How to Optimize Media Advertising & Monetization Using Modern Technology

Media companies today aren’t just competing with one another. They’re fighting for reader attention against Google, Meta, TikTok, and X. This lopsided competition has left publishers dangerously dependent on these platforms for both visibility and ad revenue.

The worst part? When tech giants change their algorithms or pricing policies, media businesses pay the price. For instance, Google’s new AI Overviews have already cut average clickthrough rates by 34.5% for top-ranking pages, proving that even “winning” in search no longer guarantees traffic. Audience behavior is also shifting, making it even more challenging to stand out and remain profitable.

Fortunately, media companies can regain control with modern technology and effective strategies in place. In this post, we’ll discuss five such solutions, from proprietary data engines to AI-driven personalization, and beyond.

Understanding the Shifting Audience Behavior

Before optimizing monetization and ads, you need to understand what’s influencing audience behavior these days. Here are the biggest drivers and shifts:

• Short-form video is changing attention spans. Scrolling through short clips has become the default mode of audience engagement. Rather than watching long-form, single-focused content, average users spend 2.35 hours daily on YouTube, Instagram, and similar platforms, where quick videos are the dominant format.
• Video’s role in the news is growing stronger. Social media video is no longer seen solely as entertainment. It’s increasingly how people get their news. According to the 2025 Digital News Report, the share of users worldwide consuming social video has climbed from 52% in 2020 to 65% in 2025, and overall video consumption has grown from 67% to 75%.
• Audio-first formats expand reach. Audio gives media companies something video can’t: continuous, low-effort engagement. For example, 25% of Americans now listen to podcasts weekly, often as a background activity. Some streaming platforms recognized this shift early, with Spotify investing over $100 million in podcasting and seeing the bet pay off.
• News podcasting is rising. The 2025 Digital News Report notes that podcasts are an effective means of reaching younger, better-educated audiences, especially those tired of traditional news formats. In particular, the US has one of the highest proportions of users accessing at least one news podcast weekly — 15%.
• Algorithms dictate content discovery and influence production. From TikTok’s “For You” page to Netflix’s homepage, algorithms are the new editors. Roughly 80% of Netflix viewing comes from algorithmic recommendations, and on TikTok, 30–50% of a new user’s first 1,000 views are determined by algorithms as well.
• Influencers are the new media voices. In many markets, individual creators are as influential as traditional outlets. For example, in France, Hugo Travers (HugoDécrypte) reaches 22% of under-35s through short-form news videos on YouTube and TikTok. In the US, 22% of those surveyed in the 2025 Digital News Report reported encountering news from podcaster Joe Rogan.

Challenges Media Companies Currently Face

Even as new formats and technologies open up opportunities, media companies are hitting several walls. From data restrictions to eroding audience trust, let’s look at the biggest ones:

Data Privacy and Targeting Limitations

Users are increasingly protective of their personal data. That is why targeting them with relevant ads and personalized offers gets trickier. It’s especially so with cookie refusals, Apple’s App Tracking Transparency, and privacy laws, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), the Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDP), and local regulations.

Declining Trust in News Credibility

Trust remains one of the media industry’s biggest pain points. Over half of the audience (58%) surveyed by the Reuters Institute say they’re worried about their ability to distinguish real news from misinformation.

But it’s not just readers who feel the pressure. According to the 2025 State of the Media Report, 40% of journalists cite maintaining credibility and fighting “fake news” accusations as one of their top challenges.

Skepticism About AI Usage

AI promises faster content production and smarter personalization, but audiences aren’t fully on board. Many consumers are okay with journalists using AI as a tool — but not with AI replacing humans entirely.

AI presents both challenges and opportunities, and 30% of journalists surveyed by Cision agree. For example, people expect this tech to make news cheaper and more up-to-date, yet also less transparent, accurate, and trustworthy.

Platform Conflicts and Uncertainty

Another challenge is the complicated relationship with tech giants. While Google, Meta, and X dominate audience reach, they also control the rules of engagement.

No wonder publishers are split. About a third want to strengthen ties, another third want to cut them, and the rest prefer to stay the course. But one thing’s clear: relying too heavily on external platforms means playing by someone else’s rules.

How to Optimize Media Advertising & Monetization with Modern Tech

Adapting to shifting audience behaviors around media consumption is the number one challenge for journalists, as the 2025 State of the Media Report points out. The good news is that media companies can tackle that with several strategies and techs:

1. Build a Data-Driven Foundation

Every optimization effort starts with data. But using just any data won’t work. You should:

1. Collect, enrich, and combine first-party data from every owned channel.
2. Integrate that first-party data with third-party data from partners, affiliates, and products.
3. Use a multi-source data engine that consolidates all the data and helps analyze user interactions across platforms.

Pro tip! Gather data ethically and transparently to avoid undermining the already fragile user trust.

Take, for example, our data engineering and management case. Our client, a global media group with over one million readers across 17 countries, focused exactly on building a solid data foundation. In particular, they needed a way to unify their ecosystem. We delivered a platform integration engine, centralized databases, and data collection tools that allowed seamless cross-integration of media and marketing solutions.

2. Personalize User Experience with AI and Custom Solutions

With quality and centralized data in place, content and ad personalization are now powered by artificial intelligence. Audiences, though not ready to trust completely autonomous AI, are open to some of its use cases:

• 27% support AI-driven summarization.
• 24% like story translation.
• 21% want better story recommendations.
• 18% are curious about chatbots answering news questions.

We recently helped our client implement this personalization. We developed a marketing automation solution where marketers could create entire campaigns from modular components (landing pages, push notifications, chatbots, pop-ups, banners) and connect them into one adaptive flow. Teams could add custom visuals, promo codes, and even dynamic discounts based on prior user interactions. Once ready, the platform generated HTML code to plug these experiences directly into any website.

This capacity for flexibility and rapid iteration supports what Bain’s 2025 study confirmed: top-performing companies are eight times more likely to run 100+ marketing experiments per month and twice as likely to scale the successful ones. AI allows that level of experimentation and agility, and media companies can benefit from the same approach.

3. Adopt a Mobile and Platform-First Approach

Today’s audiences rarely sit behind a desktop to consume media. They typically do it on mobile devices and in-platform, whether it’s TikTok, YouTube Shorts, or Instagram Reels. Yet many publishers still put web-first experiences on a pedestal.

To meet your audiences where they truly are, focus on:

• Mobile-first interfaces.
• Adaptive video formats, including vertical video.
• Ad experiences that feel native on every platform.

Need help with that? Consider our mobile development services. We deliver mobile experiences that meet the expectations of modern audiences.

4. Develop an Integrated View of the Consumer

Successful monetization and advertising require moving past click-through rates and focusing on the entire user journey. However, media companies often find it hard to see a complete picture of user behavior across channels: what they read, click, buy, or subscribe to.

The solution? Data integration and automation. You should connect CRM, analytics, marketing, and any other systems in use to create a unified customer profile. Having done that, you’ll be able to deliver more relevant content, measure ad performance more accurately, and identify monetization opportunities early.

This approach mirrors our own marketing solution mentioned above. The integration of multiple campaign components allowed our client to track, adapt, and personalize based on a single user journey.

5. Diversify Revenue Streams

Diversification is never extra, especially when you’re dealing with constantly shifting audience behaviors. Forward-looking media companies are branching into:

• Ecommerce and affiliate marketing, supporting shoppable content, embedded storefronts, product reviews, and influencer-driven sales.
• New digital products, including gaming (29%), education (26%), youth-focused products (42%), and foreign-language versions (20%).

Pro tip! Rely on three or four revenue streams. In particular, publishers surveyed by Reuters make money from events (48%), affiliate programs (29%), donations (19%), and related businesses (15%).

Custom tech plays a pivotal role here. For publishers, it offers an opportunity to create digital ecosystems where users can read, watch, listen, and buy, all in one place.

Conclusion

You don’t necessarily need the market cap of The New York Times or the engineering team of Google to compete with tech giants under changing audience expectations. What you do need is proper tech and strategy.

Optimizing media advertising and monetization comes down to the following essentials:

• A comprehensive, unified data strategy that connects insights across all channels.
• Personalization powered by AI and custom-built solutions.
• Revenue diversification that protects your business from market fluctuations.

With these in place, you’ll regain control of your audience, stabilize revenue, and, ultimately, lead the competition. And if you need assistance in implementing any of the techs mentioned today, get in touch with Exoft. We made sharing stories easier for numerous publishers, and we’ll do the same for you.