Research notes: Britain’s ad boom exposes publishers’ diversification problem
By Ivan Massow. 7 November 2026.

AOP/Deloitte is a participating-publisher revenue benchmark, not a census. Its current public release does not give the participant roster. The latest comparable Q2 totals are £155.04m and £157.39m, a £2.35m decline. Miscellaneous income fell £3.93m. Earlier releases used a different prior-year headline; those figures are not mixed here. The release's tentative AI explanation is not a quantified attribution of losses.

AA/WARC measures advertising expenditure. IAB UK/mediasense figures cited cover the first half, whereas AOP and AA/WARC figures cover Q2. None of these series is divided by another to calculate publisher market share. AA/WARC's other-online-display category excludes news and magazine brands and several other channels. TV+ means internet-delivered video on large television screens in IAB UK's glossary. Retail media here includes advertising using retailer customer data beyond a retailer's own site.

The £100 portfolio is entirely hypothetical: 60×1.05 + 40×0.85 = 97. It is not a forecast or an estimate of a publisher's actual mix.

Future's Ocado/Permutive partnership was announced on 14 July 2025. The article does not claim a new November launch. Its broader Aperture website claims 2.6 times return on advertising spend for an unnamed big-box retailer, without identifying an Ocado campaign. Attributed purchases and controlled incremental sales differ. Undisclosed results do not prove failure. People Incorporated's Q3 figures are US company results, not a comparable UK cohort. Reach's direct and indirect categories are company definitions.

WebKit describes its identity-resolution blocking as a privacy protection against cross-site tracking. That technical policy does not establish a measured UK publisher loss, or that a particular retail-data partnership uses a blocked connection. IAB Tech Lab advocates its own infrastructure approach and acknowledges that production evidence is still being developed. Its claim to be the only practical solution is not adopted here.

Noah, a research and forecasting service, supplied archive research and a bounded follow-up investigation. Search matches and story counts were not used as market shares, public opinion or event probabilities. Exact numerical forecasts were unavailable in the returned final handoff; no odds are published or invented. All returned forecast definitions and run references are retained in the private claim audit.

Quotations: Andy Cowen, Deloitte lead partner for telecoms, media and entertainment, in AOP's 4 November 2026 release; Elizabeth Lane, head of insight at IAB UK, in its 29 September 2026 announcement. Both excerpts were checked against those published sources. Neither was interviewed by Tomorrow's Publisher for this article.

Sources:
AOP and Deloitte: Q2 2026 Digital Publishers’ Revenue Index, 4 November
https://www.ukaop.org/research/uk-digital-publishers-revenue-falls-1-5-despite-subscription-and-display-growth-according-to-aop-and-deloitte-data

Advertising Association and WARC: Q2 2026 expenditure and category definitions, 29 October
https://adassoc.org.uk/our-work/uk-advertising-forecast-to-reach-record-14-0bn-in-festive-quarter/

IAB UK and mediasense: first-half 2026 Digital Adspend findings, 29 September
https://www.iabuk.com/news-article/six-months-uk-digital-adspend-now-exceeds-whole-2020

Reach: Q3 2026 trading update, 13 October
https://www.reachplc.com/content/dam/reach/corporate/documents/results-and-reports/2026/Q326%20Trading%20update%20Reach%20plc%20131026%20final.docx%20(8).pdf.downloadasset.pdf

Future: Ocado Ads and Permutive data partnership, 14 July 2025
https://futureplc.com/news/future-moves-into-retail-media-with-ocado-ads/

People Incorporated: Q3 2026 issuer earnings exhibit, 2 November, archived filing
https://archive.fast-edgar.com/20261102/AOZRNG2COZ22UZ9Z2MTM2ZZ2BMLGZ22IZ282/ex_991q32026ppli-pressrele.htm

Future: Aperture case-study claims and US-only early-access guarantee, accessed 7 November
https://futureplc.com/aperture-audience-intelligence/

IAB UK: TV+ definition
https://www.iabuk.com/jargon-buster/tv

WebKit: Blocking Identity Resolution Infrastructure, 19 October 2026
https://webkit.org/blog/18438/blocking-identity-resolution-infrastructure/

IAB Tech Lab: Apple’s private browsing and the practical path for advertising, checked 7 November
https://iabtechlab.com/apples-private-browsing-and-the-only-practical-path-for-advertising/