At least 60% of Future plc revenue still comes from brands that rely on Google as a major source of website traffic.
Future revealed the scale of its continued reliance on Google as it published its half-year results for the six months to 31 March on Thursday.
Revenue was down 8% year on year to £349.1m for the period while profit before tax was down 67% to £18.4m. Operating profit was down 53% to £32.7m and operating profit margin dropped from 18% to 9%.
Adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation) was down 24% to £83.3m.
Future’s share price rose 11% after the results were published and it currently has a market cap of £280m, down from around £4bn in December 2022.
Investors’ Chronicle on Thursday said the shares had risen “but only because things could be worse”.
Chief executive Kevin Li Ying said the company has made “meaningful progress” on new revenue sources such as helping brands with optimising to appear in AI tools like ChatGPT, and a new e-commerce solution (although traditional e-commerce was down 24% due to the Google-driven audience decline).
Future is one of the UK’s leading magazine publishers and owns B2C brands including Marie Claire, The Week, Four Four Two, Women’s Weekly and Livingetc, plus B2B titles such as IT Pro, Installation and Tech & Learning.
In his CEO’s review, Li Ying divided Future’s brands into four categories depending on how well they are adapting to the new online ecosystem in which newsbrands are largely trying to move away from a reliance on Google traffic towards direct relationships with their audiences. However he did not name which brands were in which categories.
Brands described as “destination brands” are those in growth whose content is already found across multiple channels and drive revenue via direct advertising – but they still only make up 9% of group revenue. They are growing by 5%.
Two categories still rely on Google as at least a major source of traffic.
Brands “in transition” have started to be channel agnostic but are still reliant on Google, Li Ying said. These make up 45% of revenue and are declining by 5%.
Brands that have not yet begun this pivot and still depend on Google for audience and revenue make up 15% of revenue and are declining by 18%.
Meanwhile, portfolio brands, likely to be more print reliant although this is not specified, are declining at a rate of 7% but are still generating cash to fund the growth needed elsewhere in the business (making up 31% of group revenue).
Li Ying said: “The segmentation is not static, we expect most of our brands to move upwards and become destination brands, whilst some might remain portfolio brands.
“This focus allows us to prioritise our resources to where these yield the best results, to give clarity and focus to the teams on how their brands are being managed and to drive change at pace.”
[Read more: Future boosts creator content, personal buying advice and registrations]
Future’s media business had a total digital audience of 525 million in the six-month period, down 9% year on year.
Website sessions were down 15% to 278 million and off-platform audiences were down 1% to 247 million.
“However, the correlation between sessions and revenue is decreasing, driven by our successful strategic focus on driving direct advertising which is less or not at all dependent on website audience,” Future said.
Programmatic advertising and e-commerce affiliate revenue in the media business together make up 16% of total group revenue.
Overall, in the full 2026 financial year Future is expecting mid to low single-digit organic revenue decline.
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