Daily Mail publisher DMG Media has made a “significant investment” in Prorata.ai, a generative artificial intelligence platform that plans to share revenue with publishers each time their content is used to answer a user query.

The deal gives Prorata access to DMG Media’s content, which includes the archives of the Mail, Mail Online, Metro, the i and New Scientist.

Guardian Media Group and Sky News all also announced on Wednesday that they have made their content available to the start-up, and they were joined on Thursday by magazine Prospect.

The Financial Times reports that the DMG Media investment values Prorata at about $130m (£100m). Press Gazette understands Sky News is also considering investing in the start-up.

DMG Media on Prorata: ‘It could be the cornerstone of a sustainable economic model for news’

Prorata has not yet launched any public-facing products, but has already signedsimilar content-sharing deals with the Financial Times, Fortune, Axel Springer and The Atlantic.

The company has previously told Press Gazette that it has created a mechanism that lets AI platforms determine “the value of contributing content” in a generative AI response and as a result “calculate proportional compensation” for the originators of that content. It has said it will make the technology available to license to other AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.

Prorata says it will share half the revenue from its forthcoming subscriptions to its licensing partners.

The business hopes to provide a solution to publishers who don’t want to be left behind should consumers move toward generative AI-powered search, but who have been burned by other AI companies who have ingested their content to create their large language models without providing any compensation.

[Read more: News Corp seeks massive damages from AI firm Perplexity for stealing content]

DMG Media vice chairman Rich Caccappolo said its deal with Prorata made the company “the first UK news publisher to invest in an equity stake in this industry-leading platform”.

“The rise of large language models and real-time content scraping represents a material threat to the news industry. There is a critical need to attribute content used by LLMs to generate answers and compensate all content creators for their work.

“ProRata’s platform is a vital first step toward advancing accurate and fair attribution and promoting transparency. It could be the cornerstone of a sustainable economic model for news publishers, giving them the incentive to continue investing in high-quality, informative journalism.”

David Rhodes, the executive chairman of Sky News, said: “Global audiences trust Sky News to give them the full story, first. ProRata’s solution helps advance that high-quality, impartial journalism across AI platforms and publishers.

“With all our partners today we’re securing our company’s massive investment in fair and accurate news reporting – now, and well into the future.”

Guardian Media Group chief executive Anna Bateson said: “The trusted, quality journalism for which The Guardian is world-renowned must be fairly credited and valued when used by AI platforms. Prorata respects and promotes these fundamental principles, and we are pleased to be partnering with them.”

And Prospect chief executive Mark Beard said: “In this age of disinformation, we respect and warmly approve of Prorata.ai’s approach. We share Prorata.ai’s belief that fact-checked, authoritative journalism is critical and will not only survive but thrive, if the publishers who produce it are credited and fairly rewarded alongside the technology companies that surface it.”  

Prorata’s chief executive Bill Gross told Press Gazette in August: “Current AI answer engines rely on shoplifted, plagiarised content. This creates an environment where creators get nothing, and disinformation thrives…

“Our technology allows creators to get credited and compensated while consumers get attributed, accurate answers. This solution will lead to a broader movement across the entire AI industry.”

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DMG Media‘s venture capital arm, DMG Ventures, has made new investments in two food and drink companies: cacao pod “upcycling” company Blue Stripes and cannabidoil (CBD) product manufacturer Trip.

The investments, of undisclosed size, come as DMG Ventures announced the launch of two new £25m funds: a “Headline Fund” designed to back “consumer-facing start-ups from Seed to Series A” and a “Scale Fund” that it says will help more established consumer brands “accelerate their growth” through partnerships with DMG Media titles.

DMG Media publishes newsbrands including the Daily Mail, Mail Online, Metro, the i and the New Scientist.

DMG Ventures launched in 2018 and says it has since invested in 29 consumer-facing start-ups including electric toothbrush brand SURI, racing simulator F1 Arcade and money management app Plum. Keeping with DMG Ventures’ pledge to support companies it invests in with exposure on DMG Media titles, SURI and Plum have been written up on Mail Online in both straight ad content and product reviews.

Pure Stripes manufactures drinks and food using whole cacao pods, which it says differentiates itself from typical chocolate companies which waste “70% of the cacao pod” by only using the beans.

Trip meanwhile describes itself as the UK’s “#1 CBD brand” and is best known for its tins of CBD-infused drinks, which are widely available in high street shops. Although it can be extracted from cannabis (as well as hemp) CBD is legal.

Trip suggests its products can help promote calm and reduce anxiety and stress, although a review of Trip products on Mail Online earlier this year reported no obvious change in stress levels after using the products.

Manuel Lopo de Carvalho, the managing partner at DMG Ventures, said: “We’re delighted to launch two new funds to support the most exciting entrepreneurs in Europe and the US.

“Thanks to our unique investment strategy, we are ideally placed to seize opportunities from what we believe will be a transformational shift in the consumer sector.”

Rachel Muzyczka, a newly-promoted partner at the company, added: “We’re really looking forward to working with Trip and Blue Stripes, which are two of the best emerging food and beverage brands globally. Trip is among the most outstanding startups we have seen, while Blue Stripes’ team is second to none.

“We will put the full weight of DMGT’s media brands – and their vast global audience – behind Trip and Blue Stripes.”

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The editor of Mail Online is becoming publisher and chief executive of its parent company amid a shake-up to its leadership structure.

DMG Media said it is preparing for continued digital innovation and further change amounting to “significant structural transformation” in the news industry.

Mail Online publisher and editor-in-chief Danny Groom, who has been in his current roles for two years, will oversee DMG Media’s publishing, product development and commercial operations.

The publisher also owns Metro, the i newspaper and the New Scientist.

Current CEO Rich Caccappolo will become vice chairman of DMG Media, with a brief to focus on “strategic initiatives pivotal to the future of news publishing”.

Caccappolo said: “I believe our industry is on the brink of a significant structural transformation, which should ensure the long-term sustainability of publishers that invest in great journalism.

“We have a powerful brand, strong operating performance and an owner with a long-term vision, which have helped us drive these changes. It is crucial that we seize these opportunities as they arise.

“The chairman has asked me to focus on opportunities for our company and the industry, and I am honoured to lead this charge.”

Groom will be succeeded overseeing Mail Online by Ted Verity, editor of Mail Newspapers since November 2021 and former Mail on Sunday editor and Daily Mail deputy. Verity will become editor-in-chief of the Daily Mail across all platforms.

Reporting to DMG Media chairman and proprietor Lord Rothermere, the publisher said Groom and Verity will together “accelerate the Mail’s digital transformation, deliver exciting new products, maximise our editorial firepower and grow our audience on existing and new platforms”.

Already this year Mail Online has launched a partial paywall, meaning ten to 15 “premium” stories a day are only for subscribers. Mail Plus costs £1.99 per month for the first year and then £6.99 monthly.

Vere Harmsworth appointed DMG Media chief commercial officer

Also announced was the appointment of Lord Rothermere’s son Vere Harmsworth as chief commercial officer. The company’s heir apparent was previously appointed in the newly-created role of director of publishing strategy in May last year and before that was working in business development for the publisher.

Harmsworth will be supported by deputy chief executive James Welsh, who will also take on an expanded role covering Metro, DMG’s US and Irish businesses, and its print, legal, HR and finance operations.

Lord Rothermere, who took parent company DMGT private in 2021, said: “We are committed to accelerating digital innovation at DMG Media. For more than 125 years, we have adapted and thrived through a series of seismic changes, and today our audience is larger and more diverse than it has ever been.”

He said Caccappolo’s leadership will be “vital to navigating the future of our industry”, adding: “We stand on the cusp of further change, and I am confident that our brands will continue to captivate readers, viewers and listeners under Danny’s and Ted’s leadership.

“Thanks to his experience running a successful digital newsroom, and his strong team-building skills, Danny is ideally qualified for his new role.

“Ted is an exceptionally talented editor with an acute understanding of the Mail and its readers. Under his leadership, the Mail will continue to create the world-class journalism that informs and delights readers everywhere.”

Groom said the company is preparing to “embrace a new set of digital challenges and opportunities” and “continue creating more innovative products for our users and advertisers”.

While Verity added: “With our unrivalled team of journalists and executives – and determination to produce the kind of journalism we know our audience wants to read – I see no reason why the Mail can’t become a dominant global media brand.”

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DMG Media chief executive Rich Caccappolo has said that monopoly lawsuits against Google and the prospect of new UK tech regulation could bring huge benefits to news publishers.

In August, a US judge ruled that Google’s $26bn-plus annual payments to companies like Apple and Samsung to secure prominence for its browser were illegal and monopolistic. A second US case, which began on 9 September, argues that Google created an illegal monopoly in the world of adtech – harming publishers and advertisers.

In the UK, Google, Facebook and other US tech giants are facing tougher regulation as a result of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act, which was passed in May.

Speaking at the Press Gazette Future of Media Technology Conference in London this month, Caccappolo said he expects the major tech companies in the UK media market to get designated as having “strategic market status” by December this year, with new rules likely to be put in place by the Competition and Markets Authority governing their behaviour by next August.

He said: “Unfortunately, I think that we as publishers are not doing enough. We’re sort of sleepwalking and waiting to see what comes out of it, instead of being there every day, knocking on the doors, arguing about what should be in there.

“It’s not just payment for content – and by the way, whatever the payment for content is, it’s not going to be enough to save us. The way that the payments get allocated needs to be decided, whether it’s number of journalists, number of stories… and the ramifications to that have to be understood.

“It could be so much more though. We should have a role in understanding when changes are coming and how they’re going to impact us.

“We should have a role in saying that they impacted us, perhaps unfairly, like this thing that’s killed off white labels for publishers in the most recent Google algorithm update [which, in June, stopped discount vouchers advertised by publishers from appearing in search].”

Reach chief executive Jim Mullen has also spoken out about big tech in the past week, arguing regulation is needed to ensure free, advertiser-funded online news can thrive.

Google monopoly cases mean ‘things are going to get sold off’

On the subject of the monopoly cases against Google in the US and elsewhere, Caccapoulo said: “There are going to be things that get sold off. There are going to be changes in the way money flows. There’s going to be investment, private equity and venture.

“We’re going to see new browsers, new search engines, new ad servers. And those of us in the space who have traffic are going to be key partners for these new initiatives. This is a chance to fix a lot of of things that are bad in our space.

“But the fights we choose, the options we make, the decisions we make, are going to have an effect on us, not just this year, but long term, and they will affect our fortunes and our ability to survive.”

DMG Media revenue and profit up

The Daily Mail and Mail Online boss said the company had finished up its financial year, which runs to the end of September, in a “strong” position. Last year DMG Media parent company DMGT reported adjusted pre-tax profit of £41m on turnover up 2% to £997m. Consumer media revenue fell 5%, largely due to a hit to advertising revenues.

On this year’s figures, which won’t be published until next February, Caccappolo said: “We’ve grown our digital revenue, we’ve grown our profit, and we made some changes that I think are really crucial to our long-term sustainability and success.”

Asked about the success of Mail Online’s partial paywall, launched in January of this year, he said the revenue contribution was “fundamental” but declined to be drawn on exact numbers for subscribers.

He said the Mail Online subscription, coupled with expansion into podcasts and original video on Youtube, had made DMG Media a much “healthier” and more “diversified” business”.

“We rolled out a subscription product, actually a subscription platform, and there’s an important differentiation there. It’s a product with the ability to test pricing, to test bundling, to test ads on, ads off.

“We’ve still got 1,000 to 1,500 free articles we do every day. Ten or 15 of them would be what we call ‘more from the Mail’.

“Those are available as part of a membership or subscription. And that has worked really well. We haven’t lost the traffic, and we have a very large number of people who are subscribing, and the churn rates are lower than we anticipated, so we’re really excited about it. It is a foundational component of our revenue. It’s very profitable.”

He added: “It changed the way we think about content, the value of content. It changed the way newsroom plans their day. It gives us feedback into what people are are interested in reading and what is good enough for people to pull out a credit card.

“This was an initiative that crossed over functional areas and I’m really proud of how we did that. And I mean, if you launch something like that and it works, it raises the morale, gives everybody a sense that we can do big things.”

Attribution for publishers on ChatGPT will bring revenue for news publishers

Caccappolo said DMG Media has no current plans to sue ChatGPT and other AI companies for using its content without permission but confirmed that it does block AI scrapers from accessing its websites.

However he said there was an opportunity for news companies to get paid by generative AI companies on the basis of attribution.

“You ask [an AI company such as Perplexity] for the news of the day and a response is given that’s five paragraphs long. We need to figure out how much of that came from each publisher, and they have to be attributed. And there is movement to that, and we’re supportive of that and that’s going to happen.”

One AI start-up, Prorata.ai, has so far signed deals with major publishers such as the Financial Times and Axel Springer with a plan for revenue sharing based on attribution of this sort, although its platform has not yet launched.

Caccappolo continued: “When that happens, I think there’ll be this amazing rush to suddenly unlock, and everybody wants to be scraped, and it’ll be just like search today. We’ll all say: ‘Hey, how come my account’s not being used there?’

“I don’t think any amount of citation of the sources is going to drive a lot of traffic. I think that’s going to go away, but I think there’s a real chance at getting some attribution.”

Google Privacy Sandbox could be a good thing for publishers

DMG Media was among the publishers arguing against Google’s plan to ban third-party cookies on Chrome at the end of this year and replace them with its own Privacy Sandbox technology.

Caccappolo was asked by Press Gazette whether Google’s July decision to keep cookies and instead introduce a new experience on Chrome which allows users to make an “informed choice” about privacy was good or bad news for publishers.

“We were concerned that if it went live and cookies were retired, that it would be practically unbuyable,” he said. “We worked with other publishers, with Google themselves and with the CMA, and we showed that it wasn’t ready. It couldn’t be done…

“I actually hope that they continue to work on it [Privacy Sandbox] because I think it is an important alternative, because when cookies go away there is not going to be one solution there is going to be five, six or seven solutions and one of them is going to be Sandbox.

“I had a meeting this week with a bunch of publishers in our office and Google talking about Sandbox. I hope it continues.”

He said one of the benefits of Sandbox was that it offered a way to attribute the success of advertising to publishers.

“One of the big mistakes we made is that we allowed ourselves to be a commodity. We allowed our inventory to be bought at scale, cheap, and part of that was that we never put in place an attribution engine to close the loop.

“People buy Meta, they pay £1, they believe they’re getting £1.20 in return… We, as publishers, were never big enough to solely to do that.

“I think that we should band together and do that. I think Google Sandbox, if you look at it underneath, had a lot of attribution and measurement that I think we can use as an industry. So I hope it goes forward, and I hope Apple adopts some of it.”

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The future funding of journalism on the open internet remains in question despite news that Google will not kill off third-party cookies on its Chrome web browser after nearly five years of promising otherwise.

Matthew Scott Goldstein, a consultant who has written previously for Press Gazette on how publishers can avoid “extinction” amid the end of cookies, summed up the views of many when he said it is “unclear exactly what this means”.

“We need another two or three weeks to find out what the fallout really is. However, my concern is this is another meteor hitting the publisher ecosystem of the internet.”

Third-party cookies underpin most publisher advertising revenue by enabling marketers to target readers with more relevant messages. Google has said it will “introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing”. But whether this turns out to be better or worse for publishers than forcing them to use Google’s Privacy Sandbox cookie-killer technology remains to be seen.

Industry ‘should continue’ transition to first-party data despite Chrome news

Few mass market, ad-funded news publishers contacted by Press Gazette on Tuesday were willing to offer a view on the cookies news.

The stock market was largely unmoved by the development. Shares in Reach, the largest publicly-listed news publisher in the UK and one which relies on display advertising for most of its digital revenue, were down 0.3% by market close on Tuesday.

Shares in Future, a magazine company that also draws substantial income from display advertising, were down less than 0.1%, and a spokesperson for the company said: “Details in the blog post remain light, and we continue to focus on cookie alternatives and selling on a first-party basis.”

Jon Mew, chief executive of digital advertising industry body IAB UK, said “many” of the organisation’s members had “more questions than clarity this morning”.

But he said that despite Google’s announcement, “it isn’t and shouldn’t be a return to cookies as the default”.

“Our industry has made huge progress over the past four years and this process has irrevocably reshaped the digital ecosystem,” Mew said. “That doesn’t just evaporate with the removal of Google’s cookie deadline.

“The reality is that a big proportion of the open web can’t be addressed by third-party cookies already so continuing to pursue other ways of targeting and measuring audiences is vital. It’s also important to note that the ICO has responded by encouraging the industry ‘to move to more private alternatives to third-party cookies – and not to resort to more opaque forms of tracking’…

“Ultimately, our hope is that the removal of Google’s deadline restores a level of certainty and control to the wider industry that is conducive to further productive collaboration and development in this area.”

[Read more: Independent set to hit four million online registrations after pivot to first-party data collection]

Anthony Katsur, the chief executive of nonprofit digital media consortium IAB Tech Lab (unrelated to IAB UK), similarly said that “the industry will likely end up in the same place. We’re just taking a different, potentially longer route to get there.

“It is important to await the exact implementation details of Chrome’s elevated ‘user choice’ approach to third-party cookies, which may put the industry in the same place.

“The advertising ecosystem still requires multiple solutions to safely and effectively target consumers, including alternative IDs, server-side solutions, Privacy Sandbox, and cookies. This isn’t materially different from what is happening today, as approximately 25% of the browser market is already cookieless, which requires solutions.”

But Google’s cookies announcement, Katsur said, gives “Chrome more time to work with the advertising ecosystem to develop a better Privacy Sandbox that works for everyone versus their initial approach, which, until recently, was developed with minimal industry input.

“The IAB Tech Lab believes the industry should continue working towards a vision of a privacy-centric world without third-party cookies.”

What have publishers said about Google’s cookie U-turn?

On the publisher side Terry Hornsby, the group digital and innovation director at Reach, said: “This announcement will come as no surprise to some in the industry… However, for Reach, this is simply another reminder that we operate in a changeable landscape.

“Our customer value strategy has always been about securing our own relationship with our customers and strengthening our advertising proposition, to make us less vulnerable to these kinds of shifts. With our large pool of first-party data as well as our own in-house advertising technology platform Mantis, we are well positioned and our focus will continue to be on strengthening our own relationships and capabilities.”

Jo Holdaway, the chief data and marketing officer at The Independent, which also draws substantial income from display advertising, said: “Circa half of our users are already unaddressable in the classic sense as they use non-Chrome browsers, so our work has not been wasted.

“Of course the decision is frustrating considering the huge amount of time and effort put in by both publishers and the ad tech community into finding robust solutions to the deprecation of third party cookies by Chrome.

“However we are committed to continuing to test new solutions, which include data collaboration, contextual targeting, universal IDs, curated marketplaces and the use of first party data for programmatic direct deals.”

A spokesperson for Mail Metro Media, which sells adds across DMG Media titles and The Telegraph, said: “Mail Metro Media strongly believes that the market should continue working on cookie-free research and developments despite Google’s announcement this week.

“Whilst there were legitimate industry-wide concerns regarding Privacy Sandbox, we welcomed the emerging initiative as it had the potential, if designed and implemented appropriately, to empower advertisers with a viable alternative. We will continue to collaborate closely with Google and other parties to ensure new and improved developments that drive best practices in the digital marketing landscape.

“As an industry, it is vital that we are all aligned to evolve, to enable targeting and measurement, and facilitate scaled advertising solutions across all browsers.”

And Damon Reeve, the chief executive of publisher-owned advertising network Ozone, said that although “the full impact of these changes on audience addressability in Chrome remains uncertain, it’s clear that they will influence media buying strategies”.

Reeve said the company, which uses first-party data signals from its publisher members, was “confident in our ability to deliver greater addressability across the Premium Web, irrespective of third-party cookie deprecation”.

Google gives consumers a choice — but does that mean they’ll agree to cookies?

Other industry insiders argued that giving users the ability to opt out of cookies would largely achieve the same end as simply doing away with them.

Jeff Green, chief executive and founder of programmatic marketing technology company The Trade Desk, said Google had “finally acknowledged what the advertising industry has been saying for years — Privacy Sandbox is not a good product and doesn’t sufficiently protect consumers’ privacy or empower advertisers. And it probably hurts publisher monetisation most.

“Google seems to finally acknowledge that the best option for them is to give consumers the choice.

“The question that remains is—will Google truly give consumers’ choice? Or will they make the decision for consumers and then bury consumers’ access to change it?

“Apple has already taken this path—one that empowers Apple and deprecates users’ experience while asserting that the user can change it if they really want to and have the will to click a lot to find the buttons.”

[Read more: Google’s new Sandbox advertising system could be ‘the end for a lot of publishers’]

Jacob Donnelly, who runs the subscription publisher A Media Operator, asked in his newsletter: “Google intends on giving users the choice of opting out of cookies. And when given the choice, will they choose anything but opting out?”

Commenting “we simply do not know what Google’s implementation will look like,” Donnelly predicted “vendors will play around with various techs. They’ll then make a bunch of lofty promises. Those promises will not be true. Publishers will get burned”.

Publishers must continue to future-proof for life after cookies

And Joe Root, the chief executive of audience platform Permutive, warned of a “false sense of security” following the cookie news.

In a statement to Press Gazette, he said: “When third-party cookie opt-out is made simple, people overwhelmingly say no, evidenced by the impact of GDPR in Europe, where over 90% of people have opted out. Forty per cent of people who use Chrome have already said no, and that is when disabling cookies is hard, let alone easy.”

In a separate statement, he said: “Google is using consumer choice as the cloak, killing the third-party cookie without necessarily having to provide an alternative solution, similar to Apple and ATT.

“The vast majority of users online are already unreachable due to signal loss in the open web today, causing publishers’ OMP yields to collapse. For advertisers, this signal loss means bidding on an ever-smaller group of users, pushing up CPMs and reducing the perceived efficiency of open web buying.”

On Linkedin, Root posted that Permutive “sits across more than a billion devices every month. Of those, 70% of consumers no longer have a cookie and within Chrome, 40% of consumers have manually disabled cookies”.

And Jochen Schlosser, chief technology officer at Adform, said the “central change” was that the move “gets Google out of the gridlock of the CMA”.

“Google’s ability to control the fate of cookies through other mechanisms still leaves all power in its hands, and so this move does not change the control dynamics. Likely without any type of regulatory approval, this development also underscores the ongoing tension between new regulations in the fields of privacy and competition law against the influence that ‘very large platforms’ have on many dimensions of the Internet.”

UK-based contextual advertising technology Illuma works with publishers including The Guardian and advertisers including Microsoft and Disney.

Chief strategy officer Ryan McBride said: “The events of the last five years, leading up to Google’s announcement this week, have made it clear that the industry should not be relying on third-party cookie infrastructure.

“While Google will no longer be officially ‘deprecating’ third-party cookies, we expect the industry impact to be more or less the same, with anticipated high consumer opt-out rates. This means the addressability challenges we’ve all been planning for, remain unchanged.

“Publishers should continue building future-proof frameworks and testing next-generation solutions which extend and enrich their first-party data, while third-party cookies are still available— benchmarking against them while they can.”

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Reform UK party leader Nigel Farage has engaged law firm Carter-Ruck over a Mail on Sunday story quoting Volodymyr Zelenskyy as condemning him.

And Farage accused sister title the Daily Mail of “colluding with the Kremlin” to discredit him.

Farage has been in the firing line since Friday when he told the BBC the West had provoked the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine with the eastward expansion of NATO and the European Union.

On Sunday the Mail on Sunday ran with the headline: “Zelensky: Farage is infected with ‘virus of Putin”.

The source for this appeared to be BBC security correspondent Gordon Corera, who wrote on X on Saturday morning: “No official reaction in Kyiv, where I’ve just arrived, to Nigel Farage’s comments on the West having ‘provoked’ Russia. But one source in the presidential office did tell the BBC that ‘the virus of Putinism, unfortunately, infects people.'”

The Mail on Sunday also published an investigation claiming that 22 Reform candidates have expressed sympathies for Putin or his invasion.

The Daily Mail asked a spokesperson for Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov if Farage was seen as an ally.

Spokesperson Maria Zakharova is quoted in today’s Daily Mail answering: “How [else do] you see the person who tells people that two plus two is four or reminds you of the exact time?”

The Daily Mail has also published a two-page tactical voting guide urging Reform UK voters to instead back the Conservatives in order to stop a “Starmer supermajority”.

And in a leader column which admitted that the Conservatives were guilty of “an unforgivable betrayal of their promises” the Mail urged readers not to bring about the “nightmare” of a Tory wipe-out by voting for Reform.

Nigel Farage likens Mail’s Ukraine quote about him to ‘most disgraceful journalistic act of the 20th century’

In a video message posted yesterday on X, Farage said: “Ten years ago I predicted there would be war in Ukraine because I thought Putin would use Nato and EU expansion.”

But he added: “I’ve never supported his administration in any way.”

He added: “A BBC reporter had a quote, my name wasn’t even in the quote. The BBC doubted the story so much they didn’t run it themselves.

“We have instructed Carter-Ruck and they have written already to the Mail on Sunday.”

Farage added: “I then get a message from the Daily Mail who say to us that they, the Daily Mail, has been in touch with the Kremlin. And they say that someone who works with the foreign minister Sergey Lavrov described me as an ally and they plan this to be the next big story tomorrow.

“They know damned well that I’ve never been an ally of the administration. I very much doubt the quote is even truthful.

“The Daily Mail are colluding with the Kremlin and intending to put out Russian propaganda.

“They are doing this to protect their friends, the dying Conservative Party… somehow the owner of the Mail thinks this is my fault. They have destroyed themselves with five years of betrayal and broken promises.”

And Farage drew parallels with the publication of the forged Zinoviev letter in the Daily Mail four days before the 1924 general election. The letter predicted that Labour‘s normalisation of relations with Russia would stir British workers up to revolutionary action.

Farage said of the letter: “It is the most disgraceful and dishonest journalistic act of the entire 20th century and now the Daily Mail 100 years on are trying to do the same again. Trying to stop Reform UK breaking through in big numbers to the UK parliament.

“My advice for you is don’t fall for it. Don’t buy the lies coming out of the Daily Mail.”

The new Conservative government in 1924 concluded the Zinoviev letter was genuine, but historians now believe it was a sophisticated forgery leaked to the UK press by anti-Communist Russians.

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Associated Newspapers are heading for a High Court showdown with their neighbours in London’s Kensington High Street.

DMG Media‘s national newspapers and websites occupy the first four floors of the premises and are seeking a court order against gym owners, Equinox Kensington, who occupy the two floors above them.

Court papers just made public say that vibrations from the gym have been so strong that items, including an air-conditioning unit, have fallen off the walls of offices occupied by Associated.

They say that the unit narrowly missed an employee and that things got so bad that staff were sent home for a fortnight, to keep them safe.

Now Associated Newspapers is seeking an injunction stopping Equinox Kensington from allowing intrusive noise and vibration from the use of free weights in its gym on the fifth and sixth floors of the building.

The papers say that Associated have spent more than £17,000 investigating the problems of noise and vibration from the gym.

Associated accuses Equinox of negligence, in failing to take sufficient precautions against noise and vibration, failing to pay attention to complaints, and failing to installing a floating floor scheme to control vibration and acoustic disturbances.

They say that despite repeated requests, Equinox has failed to stop the nuisance, and remedial works have not improved the situation. They seek an injunction banning the gym from continuing the nuisance, and damages of up to £25,000.

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The Daily Mail today launched a long-form video strategy around a slate of original series designed to be watched primarily via the Youtube app on home TVs.

The Mail’s new Global Video Studio is developing about 20 shows, including “Price of Fame”, which looks at how expensive it is to live the life of a celebrity, and “Your Body on Sport”, which looks in-depth at the physiological and medical issues facing professional athletes.

“The company is basically making a big investment in video”, Tony Manfred, the Mail’s global head of video, told Press Gazette. “This is a hit strategy. We expect these to be big, blockbuster, million-view-an-episode-type of things.

“Not all of them are going to work, but the hope is we’re sitting here next year and we have the beginnings of a slate of our shows that we know work.”

New York-based Manfred joined the Mail about nine months ago from Business Insider.

The Mail has a team of about 12 producers working on the series, led by Patrick Bulger also in New York, the relatively new head of shows at the title.

The Mail has about 50 people in total working in video. About 20 work on the “social” team (under head of social video Phil Harvey in London) creating vertical short-form video for platforms like Tiktok.

The remainder work on the “site” team (under head of site video Olivia Bateman, also in London) which creates video to accompany Mail Online’s text-based reporting, Manfred said.

New Youtube shows will be up to 30 minutes long (versus two minutes on Tiktok)

“The big Youtube trend that is happening in the last 18 months now is the amount of engagement they’re getting on televisions. I think Nielsen puts out a report every month of the biggest TV broadcasters in the US, and Youtube is number two behind only Disney,” Manfred said.

When all US viewing numbers are combined, for both TV and via on-screen apps, Youtube claims almost 10% of all US television use. Disney has 11.5%, according to Nielsen.

Most of the Mail’s audience on social and third-party platforms is now outside the UK.

“We’ve seen just completely explosive growth on Tiktok in the last 18 months,” Manfred said. The paper claims 13 million followers on TikTok. “We get more than a billion views a month there. So, part of the reason to pour gas on that fire is that it exposes our brand to people who might have never come in contact with a Daily Mail story otherwise.”

The Mail is part of Youtube’s partner sales program and is thus able to sell its own ad inventory on the app.

Each show will be 15 to 30 minutes long, instead of the 30 seconds to two minutes favoured by Tiktok. That allows the Mail to design the series with sponsors and brand partnerships in mind. A 22-minute-plus show has room for a presenting sponsor, pre-roll ads, and multiple midroll ad breaks, Manfred said.

The Mail claims it receives 125 million monthly views on Youtube. “The idea is that these unlock commercial opportunities that wouldn’t be available to us otherwise,” Manfred said.

Manfred is aiming to publish five to ten episodes of its new shows per week. That’s a much lower cadence than the Mail’s existing social media video output, which is producing ten to 20 short videos per day, he said.

That frantic pace is sustainable only because the Mail’s operations are larger than most newsrooms.

“The reason I came here [from Business Insider] is because they have all the resources, they have all the stuff you need to do video really well at scale,” Manfred said.

“They have a huge amount of money. They have the distribution megaphone on a bunch of different platforms. The going-from-zero-to-60 thing, that is really hard if you’re starting at a standing start. It’s not the case here. In my discussions with them there’s buy-in from the people in power here, the folks at the top were like ‘this is an opportunity for us and we trust you, and we like your plan, and go for it’. So that’s why I came over.”

“As growth in video consumption continues, we’ve adapted to give our global audiences access to the most captivating stories, and now advertisers have access to our premium video production capabilities,” Dominic Williams, Mail Metro Media’s chief revenue officer, said in a statement.

Read more:

• How Daily Mail went from voice of Middle England to Tiktok sensation
• At 1,500 stories per day, Mail Online is UK’s most prolific news website
• Daily Mail podcast chief Jamie East on publisher’s rapidly expanding audio empire.

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Guardian Media Group chief executive Anna Bateson has said the publisher “would do a deal” with an AI company “but only on the right terms”.

Bateson made the comments on Tuesday while appearing alongside four other news executives at the Deloitte and Enders Media and Telecoms conference in London.

At the same conference last year Bateson joined colleagues from Le Monde, The Telegraph and the Financial Times in calling for publishers to “get control” of their intellectual property from generative AI companies.

One year on, two of those other news businesses — Le Monde and the FT — have each made deals with ChatGPT creator OpenAI.

Asked whether The Guardian would do the same, Bateson said: “Would we do a deal? Yes — but only on the right terms and for the right value. And I think that’s easy to say and it’s very hard to actually deliver.

“Without in any way wanting to diminish or underestimate the potential opportunity and power of the technology [AI] — the technology businesses do seem to sort of believe that they’re exceptional, in a way, and that they don’t necessarily have to pay for the things that everyone else respects…

“They’re happy to pay for talent and they’re happy to pay for computing power, but then they don’t want to pay for data.

“I’m sure we’d all love to say: ‘We’re going to reduce our cost to our businesses by not paying for the things that are fundamental to the way that we run our businesses.’ We’d love not to have to pay for web hosting, we’d love not to have to pay for print or paper. But that’s not the way that markets work.”

Because of that, she said, “a respect for copyright” would have to “underpin any deal”.

The FT’s Matthew Garrahan, moderating the panel, asked whether deals being struck between publishers and AI businesses meant “history is repeating itself”, drawing a parallel to partnerships struck years earlier between news companies and social media platforms.

Bateson said: “I think everyone has a greater understanding about the importance of really standing up for and arguing the very real value, and I think everyone is more realistic about what the value exchange really is.

“The first value exchange was this idea that you could give away your content in return for this incredibly valuable audience and you would then be able to realise a return on that. I don’t think anyone believes that anymore.

“So therefore the robustness and the rigour with which the partnerships get negotiated is going to be very important to make sure that that value exchange is fair.”

New Telegraph chief executive ‘optimistic’ that copyright law leans in media’s favour on AI payments

Anna Jones, who became chief executive of Telegraph Media Group in January, said she felt “pretty hopeful” about AI and journalism.

“I think there are some established rules in other sectors that we can look to,” she said.

“I was actually on the board of Universal Music for a few years, and the music sector has already been through this — and has sort of proven that, actually, the IP of the creators who created the music, or in our case the news content, has to be rewarded for it, has to be paid for it…

“If you look at what happened with Universal and Tiktok, they’re just a little bit ahead of us. So if I look at it through that lens, I actually feel optimistic.

“And I also feel optimistic about the fact that they have to do deals with us. Because if you think about what people will be looking for… what will people be using their ChatGPT for — they’re asking it questions about what’s happening today, what’s culturally relevant, what’s happening in the election…

“And who is actually producing that? Well, the people who work with us.”

DMG Media chief executive Rich Caccappolo, however, said he feared “that whatever payment comes about is not going be enough to save the industry, or many of the participants in the industry”.

Specifically, he said he was concerned that generative AI replacing traditional search engines is “going to be devastating for some publishers who are very dependent on search…

“We’re very fortunate that people come to us direct to the homepage or they open up the app… but the sites that are dependent on search are going to be destroyed.”

Caccappolo said it is “very difficult, now, to build direct traffic. It’s probably more expensive than ever, probably harder than ever to get a new reader. And to get a new reader who becomes addicted, who comes back every day”.

He said community, whether in the form of comments or direct interactions with journalists, was one way to bring back direct audiences.

[Read more: Hard paywalls are ‘dangerous’ says Mail CEO Rich Caccappolo]

The Telegraph’s Jones suggested a different way of building those audiences back up, saying: “I think we will also have to go back to good old-fashioned brand campaigns — I think it’s something that the media did more of in the past and then there has just been a huge reliance for many years on Google.”

To that end Axios reported on Monday that The Wall Street Journal has launched a “multimillion-dollar brand advertising campaign” with a goal of “broadening the Journal’s subscriber appeal to a wider set of business professionals”.

Speaking the same day that ITN announced a deal that hopes to authenticate its content against AI fabrications, its chief executive Rachel Corp told the audience she remained concerned about the effects of both AI-generated deepfakes and more lo-fi “shallowfakes” on the election.

She said: “Broadcasters have to stop doing TV news when the polls open. All we can do is leaders voting and Labradors looking sad outside polling stations.

“We can’t take it on, so if something emerges of Rishi high-fiving Putin and that’s spreading, we can’t counter it in the normal way we would on our bulletins.”

She did add, however: “We’ll see — so far there hasn’t been very much.”

In February ITN issued a warning over deepfakes after fake videos posted online appeared to show its journalists endorsing or promoting products.

Dominic Carter on The Sun’s election endorsement: ‘Who knows?’

Also appearing on the panel on Tuesday was The Sun’s executive vice president and publisher, Dominic Carter, who told the crowd he wanted regulatory action on AI from the next government.

“It comes back to regulation,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what colour the next government… it’s really important for any government to take on copyright and IP.” (Guardian chief executive Bateson agreed, suggesting there may be a need for regulatorily-mandated labelling of synthetic content.)

Carter added that while the public may not think a great deal about the effects of AI on the quality of information now, “ultimately, people will care — and in a world of rising synethtic content they’ll care more”.

The News UK executive also disclosed that the election “doesn’t sell copies of the [Sun] newspaper, but it does drive traffic online”.

He said: “There are bits of it that our readers are fundamentally interested in, but it’s not at the exciting stage yet. It’s getting close — I think it’s a couple of weeks away.”

Asked by Garrahan whether The Sun could be expected to announce a dramatic switch in its support from the Tories, Carter said: “Who knows? We’ve got some time.”

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Chief executive of DMG Media Rich Caccappolo has warned that hard paywalls are dangerous for democracy as Mail Online continues to roll out its premium content model.

He also revealed that DMG Media has achieved digital revenue growth in the first half of its financial year for Mail Online and increased profit despite a challenging online advertising market.

And he explained why publishers need to work together to put in place the foundations for a generation of profitable journalism as Google phases out personalisation cookies on the Chrome browser.

Privately-owned DMG Media is the largest national news publisher in the UK with a daily print newspaper circulation of around 1.8 million copies (via Metro, the Mail and the i). According to Similarweb data, Mail Online is the fourth biggest commercial news website in the world – attracting 376 million visits per month.

DMG Media revenue up in first half of year

Speaking to Press Gazette at the Beeler.tech Navigator conference in New York, Caccappolo, who splits his time between the Daily Mail offices in New York and London, said DMG Media digital revenue was up in the first six months of its financial year from October 2023 onwards. (Listen to the full conversation on the latest edition of the Press Gazette podcast here).

He said: “We are on a good path for the second half, we have a good team and we’ve been operating well…

“We still have a really vibrant print business that throws off some profit and that allows us to invest in the digital initiatives. We’re really fortunate online to have a huge percentage of our traffic coming direct.”

Over the past year the Daily Mail has become the biggest UK publisher on Tiktok, with 8.7 million followers for its main account and nearly 13 million in total.

He said the Mail’s work on social media platforms like Tiktok and Snapchat is reflected in focus group research with younger people.

“They tell us ‘I don’t read your paper, I don’t go to your app but I go to your edition on Snap every day and I love what you do on Tiktok’ and we have to realise that we have to embrace that, we have to figure out how to do well on other platforms other than our own in the way that works on those platforms.”

Hard paywalls ‘create two-tiered group’

Asked about the future viability of journalism on the open web, as opposed to behind paywalls, Caccappolo said: “I think hard paywalls are difficult and they are dangerous.

“We’ve launched a subscription product called Mail+, it’s a reader revenue premium product in the UK but it’s not a hard paywall, it’s ten to 15 articles out of the 1,000 to 1,500 we do a day that people who want more from the Mail can subscribe to.

“We’re trying to thread the needle to keep the massive scale but also get some reader revenue.

“The challenge with hard paywalls is you create this two-tiered group. You’ve got one group that’s better informed and perhaps more tied to facts and you have this other group that’s reading murky or less reliable information.

“An informed public is the foundation of democracy and if you put a paywall in front of that you run the risk of not having an informed population.

“All of us – publishers advertisers, agencies, regulators, Google etc – need to realise that is at risk and that a lot of publishers are going to be challenged unless things change a bit.”

Attribution of online advertising major threat for publisher

Caccappolo said one major challenge for publishers in the online world is over attribution and being able to prove return on investment to advertisers.

“None of us have ever been big enough to sort of push for attribution, a pixel on a thank you page…

“Advertisers buy Facebook, they put in their dollar and they believe because of the attribution model they’re making $1.20 or whatever, they buy Google for 57 cents and they make 72 cents.

“There’s some sense of a return on ad spend that we don’t have and we’ve allowed that to make our inventory less valuable than I think it is.

“We don’t get credit for the impact we have. I understand our place in the funnel is tough, we’re not necessarily awareness, we’re not necessarily conversion, we’re more in that middle consideration range. People come to our site, they know they want to buy vitamins, they see an ad for vitamins and they go to Amazon and they buy.

“It’s tough to credit us but we have to use this opportunity of cookie deprecation as not just a chance to fight back for what we have today, which is not a great spot – commoditised cheap reach. We need to fight for a better representation of the value of getting in front of our readers.”

Fighting Google in the courts

The Daily Mail brought an anti-monopoly lawsuit against Google owner Alphabet in the US in 2021 alleging that its monopoly over search and the tools used to buy and sell online advertising space across the internet had rigged the market in its favour.

Last year marketers spent around £14bn with Google on search advertising alone in the UK versus around £2bn with every newspaper and magazine publisher in print and online combined.

A case putting US state attorney generals against Google will go to court in Virginia in September and is one of a number of class action and private cases alleging that Alphabet has unfairly exploited a monopoly position.

Meanwhile the UK Competition and Markets Authority is considering lodging a similar case against Google while scrutinising its plan to replace publisher cookies on Chrome with its own Privacy Sandbox system. CMA concerns have already forced Google to push the planned end of cookies on Chrome from this year to 2025.

Caccappolo hinted that the legal challenges could make it hard for the CMA to allow Privacy Sandbox to be rolled out.

“I think what’s really interesting about all this is that the CMA is in sort of an interesting spot if they choose to go forward with a case or these cases play out,” he said.

“That question about whether or not Google has done some things that manipulate the markets. How can they say that they want to file the case and at the same time approve Privacy Sandbox, which in many ways gives more control to Google, it seems a tough circle to square.”

He added: “If Google is found guilty of some of those things then we’ll all try to claim damages and there will be some changes, whether are behavioural changes or structural changes.”

New advertising tech, video and e-commerce driving DMG Media revenue growth

Asked what’s driving revenue growth at DMG Media, Caccappolo said online advertising yields were up partly driven by new ways of targeting readers based on anonymous data signals.

He said contextual advertising (serving ads based on the content being read) was also being looked at by DMG Media, but he cast doubt on whether this technology would work well for newsier content. US consumer media giant Dotdash Meredith has reported digital advertising up 13% year on year in the first quarter of 2024 driven partly by its own contextual advertising solution.

He said: “I don’t think it works well for news sites. It’s hard right now to run any contextual ads on stories about Ukraine. It’s hard to monetise news through contextual.

“That said, I think contextual signalling is an important aspect among others of defining audience segments and I think that’s what we need to be looking at. We sell access to the audience.”

Video has been a source of incremental revenue growth, Caccappolo said. The Daily Mail has 3.6 million followers on Youtube and is also rapidly expanding its audio output.

Caccapolo said more ad revenue will move to Youtube in the post-cookies world. In the first quarter of 2024 Youtube ad sales rose 21% year on year to $8.1bn and publishers take around a 55% share of programmatically sold ad revenue on the platform.

He said e-commerce is currently DMG Media’s best-performing revenue area and its direct ad sales operation has also been performing well.

“Things are working right now, there are a lot of challenges coming up in the second half and there are a lot of potholes, but we’ve always found ways to manage through that and I’m very confident that our team will do that.”

Advice for publishers on surviving the big cookies switch-off

On the issue of Google phasing out cookies, Caccappolo urged publishers to test Privacy Sandbox and not make the same mistakes of 2018 when the European Union’s new GDPR regime came in, forcing publishers to obtain reader consent for using their data.

“GDPR was a mess and some people really played it badly and they were very hurt by it. We want to avoid that this time and I think that’s just by communicating and working together on things that we can do to make Privacy Sandbox as viable as it can be.

“I read the Google announcement that they weren’t just delaying it, they were also open to addressing some of the concerns that many people have raised.

“So I think we need to work with Google and with the buyers and the agencies on figuring out how we give them the clean signals they are going to want to do buying.”

He added: “Let’s not just be content with fighting to keep the spot we’re in right now which is commoditised cheap reach. I think if we can get some of the past sins rectified we could be in a better place for the next generation.

“It’s going to be a tough year and I’m not sure everyone will make it through but I think if you can get to the other side I do see a world which could be better for publishers and advertisers and hopefully readers as well.”

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