As 2025 draws to a close, Ozone’s 2025 Wrapped has arrived. It has been a transformative year; we have evolved from a UK publisher alliance and premium web champion into a global Audience Connection Platform.
In the UK, Ozone offers scale to rival the major tech platforms. We connect brands to nine in ten monthly online users and over two-fifths of the British population daily – sitting comfortably between Instagram and Amazon for daily reach.
In the United States, our platform is scaling rapidly and is expected to reach almost three-quarters of American online users monthly. Through our Premium World offering, we also now connect global brands to audiences across 30 markets.
While it has been a year of exponential growth, including increasing our headcount by 25%, our core values remain. We are committed to supporting a more sustainable future for ad-funded journalism and audience-first media businesses; the digital spaces that connect online audiences to high-quality content that inspires, informs and entertains.
Through transparency and trust; through scaled connections, deep audience intelligence and context-led creative solutions and formats from our in-house Studiozone team, we continue to deliver meaningful, measurable business impact. There is much more to come in 2026.
Our top-five highlights of the year
Planting the flag in the U.S.
The year’s headline was our official United States launch in September. Our CTRL NYC event introduced Ozone to our U.S. partners before we formalised the expansion in The Media Leader, Digiday and via our own press release.
Staying Stateside, among the many new publisher partners welcomed in 2025, we were particularly pleased to publicly announce the prestigious signings of leading US-based premium publishers Newsweek and CNN to our UK and US platforms. In addition, we bolstered our global sport footprint, as Footballco also joined Ozone in December.
The Art of Connection
In April, we unveiled our new strategic positioning: The Art of Connection. This challenged the industry to embrace ‘The Connection Advantage’ – a multiplier effect combining scale, insight and creativity to deliver measurable business impact.
For brands, The Connection Advantage is supported by three pillars: human connections at scale, living audience intelligence and context-responsive creative. For publishers, the three pillars are: tools for growth, high value ad revenue and community influence.
Championing news; subverting brand safety norms
We remained a fierce advocate for the economic health of the news industry. Globally, we support Stagwell’s Future of News initiative. In the UK, we joined the News Alliance, partnered with Bountiful Cow on their award-winning RA: Unblocked study and utilised Newsworks’ attention research. We continued to highlight the unique value of high-attention media while challenging outdated brand safety norms.
Spotlight on Curation
Other than AI, one of 2025’s hottest topics has been curation in programmatic advertising. As such, our Publisher Services team undertook an extensive analysis to produce ‘Curation: Friend of Foe?’, a research paper into the topic that found…
- 80% of curation revenue comes from just 10% of curators.
- Only 23% of publishers currently feel in control of their participation in curated deals.
- Over 60% of publishers reported not being asked for permission to include their data and inventory in curated deals.
- 95% of publishers are unclear on curation fees, with average curator margins at 44%
At Ozone, we’ve always championed permissioned, compliant access to publisher assets with clear commercial terms. We believe curation can be a force for good when publishers have transparency, control and fair value exchange.
‘Trust in Media Excellence’
Our efforts culminated in November when we received the ‘Trust in Media Excellence’ award at The Media Leader Awards. This followed a rigorous six-month independent audit by PwC, validating our ‘Premium Web Methodology’. The audit confirmed that 83% of Ozone’s audience remains addressable in a post-cookie world – a testament to the privacy-first, consent-driven architecture underpinning our platform.
To all of our partners, we wish you season’s greetings, a restful break when it comes, and a prosperous new year full of partnership and opportunity.
