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“OpenAI’s experimentation with CPC is driven largely by its need to maintain demand growth and build trust with advertisers, though declining CPMs and an expanding pilot are also factors,” said Claire Holubowskyj, senior research analyst at Enders Analysis.
As Enders Analysis recently argued, habit has become the north star for publishers. Light users haven’t vanished — they’ve simply stopped arriving at the front door, with “what happened” increasingly answered upstream by platforms and AI summaries. The homepage now primarily services the already-converted; breadth alone does not create defensibility. Durable value, the analysts wrote, depends on occupying a recurring need state through vertical products, distinctive voice and community, and reinforcing it through authority and belonging. The Mail’s strategy is essentially a live response to that diagnosis.
“Netflix didn’t invent streaming, but they managed to perfect it a lot faster than anyone else,” Tom Harrington, head of television at Enders Analysis, said. “Netflix were, and still are, several years ahead of everybody in terms of the user interface, which basically means that they set the perception of streaming.”
The streaming giant has been seeking to grow revenue from new programming formats such as video podcasts, live sporting events and video games. “For a decade, it was quite easy for Netflix, they could have a pretty simplistic offering,” Harrington said. “Now, they’re fighting amongst everyone else for incremental growth.”
The market was less convinced by the growth story, particularly given Hastings’ departure, and shares fell nearly 10 per cent after the results. The problem for analysts is that Netflix is in uncharted territory. “There are no clear parallels on which to base potential penetration,” Harrington said.
Q1 saw Netflix continue to display revenue growth, up 16% YoY (to $12.3 billion), with UCAN (+14%), EMEA (+17%), LATAM (+19%) and APAC (+20%) all contributing strongly.
Netflix has thrived in a decade where TV content has been increasingly siloed. With TV appearing to be moving towards more liquid viewing environments, increased direct competition will disadvantage primary TV destinations.
HBO Max’s launch has so far proceeded as expected, although its decision to not commission locally raised eyebrows: this is in contrast to Netflix, whose UK originals continue to garner the most viewing globally.
UK mobile coverage/quality significantly lags that of its European peers; this really matters, for both consumers and the wider economy, and for both existing services and a range of potential new ones.
Improving coverage will likely require a variety of techniques, from antennas in space to antennas inside shopping centres, and fully utilising the entire range of available spectrum, from sub-1GHz to mmWave.
Network quality competition sparked by the VodafoneThree merger and network rebuild could drive improvements from all three operators, but significant government help is required to ensure this.
Analyst firm Enders Analysis underlined this at the end of 2025 by calculating that the UK’s largest alternative gigabit broadband networks (i.e. BT / Openreach challengers) collectively suffered losses of £1.5bn in 2024 (up from £1.304bn in 2023 and £755m in 2022) – driven by high interest rates and rising build costs.
“It’s very competitive,” said Claire Enders, a media analyst. “The audience who wants to hear about celebrities can now hear it from them directly. There are a lot of influencers who have taken the market from mainstream media.”
A report by Enders in April said that social media sites like TikTok and WhatsApp had become “primary spaces” for information, commentary and discussion, showing the extent of the new competition. “These environments are engineered for sustained engagement-infinite scroll, algorithmic reinforcement and low friction — in contrast to publisher sites,” it said.
An Enders note said that publishers were building up their columnists and star reporters as “creators in their own right”. It pointed to “publisher-owned personalities and episodic formats” as a means to attract and retain paying audiences.
Referral collapse and AI summarisation have made it harder for content investment to capture commercial value. Original reporting remains the authority anchor of the bundle, but the economics of serving habitual news users have become structurally harder.
High engagement does not automatically translate into loyalty. Sustainable growth depends on three engines: engagement (depth and distinctive voice), habit (repeatable utility driving daily return) and community (shared identity binding users to brand).
Distinctive voice and personality are the moat in an AI-mediated environment. Publishers building branded formats, creator programmes and deliberate pathways from platform presence back into owned products are constructing defensible, post-platform economics.
Enders Analysis senior research analyst Niamh Burns, meanwhile, believes the marketplaces being built by the likes of Microsoft are a genuine business necessity, not just a public relations stunt, because tech companies need legally sound data for their growing number of enterprise clients.
In parallel, the European Commission is investigating Google over its use of publisher content in AI without “appropriate compensation”, while the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority is currently consulting on “publisher conduct requirements” to address the structural market harms caused by the search giant.