The road ahead: Expert predictions for digital publishing in 2030

Published: 11 Dec 2024

Given the rate of industry-wide transformation we’ve seen over the past few years, what will digital publishing look like in 2030? Will we see the same continued pace of change? What new challenges will emerge?

We reached out to our Associate partners to discover their predictions for the next five years to help you prepare your strategies. So, with no further ado, here is an Expert’s A-Z of predictions for the challenges and opportunities facing the digital publishing industry. 

Sean Adams, Chief Marketing Officer, Brand Metrics:
By 2030, I believe digital publishing will focus even more on creating engagement and delivering value. I also think we will achieve this by using AI to create more relevant and personalised content, which will enhance the user experience. We’ve already seen a shift, but I believe there will be a clearer focus on measuring long-term brand impact, taking the entire consumer journey into account, rather than just short-term results. As privacy regulations tighten, first-party data will become crucial for building stronger relationships with audiences. Collaboration among different players will be key to ensuring transparency and driving growth. The ability to demonstrate brand lift will continue to be critical in a data-driven, competitive environment.

Richard Chambers, Managing Director, Business Development - Publishers Northern Europe, Outbrain:
I predict the emergence of three key initiatives by 2030:

• Publishers will join together meaningfully and work with the biggest advertisers in the UK to demonstrate why news is an effective medium for delivering branding results. In addition, publishers and advertisers will scenario plan and realise that a world without quality journalism is a world where politicians and businesses could behave as they liked.
• Publishers will realise that younger audiences no longer had an affiliation with the media brands of yester-year. The successful publishers will look at how younger audiences consume content via vertical video, following certain influencers, and start to deliver news with this format in-mind. This happens both on their own domains and also within social media walled gardens. The walled gardens will be used to build followers, which in turn drives more users to publishers’ domains for the full picture. News becomes a force for good and great playground stakes.
• Along with the new angle for telling news stories, new audiences will follow. This allows far stronger monetization via vertical video formats. New audiences become closer to publishers, by signing-up, subscribing, attending live events and buying merchandise.
  
  

Alex Dawson-Smith, Business Development Director (UK & EMEA), EX․CO:
In the next five years, digital publishing will see transformative innovation. AI-driven content will dominate, with advancements enabling the creation of compelling video stories that enhance editorial work and seamlessly integrate with contextual targeting strategies. Transparency around content ownership will likely improve, addressing current concerns about authenticity and intellectual property in AI-generated media.

As privacy regulations tighten, publishers will prioritize first-party data strategies, building stronger, direct relationships with readers to create robust audience profiles. Meanwhile, short-form, vertical, and shoppable videos will continue to thrive as dominant content formats, with AI innovations making video production more scalable and accessible than ever before.

Ian Dowds, CEO, UKOM:
I’m going optimistic: as we approach the 2030’s good industry governance means that quality digital publishing will have been properly rewarded for the premium content environment it delivers. The market will recognise that smart machines are only as smart as the people that run them. Only quality inputs can produce quality outputs or, put another, cruder, way: shit in, shit out. Quality content supported by quality data will have helped marketers to learn that finding an audience is one thing, but finding the right, validated audience in an appropriate environment is another thing altogether, and that it’s something worth paying for. Oh, and we won’t need roads.

Mattia Fosci, CEO, Anonymised:
Wow, difficult question! Here are three likely developments:

1. Premium publishers will have signed content licensing agreements with Generative AI providers, while unlicensed scraping will be been banned
2. Cookies and IDs will have finally disappeared and advertising data will have moved closer to the source (supply-side)
3. Long-tail content creation will have moved increasingly to the platforms, while the premium publishing market will have undergone positive consolidation that unlocks scaled opportunities from multiple media formats
   
   

James Hanslip, CEO, Content Ignite:
By 2030, AI will have exhausted readily available data and struck lucrative deals with premium publishers to access exclusive content. ChatGPT and its competitors will have launched ad businesses to start monetising the immense traffic volumes they have access to, fundamentally changing search habits—a category shift not seen since the walled gardens took over every aspect of our digital lives. The impact of AI is still negatively affecting traffic for long-form content sites; however, the remaining premium inventory will drive CPMs up as demand for curated, high-quality traffic increases (unless authorities step in with legislation to regulate AI crawling). MFA sites will be all but dead, with curation delivering the fatal blow. Publishers will seek partners offering end-to-end solutions, outsourcing many operational headaches so they can focus on creating high-quality content and combating AI disruption. Cookieless ID solutions will have consolidated to a handful of scaled players, but despite the competition, Google will still emerge as the dominant force (probably!).

Danny Holmes, Consulting Lead, Marketing Services UK&I, Experian:
By 2030, I think it’s fair to say AI will now be playing a central role, enabling publishers to create hyper-personalised content and delivering immersive experiences through formats like AR and VR. Alongside this, contextual, audience targeting and consent-based identity frameworks will playing nicely together, leveraging their individual strengths after fostering user trust. Measurement will be delivered through an array of partnerships, enabled by technological advancements such as clean rooms. Regulatory pressures around data privacy will have been through continued shifts and change (something Experian has factored into everything we build!), with the DUA Bill now fostering a more dynamic and secure data ecosystem to promote digital growth. Blockchain technology has long been sat in the background building up steam, I think it could transform how content is monetised and verified, with decentralised platforms giving creators greater control over their work and enabling seamless micropayments. It’ll also play a role in enhancing transparency and security, particularly countering pesky bot traffic. Sustainability (like most other industries at this point, one would hope!) will be more front and centre, with publishers now adhering to a framework that will be a requirement of advertisers in meeting their own scope three emissions. It’ll definitely be interesting to answer this question again in 2030!

Jason Iliou, Director, Publisher Partnerships, UK & Ireland, Taboola:
The future of digital news publishing could be fundamentally reshaped by advancements in AI, evolving consumer behaviour, and new business models.

AI tools will become standard practice and automate routine reporting, allowing journalists to focus on investigative and in-depth storytelling. AI will also play a key role in fact-checking, ensuring faster, more accurate news verification, which will be crucial as trust in media remains a top priority for readers and it's been in decline in recent years.

Publishers will increasingly rely on machine learning to deliver hyper-personalized content tailored to individual preferences, fostering more engaged, informed audiences. As AI-powered referral sources replace traditional platforms like Facebook and Google, news rankings will be reshaped based on trust and relevance, offering new opportunities for digital publishers to grow their reach and impact.

User-generated content (UGC) will increasingly compete with traditional journalism, providing the news ecosystem with diverse perspectives, but also further polarising audiences, giving rise to misinformation. Even though challenges like privacy concerns and AI bias will continue, digital publishers will fight to ensure ethical practices are adhered to. The future of digital publishing holds potential for collaboration, transparency, and innovation, creating a more connected and resilient news landscape where opportunities remain vast.

Anya Libova, Sales Director, EMEA, DoubleVerify:
Publishers will be faced with multiple challenges over the next five years, but alongside them come opportunities. For instance, AI is already making a tremendous impact on everything from content delivery to ad optimization. As adoption continues to climb, AI’s ability to reduce costs and increase output will forever change the industry. In addition to protecting IP and search traffic, publishers will need to ensure that the increase in content doesn’t overwhelm their readers and dilute the value of their inventory to advertisers and brands.

Another key change to watch out for is the growing importance of newer metrics like attention. As audiences become inundated with more content, advertisers will want to know how engaging that content is to everyday users. Early adopters have an opportunity to differentiate themselves by including this data in their daily ad operations and sales strategy. DV is helping publishers accomplish this with dynamic initiatives like DV Attention for Publishers, which offers a wide range of granular attention insights to help improve campaign performance and grow partnerships.

Franziska Motta Ferraz, VP, Media Owner Development, EMEA, Criteo:
The way consumers shop is shifting from linear to ‘always on’ commerce, and there is a real opportunity for publishers to reach high-intent audiences with a commerce offering.

At the heart of this will be commerce media. With a unique insight into their audiences’ content preferences, publishers can ensure that commerce driven content is tailored and relevant to them. AI will play a core role here, automating audience activation and the delivery of ads to the right user, in the right moment.

According to projections from MAGNA Global, commerce media could reach $220 billion globally by 2027– representing over 20% of global ad revenues. Publishers are set to take a significant slice of this, if they diversify revenue and capture additional ad spend.

By 2030 and beyond, we can expect to see more and more publishers thinking like retailers. In fact, our insights show that over a third (37%) of global publishers believe digital publishing sites will more closely resemble retailer sites, as they continue to adopt these models The commerce media opportunity certainly is lucrative, and the publishers that realise this and become part of an ‘always on’ commerce ecosystem will be best placed to succeed in the future. 

Catherine Murray, Head of Partner Services, Utiq:
I should caveat the following thoughts by saying that five years is a long time in adtech, but…

• Privacy regulation will be global - it will have iterated many times and be an ever-changing constant that everyone within the industry should be making provision for.
• The open internet will be thriving - ad spend will have returned to a level that enables quality independent publishers to fund high-quality, fact-checked content, written by journalists who are fairly paid, supporting livelihoods whilst enabling a diversity of voice.
• Advertising will work - due to developments in addressability. It will be highly relevant, and not scarily following you around.
• The open web and platforms will coexist for their own use cases.
• The third-party cookie will be a ghost of adtech past
• Consent and privacy will be table stakes for everything. Not an afterthought, but the first thought.
• AI and ML will bring more efficiency to our industry across all aspects. This will free up time for people to engage in areas more conducive to their skill set.
• Sustainability will be a key focus across all campaigns. Solutions in this space will be highly sought to partner with.
  
  

Sonia Pham, Head of Operations, illuma:
By 2030, I expect digital publishing companies to be considerably more fluent in the opportunities offered by AI. Publishers will have analysed which areas of AI can drive innovation in their businesses, be it content categorisation, brand safety or creative delivery, and they’ll have partnered with sophisticated companies in order to integrate these services. At the same time, we’ll see more careful and deliberate engagement with the dominant new tech companies that have emerged.

Audiences will also become more aware of the relationship between AI and publishers, and as the battle for attention continues publishers will prioritise transparency, in order to maintain trust and credibility.

Dave Posnett, Head of Partnerships, Captify:
The future belongs to those who embrace the power of data-driven, audience-led content production and development. With search engines holding power over referral traffic—and ultimately revenue—publishers who really lean into understanding their readers, and delivering true value will be best placed to protect against traffic decline. To achieve this, we must move beyond the simple notion of just ‘content is king’. Instead, the focus must shift to leveraging authentic, rich data to uncover what truly matters to readers. This data-driven approach is perhaps even loftier than the king itself - a data deity, if you will.

There will be a need to embrace and embed data knowledge across all aspects of businesses to drive growth. As CPMs are likely to increase to counteract traffic declines, the push towards utilising multiple data sources—both first-party and enriched data—will be critical to fuelling real change. It’s this content king approach, driven by the data deity, that will be the biggest driver of audience growth, stickiness, and ultimately, revenue generation within digital publishing by 2030.