, and therefore it is absolutely incumbent that the AI companies all lean into that framework.
“We understand that they need data/content to feed their machines, and we are ready to provide it but it has to be done on a value exchange. But I’m pleased the market is moving in that direction. Obviously, also there are moves on the on the regulatory side as well. So we will wait to see how that develops, but it is an interesting growing but small industry at the moment.”
Reach is not part of the SPUR publisher coalition which is working to agree shared AI licensing standards, but it is taking part in cross-sector coalition ARIAM (the Alliance for Responsible Innovation in the Arts and Media) which launched last month.
Of SPUR, North said: “I think the key for us is to make sure that any organisation that we join has a clear purpose and end game, so that we know what we’re getting into. But we’re very supportive of the principles of SPUR in the industry as we all look to navigate the licensing industry.”
Further job cuts to come
Last year Reach cut editorial headcount by up to 186 and restructuring also took place in other parts of the business.
North warned that more job cuts are expected in the second half of this year as Reach continues to work through the “disrupted period” impacted by falling referral traffic and nears the end of its pension deficit payments which will end in 2028.
Reach is aiming to make a similar level of savings to its 10.3% reduction in adjusted operating costs (ahead of a target of 5-6% savings) made in the first half of the year attributed to the 2025 restructure and the closure of two out of three of its print sites.
“We’re going to have to manage our cost base very acutely,” North said. “We’ve been very open internally with the teams that there will be, unfortunately, job reductions in the back half of the year.
“Details of that obviously will be worked through, but it is critical. It’s not something obviously anyone wants to do, but it’s what we need to do is make sure we manage the business for the long term.”
World Cup helps print advertising revenue
Print circulation revenue was down 7% in the half year while print advertising was down 11%, said to have been boosted by brands making the most of the World Cup.
Reach said these had outperformed a 23% decline in circulation volumes (the number of newspapers sold).
“The necessary increase in cover prices, along with the ongoing cost of living pressures, meant that the volume decline was higher than historical trends.”
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