The UK publishers in the latest Association of Online Publishers and Deloitte revenue index brought in £155.04 million in the second quarter of 2026. That was about £2.35 million below the previous-year figure used in the November 4 release, even though the two biggest revenue streams grew. The useful question for a publisher building a budget is how much growth in its biggest products can absorb a decline elsewhere.
The latest AOP and Deloitte release puts subscriptions at £57.98 million, up 2.49% year over year, and display ads at £54.08 million, up 4.50%. Those figures describe the participating publishers. They are not an estimate of all UK digital publishing revenue, and the combined change does not describe every business in the sample.
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What subscriptions and display added in pounds
To estimate the change in cash, divide each current amount by one plus its reported growth rate. Subscriptions imply a prior figure of about £56.57 million, for an increase of £1.41 million. Display implies a prior figure of about £51.75 million, for an increase of £2.33 million. Together the two streams added roughly £3.74 million.
The report attributes a £3.93 million decline to the miscellaneous category alone. That decline slightly exceeded the two gains combined. Using the release’s total change of minus £2.35 million, the rest of the categories together account for another net decline of about £2.16 million. The last figure is a residual, calculated from the published totals and rates. Rounding can move the estimates by small amounts.
This is a revenue bridge: it accounts for how the total moved by adding the changes in each part. It does not identify the cause of any change. The public release does not break down the miscellaneous category enough to measure how much of the drop came from any particular activity. A publisher comparing this report with its own books should first check what is included in its own catch-all categories.
| Revenue stream | Change |
|---|---|
| Subscriptions | +£1.41m |
| Display advertising | +£2.33m |
| Miscellaneous | −£3.93m |
| All other streams combined | −£2.16m |
| Total | −£2.35m |
Use the comparison printed in the current release
The original October 2025 release put Q2 2025 total revenue at £165.40 million. The November 2026 release uses £157.39 million for that same quarter as its comparison. That £8.01 million difference in the baseline is larger than the reported year-over-year decline.
Taking £155.04 million from the new release and dividing it by £165.40 million from the old one would give a drop of roughly 6.3%. That arithmetic combines totals from different release editions. The current release reports about 1.5% using its own comparison. Neither public release explains the discrepancy in enough detail to establish whether it reflects a different set of publishers, revisions to submitted figures or some other change. Keep the two baselines separate and ask for a reconciled series before comparing them as if they measured the same population.
The AOP also reports that half of participating publishers grew in the latest quarter. The aggregate decline and that share answer different questions. The first adds pounds across the pool. The second counts publishers, giving each one the same weight. Neither reveals what happened to a typical publisher’s margins or what its next quarter will look like.
Build the same bridge with your own categories
Start with last year’s quarter and this year’s quarter. Use the same properties and revenue definitions in both columns. If you bought or closed a site, report the effect of the portfolio change separately from the change at sites you ran throughout both periods. If you moved sponsorship from miscellaneous into display, recast the earlier period before declaring growth in display. A recategorized pound changes a category total without adding a pound to the business.
Then put the cash changes alongside the percentages. Consider a hypothetical publication that goes from £20,000 to £22,000 in subscription revenue and from £50,000 to £51,000 in display. A third stream falls from £10,000 to £6,000. Its largest growth percentage is the 10% subscription increase, yet total revenue is down £1,000. The small stream mattered because it lost more pounds than the larger streams gained. The revenue mix calculator shows what share each source contributes, and the comparable revenue guide shows how to separate business changes from changes in the comparison itself.
Bring one more column to a budget meeting: what would have to happen to close the gap? In this example, keeping the other lines fixed would require another £1,000 from subscriptions, display or another product just to match last year’s revenue. Before choosing which one to grow, check how much each incremental pound costs to earn. Revenue growth alone cannot establish whether filling the gap improves profit.