On June 25, the South China Morning Post and HarrisX released The Intersection of Influence, which found 68% of Hong Kong adults use news apps with full or major focus, the highest active attention of any digital channel measured.

The report also found 61% say news content stays with them long after they finish reading. In addition, 70% of business decision-makers said they feel more positive about a brand that advertises with a news source they trust.

New research from The Trade Desk and PA Consulting found premium environments were 4.3 times more effective at driving purchase consideration than low-quality inventory, lifted purchase intent by 37%, and produced 50% stronger brand associations. 

Their summary of cheap reach was blunt: It “drives numbers, and it drives uniques, but it actually doesn’t sell anything.” The trust gap underneath those results is now being measured, too. Schibsted’s 2026 Trust Report, covered here by Alma Media, put trust in editorial media at 59% against 10% for social, and in advertising specifically the split runs 35% for editorial media versus 9% for social. 

This is further evidence media context is not neutral and that it carries straight into how the ad placement itself is received by the viewer. The picture varies by market, but trust matters a lot.

Reading the new Reuters Digital News Report, Newsworks’ Heather Dansie pulled out the UK numbers: 73% of Britons distrust news on social media, only 4% use an AI chatbot for news, and news Web sites still command the highest share of UK news viewership at 56%.

All of this matters because the conventional wisdom about news in the advertising market is still fundamentally absurd. As Henry Innis, CEO of Mutinex, argued in a piece on the strangely uneconomic world of brands and news, news audiences have never been larger or more engaged, yet advertising across all news Web sites fell to roughly 1.28% of U.S. digital ad spend in 2024, down from the 62% of all advertising that newspapers and magazines commanded in 1980. 

Audiences have gone one way while the money went the other.

It’s also worth being precise about what that premium is for. Vanessa Otero of Ad Fontes Media warned in The Current against conflating the journalism business with the “content” business and that distinction is useful to think about in the advertising market as well because the two are often treated as the same thing. 

The value buyers are slowly coming around to understand lies in accountable, verified reporting, which is the part that is also the most expensive to produce. But that’s the part audiences actually trust, not the cheaper content that often gets bundled next to it or classified as the same thing. 

In Australia, ThinkNewsBrands’ Vanessa Lyons made the same case from the brand side: As AI-generated fakes spread, around two in five people now use news brands to verify what they see on social platforms, which is precisely the moment of attention a brand wants to be part of and where their ads are most likely to succeed.

As we’ve covered extensively (including in my report last year How News Advertising Reclaims the Brand Safety Narrative), a big reason for the gap between what news is worth and buy-side demand has been the misapplication of “brand safety,” but in 2026 we’re finally seeing that starting to improve. 

On one hand, publishers and collaborators continue proving how much good inventory blunt blocking throws away:

• IAS and Reuters found more than half of Reuters’ brand-suitable pages would have been caught by a typical keyword blocklist.
• Hearst, working with Mobian, said 38% of its newspaper impressions were misclassified by suitability tools, and that correcting it could improve CPMs by up to 27% while opening new demand.
• Ozone’s new content-classification tool lifted addressable users 35% in testing by reading pages in context rather than scanning for trigger words. 

And on the regulatory side, interesting developments that seem to accidentally help publishers. In April, the U.S. FTC settled with WPP, Publicis, and Dentsu, requiring them to stop applying common brand-safety standards and shared exclusion lists when placing ads.

Whatever one makes of the motivation or how we got here, that result removes a large piece of the structure that treats news as unsafe by default.

None of this means the problem is solved. The News Alliance’s survey of agencies and advertisers, reported by The Media Leader, framed the paradox clearly: 67% of agencies call news a “trusted, reputable source” and 77% are confident recommending it, yet around half still admit it is underused on plans, and 47% of agencies and 42% of advertisers said they still would not relax their brand-safety settings. 

Trust is acknowledged rationally yet still ignored at the point of the buy. We must continue to hammer this, as conventional wisdom, even misguided, can be incredibly resistant to change.

Yet we do see signs of progress on the buy-side too. Omnicom is quietly pushing its agencies to route more spend straight to publishers, telling them publisher-owned ad tech “ticks a really big box.”

The case for news is winning on the evidence. The harder work, turning that into budget, requires more momentum and time. That will be a big part of day one of the INMA News Media Advertising Summit, where we’ll have candid perspectives from the buy-side around what they want from publishers now.

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Banner photo: Adobe stock image by Sebra.

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