Enders Analysis provides a subscription research service covering the media, entertainment, mobile and fixed telecommunications industries in Europe, with a special focus on new technologies and media.
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“Temu’s strategy is transitioning to focus more on efficiency and user retention through platforms that offer a balance of targeting and price performance,” said Claire Holubowskyj, senior research analyst at Enders Analysis. “Realigning their advertising strategy towards incremental sales reflects their growing platform maturity and the lower impact of tariff price barriers on consumers already bought into the broader platform experience.”
Broadcasters accept the need to ‘meet audiences where they are’ on video-sharing and social/entertainment platforms. In practice this means full episodes where they think viewing is likely incremental, as well as multi-format ‘fandom-building’ content strategies arranged around core IP.
Thriving on platforms requires playing by platform rules. There are sophisticated strategies emerging that straddle marketing and the monetisable distribution of new formats.
For most, this activity remains fundamentally secondary and supplemental to core offerings. There are concerns around the ability to fund the kind of premium content broadcasters and traditional studios produce via digital platforms, without entirely reconfiguring what it is they do.
“Launching CPA advertising is a logical next step for OpenAI’s ads business,” said Claire Holubowskyj, senior research analyst at Enders Analysis. “It expands its offering while diversifying its pool of advertisers, and aligns its product more closely with that of Meta and Google, whom it must compete effectively against to reach its own targets.”
BT hit its FY26 guidance with a particularly strong Q4 financial performance, which was buoyed by a number of one-offs.
Operating metrics were far from spectacular, but the company is outperforming its peers in tough markets, and Openreach’s line losses are on a clear (if potentially bumpy) downwards trend as altnet growth wanes.
Improving cashflows will still take some years to translate into rapid growth in shareholder returns given a conservative dividend policy, but the path is looking increasingly secure.
It was reported in April that OpenAI projects it’ll achieve $2 billion in advertising by the end of 2026, rising to $102 billion by 2030. And Enders Analysis has charted how it expects that to grow. Within the next two years, Enders projects that OpenAI will record about $25 billion in ChatGPT consumer ads — a 1150% increase from where it is now. That figure is expected to more than double in 2029 to $53 billion and again to $102 billion by 2030. The scale of those forecasts sits in sharp contrast to the early-stage constraints still visible in the pilot today — and to current engagement trends.
Niamh Burns, of Enders Analysis, says the latest changes mean “consumers can offload more and more of their cognitive effort, and their website visits, to AI”.
“There needs to be a functioning economic grounding here if the open web isn’t going to wither,” says Burns. “Google does rely on this ecosystem, so this is Google’s problem to solve too.”
BT, Virgin Media O2 and VodafoneThree lost a combined 972,000 mobile subscribers last year according to data compiled by Enders Analysis, which estimated that low-cost rivals including Lebara, iD Mobile and Sky gained more than 1.5mn by comparison. They lost 724,000 in 2024.
“Great deals for MVNOs have arguably been a collective strategic mis-step by the operators, but the VodafoneThree remedies now tie them to that for many years to come,” Karen Egan, head of telecoms at Enders Analysis said.
Its rivals, meanwhile, seem to have slowed their rate of sprawl. No longer fuelled by cheap funding, they are building about 40 per cent less than they were in 2025, according to Goldman Sachs research. Not all of the hundred or so will make it out alive. Most would need to more than double the average altnet’s market penetration of about 19 per cent to break even, according to Enders Analysis.
BT’s own capital expenditure has tailed off, set to fall about £1bn this year as it aims to complete its fibre coverage of UK homes by 2032. Keeping up the pace is also easier for BT, where the investment required to build infrastructure that runs past a single home is about half what altnets spend, according to Enders Analysis.
Enders Analysis said 2025 had been “a somewhat stable year” for Channel 4, helped by a better advertising performance than ITV after three years in which the reverse had been true. However, it warned that the broadcaster now faces a volatile advertising market with its lowest cash reserves in more than 20 years.