Future says it is cutting down on the correlation between page views and revenue as Google AI Overviews hit traffic.
Future‘s overall revenue for the year to 30 September was down 6% at actual currency (or a 3% organic decline combined with adverse foreign exchange and closures made in the year) to £739.2m.
Profit before tax was down 11% to £91.9m. But the adjusted operating profit margin stayed steady at 28% and shares jumped 11% when the markets opened on Thursday morning.
Future brands include Country Life, Tom’s Guide, The Week and The Week Junior, Techradar, Money Week, Marie Claire and dozens more.
Chief executive Kevin Li Ying said in a statement with the full-year results that despite the impact of Google AI Overviews on traffic, as people have less need to click through to publisher websites for certain queries, only 16% of Future’s revenue is directly impacted by changes in website sessions.
He said: “Thanks to the scale and diversity of our audience, overall engagement has remained steady. Website sessions are only 56% of our audience and of this 56%, only 27% is coming from Google Search, with other sources including Google Discover and News, social and emails.”
[Read more: How Forbes CEO Sherry Phillips is responding to Google challenge]
B2C sessions were down 10% to 317 million in the year with the women’s and wealth verticals reporting growth, but not enough to offset declines elsewhere.
But Li Ying noted that “the correlation between sessions and revenue is decreasing, driven by our strategic focus on driving direct advertising which is less dependent on audience”.
He said three percentage points of advertising revenue moved from programmatic to direct in the year, meaning yields were up 8% year on year.
However affiliate revenue was down 6% to £76.7m mainly driven by the audience decline, “despite continued growth in vouchers”.
A new initiative called Future+ is “the embodiment” of Future’s strategy for what it calls “Google Zero” – the downward trend in Google search traffic.
It has been launched on three brands so far and Li Ying said in ten weeks this has driven 67,000 “new members for whom the sessions are at least 4x longer than unknown users i.e. driving more revenue – and, further added value comes from the additional insightful, first-party data into our data lake”.
Revenue in the B2C division was down 6% when taking into account foreign exchange and closures, with organic revenue down 2% to £493.4m.
Of this, £246.2m came from websites and events (the “media” division) and £247.2m from magazines.
UK digital advertising saw the biggest decline in the B2C division, down 14% (or 8% organically) to £44.6m.
US digital advertising did better, with a 6% decline (or 2% organically) to £96.8m.
This meant total B2C digital advertising was down 9% (or 4% organically). However in both the US and UK digital advertising was said to have been in growth in the second half of the year.
Websites and events overall were down 8% (or 4% on an organic basis) to £246.2m while magazines were down 3% (or flat organically) to £247.2m.
Li Ying described this as an “excellent performance” for magazines considering the industry is in “secular decline”.
[Read more: Country Life editor Mark Hedges says we’re ‘the great print triumph’]
Its flat revenue was “the strongest performance from magazines since Covid, and is a result of an improvement in our subscription business combined with growth in premium print titles and the Rolex book,” referring to an authorised history book published in partnership between the watch brand and Future’s design brand Wallpaper*.
Subscriptions growth was seen at titles like The Week Junior.
Li Ying also said Future is monetising its “ability to make ourselves and our clients visible on large language models” and has signed deals to do so with some “major tech and luxury groups”.
Future has also begun putting together a network of content creators publishing and monetising their content through the publisher’s tech stack with a revenue share model.
This is currently live with 50 content creators across seven brands after ten weeks and is “driving 3x the social traffic and incremental ecom revenue on top of digital advertising revenue”.
Future has also revamped its e-commerce proposition to “tap into a new customer base by entering new distribution points like Social Platform. Signal has produced over 160 curated collections, translating into over 0.9m unique page views.
“Additionally, we have doubled our social and email traffic compared to traditional content.”
In B2B, revenue was down 13% (or 9% organically) to £54m. Digital advertising in newsletters was down 9% on an organic basis as growth in education and financial services was offset by a decline in healthcare, food and travel.
A 10% organic decline (to £22m) in other revenue including lead gen, webinars, events and magazines was “largely driven by the continued challenging backdrop in enterprise tech”.
Future also owns price comparison business Go Compare, which it bought in 2020, which saw revenue down 5% to £191.8m. It bought insurance wallet app Renewal in March and said it will relaunch it in January to drive growth at Go Compare.
Future said it is “expecting modest organic revenue growth” in 2026 and that it expects its profit margin of around 30% to continue as it targets a more “efficient and sustainable operating model”.
It spent £2.7m on redundancy costs in the 2025 financial year and is targeting £20m savings per year by 2028.
Email pged@pressgazette.co.uk to point out mistakes, provide story tips or send in a letter for publication on our "Letters Page" blog
