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“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.
At the last count, the “altnets” posted losses of more than £1.5bn in 2024, according to Enders Analysis. After accumulating some £9bn of net debt as of 2025, some companies have already been placed into administration, while others have fallen into the hands of lenders.
The share price reaction to Vodafone’s FY26 results appears to be centred around the outlook for European EBITDAaL in FY27, with consensus hitherto optimistically expecting a very marked turnaround in underlying performance.
Similarly, there should not have been an expectation of further buybacks, with prospective leverage towards the top of target range given recent deals.
Vodafone’s value over volume strategy cost it dearly in subscriber numbers in Q4 – a dangerous strategy in a scale industry. Less demanding guidance would give it more commercial flexibility