The message of the wider publishing industry facing significant challenges has been widespread over the last two years, evidenced by reports including that of the UK's Publishers Association, which noted that the UK publishing industry's revenues only grew by 1%, yet Planet Sport has again posted record revenue in the first half of 2025.
What are we doing differently? We spoke to our Chief Commercial Officer, George Odysseos, to find some answers in his 25 years of experience.
Investment and Optimisation
George kicked off by mentioning, "There has been a lot of focus in the last couple of years on the quality of what we produce as a publisher and maintaining our position at the height of people's awareness. We've continually invested in our network of sites, making them a brilliant experience for users and ultimately making them want to return."
No doubt this strategy makes George's role in the commercial team easier. After all, allocating resources to maintaining and optimising revenues as opposed to chasing them frees up time to test different theories and garner record-breaking results, a key strategy for fellow publishing companies to implement.
George continues, "I've always maintained that you have to put the user first. In a difficult market, you have a flight to quality. What do I mean by that? When there's high demand and not much supply, some potentially lower their quality thresholds. I think we've come out on the right side of that; it's the ethos we continually promote, offering high-quality engagement environments for advertisers."
Our Smartest Strategic Move
Media buyers want to know who they're targeting. As George's insights echo, providing a good environment for both advertisers and users requires balance — swing too far each way and you either lose the buyer or the consumer.
George says, "Users are becoming increasingly aware that it is advertising that pays for the content that they consume, but it shouldn't come at the expense of their user experience.
Making our users more addressable for advertisers by offering insights into our audiences through working with data partners, doing content activations, and uplifting brand questionnaires across our network allows our internal teams to offer advertisers useful audience insight data on who they want to target."
The key takeaway is that you must know what your users like, who they are, and where they are, otherwise, how can an advertiser or media buyer know whether you or they will be able to engage users effectively?
It's clear that delving into the data and scouring through the relevant statistics has been paramount in Planet Sport's wider success. That being said, swimming in a sea of data without the expertise to interpret it is a pitfall in itself.
George adds, "One of the best investments we made in recent years was into our data analyst team, which not many publishers of our size had at the time. I think the progress we've made over the last six years has been directly impacted by establishing data sources and visualising them to achieve consistent growth."
Common Publishing Industry Traps
We're not saying we do everything right. Nobody can. However, in our advantageous position, we can offer insights into common and avoidable errors.
Here's George's take: "It's difficult to speak for others; every company has their different pressures, but I think some of the knee-jerk reactions I've seen in my 25 years in the industry are to put more ads on a page. It's simple economics: if you increase supply too much, your yield drops."
A common misconception in the publishing industry is that more advertising means more revenue. It seems like a low-hanging fruit and an easy win, but an ineffective one clearly reflected by George's observations and the wider publishing industry growth, or lack thereof.
George concludes, "I always argue that revenue from an additional page or a returning user is going to far outweigh an extra two ads you might try to squeeze onto a page. Don't fall into the trap of thinking you can just increase the ads and make them more prominent."