State of Digital Publishing

Answer eight questions about your ad setup and get a prioritized list of where revenue is leaking — weighted for how monetization works now: opt-in formats, ad breaks, identity and yield per visit, not just more display units. Estimated dollar impact for each fix. Your setup Site URL Monthly pageviews Current page RPM (USD, if known) Formats you currently run In-content display Sticky anchor Side rails Outstream video Interstitials Rewarded ads Ads per article page Ad refresh in use?

EPMV — earnings per thousand visitors — is the truest measure of how well a site monetizes, because it captures every ad, on every page of a visit. See where your site sits against publishers like you. Your site profile Niche Monthly visits (sessions) Audience geography Current monthly ad revenue (optional) If provided, we compute your actual EPMV and your percentile vs. peers.

Estimate what rewarded ads could earn your site — then unlock the full breakdown the same way your readers would: by watching one. The unlock is the demo. SODP runs no ads anywhere on this site. The only ad you’ll ever see here is one you choose to watch, in exchange for something you want — that’s the whole model this tool calculates.

When you interact with a large language model (LLM) – one of the systems behind chatbots such as ChatGPT and Claude – it can feel as though you are in contact with another conscious mind. But are you, really? Some prominent scientists, such as Geoff Hinton and Richard Dawkins, claim you are. But most experts remain sceptical, arguing that the impressive cognitive capacities of LLMs occur in the absence of consciousness.

Earlier today, the ABC flagged a shift in their position on generative artificial intelligence (AI) use in their news production. Despite previous caution, a recent deal with US tech company Anthropic has opened the door for ABC staff to bring Claude AI into their broadcasting news work. For now, the scope of this inclusion is limited, with a focus on converting radio programs into articles. However, the ABC has signalled a willingness to expand this scope to include other tasks.

Over the past few years, we’ve watched domain parking earnings drop sharply. What used to be a reliable passive income stream for many publishers has become much harder to maintain, forcing quite a few operators to shut down or pivot entirely. But here’s the good news: monetizing domain traffic is still very much possible in 2026, provided that you approach it the right way. At RollerAds, we’ve been helping publishers turn parked domains back into profitable assets.

The audience development playbook that defined the last decade of digital publishing is no longer fit for purpose. The dominant logic was straightforward: publish quality journalism, optimise for search, build a social following, and drive traffic back to owned platforms. Distribution was a final step. Audience development sat downstream of the newsroom, not inside it. The data now make the scale of the shift impossible to ignore.

Content creator jobs have moved well beyond YouTube hobbyists and bedroom streamers. The global creator economy is estimated to exceed $250 billion in 2026 and approach $500 billion by 2030. More than 200 million people worldwide now identify as content creators, with around 50 million considered professional or semi-professional. The niche a creator chooses shapes everything: equipment costs, revenue streams, platform strategy, and the kind of audience they build.

Publishers are gradually moving away from a monolithic system and switching to flexible CMS platforms. Headless CMS platforms have been designed to meet the market requirements of the publishing industry. The headless CMS software market is estimated to grow from USD 1,193.9 million in 2026 to USD 9,159.4 million by 2036. 57% of users have reported enhanced personalization and user experience, while 41% have witnessed a significant increase in ROI after adopting hybrid CMS platforms.

Short-form video has fundamentally rewired how audiences, particularly younger ones, discover, engage with, and share news. Platforms like TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels have become primary news gateways for a generation of consumers who were never going to seek out a homepage or a print edition.