State
To the audience leaders pushing this industry forward—
Audience professionals have never had a more important, or more complicated, role to play. With traditional channels under pressure and third-party data fading fast, every organization is being forced to rethink how they grow, engage, and monetize their audience.
This report—our second year producing it—aims to answer the questions we hear from our community every day:
What’s working right now for teams like yours?
How are organizations building smarter tech stacks?
Where are the biggest opportunities—and the biggest pitfalls?
We surveyed media and marketing leaders across the industry, and we partnered with The Rebooting to expand our perspective with more research. We explored which tactics are paying off, what’s falling short, and how organizations are adapting their strategies and tech stacks to drive real results.
The findings point to a clear theme: Your audience is your most valuable asset—and your greatest opportunity. Yet, there is a clear gap between having audience data and actually putting it to work.
As third-party data fades and platform-driven models shift, first-party audience strategies are becoming the foundation for sustainable growth. That’s why now, more than ever, it’s essential to build direct, meaningful relationships with your audience.
I believe the future of media belongs to the companies that own their audience relationships —and know how to enhance them.
Thanks for being part of this growing, evolving, often chaotic, but always inspiring community. We’re here to support you however we can.
James Capo CEO, Omeda
Executive Summary
This report explores the state of audience-driven organizations—what’s working, what’s not, and where things are headed. We surveyed audience professionals to uncover their biggest challenges, priorities, and resource gaps, and combined those findings with insights from our recent What’s Working in Audience Development? study, conducted in partnership with The Rebooting
Here’s what we found:
Audience data is a top priority—but also a pain point.
85% of respondents see audience data as a key competitive advantage, yet only 9% feel their current approach is very effective.
There’s a gap between data potential and actual use.
Two-thirds of organizations aren’t leveraging their data for personalization or innovation, leaving opportunity on the table.
Search traffic is slipping; ownership is rising.
With 50% reporting declines in search traffic, more publishers are shifting from renting audiences to owning them—focusing on first-party data as the path forward.
Newsletters and direct traffic are leading the charge.
62% cite newsletters as a top audience driver, signaling a renewed focus on direct channels.
Events are back—and matter more than ever.
77% say event sponsorships are important to revenue, and for smaller publishers, 31% rank events among their top two audience development priorities.
Digital ad revenue remains king—but hitting targets is tough.
While 94% cite advertising as their primary growth source, half say they’re missing ad sales goals.
Activation is the new frontier.
Teams are moving past basic collection to focus on activating data and converting unknown visitors to known users —but fragmentation and tech limitations continue to slow progress.
As audience businesses look to scale, the priority is clear: unify data, streamline workflows, and get smarter about activation. The era of passive data collection is over—now it’s about making it work.
Audience data is a competitive advantage—but hard to harness
The numbers tell a revealing story about the state of audience strategy in 2025:
The consensus is clear: audience data matters. A full 85% of respondents say it’s their competitive edge—proof that organizations recognize the value of audience insights in driving growth, relevance, and revenue.
But there’s a growing gap between knowing and doing.
While most teams are reviewing audience data (64%) and over half now have a defined strategy (57%, up from just 35% in 2024*), that strategy isn’t translating into execution. Only 45% are using insights to evolve their approach, and just 36% are applying it to personalize experiences or develop new offerings.
That drop-off at each step signals a deeper issue: teams are leaving value on the table.
Why? Because activating audience data is hard. It’s often scattered across platforms, owned by different teams, and buried under layers of tooling. Even when the data exists, stitching it together in a usable way—and applying it consistently across channels—is a massive operational lift.
And the accountability gap doesn’t help. Many organizations lack a clear owner for audience data strategy, which means no one’s fully responsible for turning insights into action.
We saw this reflected in the top challenges cited by respondents—30% were directly related to audience data, with the #1 issue being:
“Converting unknown to known” (32%).
That’s not just a data challenge—it’s a strategic one. Mastering audience data means more than collecting it. It requires a plan to unify, analyze, and activate it— across the entire organization.
Interestingly, even teams that are meeting or exceeding revenue goals reported struggling with data fragmentation—often more so than others. It’s the paradox of success: more tools, more data, more team members… and more complexity.
More growth shouldn’t mean more chaos. But without a unified data strategy, it often does.
What is the top challenge that prevents your company from growing its audience faster?
Who owns audience data strategy?
Our What’s Working in Audience Development? research revealed a striking lack of ownership when it comes to audience data strategy. Only 25% of respondents said their audience development or growth team leads the charge.
The rest? All over the map.
25%
Audience development or growth
18%
Editorial/Content Strategy 11%
Technology/Product Development
Marketing/Brand Strategy 14%
13%
Data/Analytics
Smaller publishers are significantly more likely to place ownership in the marketing department—with 23% reporting that marketing leads audience data efforts, compared to just 5% of larger publishers.
The takeaway? Most organizations haven’t clearly defined who’s responsible for turning audience data into action—and that’s a problem.
Make audience data everyone’s job
If growing revenue is a real priority, audience engagement can’t live in a silo. Leadership needs to make it a cross-functional, organization-wide goal.
Set shared metrics. Define success. And ensure every team—from editorial to product —is doing their part to drive audience value.
Top Growth Priorities
We all know the formula:
Audience size + engagement = monetization.
But in 2025, it’s not about choosing one over the other. Publishers need to build breadth and depth—growing reach while deepening relationships.
This dual focus is playing out in the data. Increasing audience engagement is the #1 growth priority for media companies overall (48%), while consumer media brands are still more focused on growing audience size (62%).
Our What’s Working in Audience Development? research backs this up. When asked to rank seven elements of an audience development strategy:
62%
ranked “grow audience size and reach” first or second
58% ranked “increase audience engagement” in the top two
The takeaway? Successful media growth hinges on building and engaging audiences—not just accumulating them.
Budget & Investment Trends: Betting on the Audience
The industry is under pressure—declining social traffic, ad revenue shortfalls, and increased regulatory scrutiny have shifted priorities. With competition from traditional publishers, niche creators, and newsletter upstarts, audience connection is more important than ever.
And media companies are responding: 87% of respondents say they’re increasing or maintaining their audience budget this year—a 7-point jump over 2024.
In the next 12 months, is your audience development and marketing budget increasing, decreasing, or staying the same?
Every new platform adds complexity—more logins, more APIs, more manual work to get a full picture of your audience. That’s time and energy your team could be using to actually grow your audience and revenue.
Nearly half (49%) of teams report moderate-to-high frustration accessing and using their audience data. And 66% say having all their data in one place is “extremely important.” Among topperforming media leaders, that jumps to 75%.
How important do you feel it is your team to have access to audience data that lives in one place?
Half of those surveyed also plan to expand their audience tech stack, with the #1 investment priority being data visualization and performance reporting tools (69%).
But there’s a catch: more tools often mean more headaches.
The message is clear: simplified access, unified systems, and workflow efficiency aren’t nice-to-haves—they’re missioncritical.
Audience Drivers: First-Party Data Is the Fuel
Your audience strategy lives and dies by your data. And not just any data—first-party data is the real MVP. It’s direct, consented, and actionable. It powers everything from segmentation to personalization to monetization. So if you’re flying blind with anonymous traffic, you’re leaving serious value on the table.
That’s why the #1 challenge cited in our survey continues to be:
Converting unknown to known.
To understand how teams are tackling that, we looked at where they’re collecting the most valuable audience data. Here’s what stood out:
Email continues to be a golden goose. In fact, our What’s Working in Audience Development? research found that:
58% of respondents saw an increase in traffic from newsletters and alerts over the past year
31% ranked email newsletters as their #1 audience development channel
The signal here is loud and clear: channels that build loyalty and capture first-party data are more valuable than ever in 2025. If it doesn’t deepen your relationship with your audience, it’s not worth chasing.
Revenue Drivers: Events Rise While Ad Sales Stall
When it comes to the most important sources of revenue this year, two categories lead the pack:
But there’s a disconnect.
Yes, ad revenue is still the biggest line item —but 50% of respondents said they missed their ad sales goals in the past year. That’s not a dip. That’s a signal flare.
Meanwhile, events and experiences are outperforming: 53% said they met or exceeded their event revenue targets.
So what’s going on with ad sales?
It’s not just the usual suspects—privacy changes, signal loss, and too many blackbox programmatic platforms. The deeper issue is this: Advertisers want value they can see. And if publishers can’t prove audience quality, behavior, or outcomes, they’re going to struggle.
Publishers who can deliver clean, rich, first-party audience data—and tie it to business results—are better positioned to win those dollars. Those still relying on third-party crumbs? Not so much. 94% 77% Digital advertising Event sponsorships
While the current environment is, let's say, less than ideal, publishers do have some cards to play. First-party data is the ace in the deck—if you stop treating it like a dusty side project and start using it like the goldmine it actually is.
Want to know how publishers can fight back like scrappy, data-savvy underdogs? Learn how to make first-party data part of the sales pitch to advertisers, not just part of the tech stack.
The Comeback Plan
01 02 03 04 05
Own the audience. First-party data is your most defensible moat.
Sell context, trust, and engagement—not impressions.
Get creative with ad products.
Make logins and consent flows part of the strategy, not afterthoughts.
Band together with other publishers to compete with the giants.
Ad Sales Woes
Why are ad sales getting increasingly difficult for publishers? There’s not just one simple reason. It’s a cocktail of:
Measurement & attribution chaos:
Proving value is harder. It’s not just a vague "difficulty", though—it’s the collapse of reliable tracking. Between cookie deprecation (finally actually happening), increased privacy regulations, and Apple's ongoing App Tracking Transparency, publishers are scrambling to show that ads lead to outcomes. Attribution models? Swiss cheese. Advertisers want proof. Without first-party data, publishers have... vibes.
CPMs are sinking like a rock: Advertisers aren’t paying what they used to. Programmatic ad rates are down, especially on display and video inventory. Why? Tons of supply (everyone and their dog now has an ad-supported content platform), and demand hasn’t kept up—at least not at the same rates. Also, generative AI is flooding the web with cheap, low-quality content disguised as scale. Which dilutes the ad pool and drives down rates.
Fragmented audiences: People aren’t hanging out in the same places. Remember when everyone read a handful of trusted news sources? Yeah, now they're on a Reddit thread about fermented pickles or watching 90-second TikToks about to learn the latest dance moves. Publishers are competing with
creators, platforms, influencers, and AI content farms. Hard to sell premium ad slots when your audience is nibbling crumbs across 47 channels.
Platform dominance: Google, Meta, Amazon, and TikTok are still hoovering up ad dollars. Brands are still throwing cash at platforms because of scale, targeting, and simplicity—even if performance is mixed. Publishers? They have to convince advertisers why going direct is worth the headache.
Budget belt-tightening: Even though inflation cooled a bit, budget uncertainty hasn't. CMOs are still being told to do more with less. That often translates to “cut that experimental podcast series and shove it all into paid search.”
Retail media competition: Advertisers increasingly want performance marketing. Clicks. Conversions. ROAS. And guess what? Not all publishers have the first-party data or ecommerce tie-ins to deliver that. Meanwhile, retailers like Amazon, Walmart, and Target have firstparty data goldmines and are offering ads at the point of purchase. It's best performing publishers are finding ways to get more first-party data and diving headfirst into ecommerce.
The Magic Wand Question: What Audience
Leaders Wish Their Tech Could Do
At the end of our survey, we asked an open-ended question: “You have a magic wand. What can you do with your audience data that you can’t do today?”
The answers weren’t wild or futuristic. They were grounded, practical — and a little frustrated.
The responses fell into five key categories:
Data Quality & Accessibility
Before AI, before automation — they just want to trust the data. And find it.
“Get it all, in exquisite detail, in one place.”
“Clean-up the quality at the drop of a hat.”
“Verify its freshness and accuracy.”
Segmentation & Targeting
Everyone wants smarter personalization. Right now, too many teams are stuck manually slicing and dicing their audiences with blunt tools.
“Create highly segmented campaigns with low effort.”
“Use AI to identify audience segments I wouldn’t have thought to create.”
Measurement & Attribution
Clicks aren’t enough. Leaders want to connect activity to real outcomes.
“Track actual conversion, not just advertising clicks.”
“Better visualize conversion of marketing efforts.”
“Enrich data on unknowns and what leads to conversion.”
Integration & Cross-Platform Visibility
Too many tools, not enough cohesion. The wish here is for harmony.
“Connect event registration software to our main database.”
“Connect CDP to LinkedIn.”
Predictive Insights
The dream? To move from reacting to predicting.
“Predict buyers.”
“Build buyer confidence models.”
What this tells us: The problem isn’t lack of data. It’s that data is scattered, untrusted, and under-leveraged. The teams leading the charge on audience growth don’t want magic—they want functionality. And they want to stop spending their time duct-taping their stack together so they can focus on actual strategy.
Want help bridging these gaps? We’d love to show you how Omeda can help. Let’s talk.
AI: From Hype to Help
AI has become the intern, analyst, strategist, and genie. The reality? Most teams don’t want to spend their time on manual, repetitive tasks. They want tools that do the heavy lifting so they can focus on strategy.
Smart AI can streamline workflows and tackle those time-consuming jobs that often get skipped—like content tagging, trend spotting, and making sense of performance data.
Our research shows that data analytics is the most common application of generative AI in publishing. Among those using or experimenting with generative AI, 60% are applying it to audience data.
“A human can't see the microaudiences that are developing around a topic the way AI can... You can productize and launch faster and not only have the content association but the audience association.”
James Capo, CEO, Omeda
Stop stacking tools. Start stacking wins.
Companies that invest in the right tech stack gain capabilities without adding more tools to learn—or more data to untangle. Omeda offers all of the functionality mentioned above, unified in one platform:
CDP, email, SMS, marketing automation, and subscription management
Audience Insights: Data visualization, performance reporting, and AIgenerated explanations
AI-Powered Content Activation: Quickly and easily scale personalization and content recommendations
Frustrated by siloed data and clunky workflows?
Get a demo and see what Omeda can do
Snowflake Data
Share: Seamless and secure unified data access
Final Thoughts
Audience data isn’t just a competitive advantage — it’s the foundation.
In 2025, audience teams face no shortage of challenges: ad sales are under pressure, thirdparty data is disappearing, and tech stacks keep growing more complex. But the opportunity is just as big.
The organizations that will come out ahead are those that stop renting attention and start owning the relationship. That means getting serious about first-party data — not just collecting it and occasionally reviewing the data but truly activating it and revising your strategy based on data.
The most successful teams aren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets or the flashiest tools. They’re the ones who have a clear strategy, cross-functional collaboration, and the right platform to power it all.
If this report has made anything clear, it’s that audience strategy is no longer a side function. It’s a revenue driver. A product differentiator. A leadership priority.
Your audience is your advantage. Own it, use it and prosper.
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Want to see how Omeda can help you do that? Let’s talk.
Methodology
113 qualified media, audience and publishing professionals completed the survey in March 2025.
Two-thirds were director-level or above and one-third were managers and individual contributors.
Respondents work within business media, consumer, niche, enthusiast, and regional publishers and media organizations, serving a wide range of audience sizes: 63% have 110 unique media brands, 22% have 11-40, 16% support over 41 unique media brands.
We also cite learnings from What’s Working in Audience Development? research we recently sponsored in conjunction with The Rebooting.
About Omeda
Omeda gives audience-driven organizations the power to turn first-party data into their biggest growth engine. As the only platform combining a CDP, marketing automation, and subscription management in one place, Omeda helps publishers, associations, non-profits, and broadcast media brands unify data, launch campaigns, and drive value—for both audiences and advertisers.
For more information visit omeda.com
Request a demo at omeda.com/demo