Billions for tech giants, crumbs for journalism: the urgent need to rebalance the advertising market to benefit reliable news media

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The global advertising market surpassed 1 trillion USD in 2025, while contributing less and less to the financing of journalism. The Forum on Information and Democracy's report,available since 20 March, identifies other beneficiaries of this fast-growing market. Chief among them are the leading digital companies Meta, Alphabet (the parent company of Google) and Amazon. These three alone accounted for more than 55 per cent of the global advertising market, excluding China, in 2025 - a share that could exceed 60 per cent by 2030.

In addition, there are websites designed specifically to capture attention and generate advertising revenue, such as the fake news sites that flood Google Discover - already flagged by RSF - and siphon off advertising resources from legitimate media outlets. New entrants to the global advertising market, chatbots are scaling rapidly. OpenAI, which develops ChatGPT, reportedly expects to generate 1 billion USD in advertising revenue from its free users as early as 2026, according to a report in the American outlet The Information. OpenAI's overall revenue is projected to reach 125 billion USD by 2029, according to the same source. The idea is to monetise public attention after capturing it, above all by regurgitating journalistic content, without necessarily addressing the risks of misinformation inherent in these technologies. In a grim irony, disinformation websites reportedly capture around 2.6 billion USDin advertising every year, according to NewsGuard, a company specialising in assessing the reliability of online information.

RSF highlights in particular the need to restructure the rules governing the advertising market by relying on independent and transparent trust standards, such as the Journalism Trust Initiative (JTI), to identify trustworthy media outlets whose work meets journalistic standards.

Developed by RSF, JTI certification is a reliable and independent tool based on strict criteria of transparency, ethics and journalistic rigour. The report suggests making it a concrete lever for transformation and cites it as a mechanism that can be activated at various stages of the advertising value chain. Two examples from the report: advertising technology (adtech) actors should be required to integrate a feature enabling certified media outlets to identify themselves as such, and the default settings of programmatic platforms should prioritise content from public-interest media. Combined with other recommended measures - such as tax credits for advertisers investing in quality media or identity verification obligations imposed on intermediaries - this systematic and comprehensive approach could finally redirect advertising flows towards those who produce reliable information.