Ozone formally launches in US
Ozone has officially launched its Audience Connection Platform in the US.
It comes as the publisher-backed tech platform aims to compete with social media platforms for audience scale and ad investment amid a global expansion.
The Audience Connection Platform pools publisher audiences to offer advertisers scale, while using audience data to offer targeting solutions.
Ozone claims it will reach 205m Americans every month, equivalent to around three-quarters of the US population. In the UK, Ozone currently reaches 42m monthly users across its partner titles, a comparable proportion of the UK population.
In addition to delivering ad campaigns, Ozone also offers tools for publishers to maximise the value of their audiences and an in-house creative studio, which develops display ad formats.
The Media Leader understands the official launch is a practical formality — Ozone has been actively courting and serving US advertisers over the past year, but had not officially “planted a flag”, as CEO Damon Reeve told The Media Leader, until now.
Ozone’s existing publisher partners include major UK-headquartered news brands like the Daily Mail, The Telegraph, The Independent, The Sun, The Guardian and The Mirror.
Last April, Dow Jones publications The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and MarketWatch integrated their UK audiences into the Ozone platform. This was followed by Mediahuis Ireland titles including the Irish Independent, Sunday Independent, Belfast Telegraph and Sunday World joining in November, which gave Ozone a foothold in the Irish market.
More recently, CNN joined in early September. Other major brands to partner with Ozone include BuzzFeed, HuffPost, the New York Post, as well as the BBC, which sells ads against its non-UK audiences.
In an interview with The Media Leader this summer, Ozone CEO Damon Reeve revealed the platform is in active discussions to on board nearly 20 additional US publishers to its alliance.
Speaking ahead of the formal launch, Reeve added that UK-based publishers have done a great job of attracting US audiences in recent years, pointing to strong growth for the Daily Mail and Sun, as well as the BBC. He estimated that about half of the 205m US audience reach is derived from Ozone’s British publishers.
That hasn’t stopped Ozone from seeking greater scale and “depth”, according to Reeve. The company hosted its first US-based event for publishers in New York City last week, which was attended under the Chatham House rule.
As Ozone aims to become a global proposition, other target markets include Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Australia, Canada and Asia-Pacific.
The platform has been on a hiring push throughout 2025. In H1, it grew its global headcount by 20% with new hires in London, Manchester and New York.
Such efforts are continuing in the US, where Reeve told The Media Leader he is looking to build out an additional team in Chicago to serve the Midwest market. He added, however, that he is willing to take a flexible approach to location for future hires.
“To get under the skin, I think we have to be outside [New York],” he said. “And also culturally I just think it’s different. It’s like Manchester and London — people in Manchester really value the investment you make in the market and they respond accordingly. And I think that just practically, there’s a lot of clients there and small agencies, and you’re going to get a lot of cut through from there than if you’re trying to do everything from New York.”
Ozone expects to hire an additional 20 team members between now and the end of the year, spanning all business areas from product development, sales and marketing to publisher services and operations.
“Our origin is very much a news-first organisation. But in the US we can’t be only that,” Reeve continued. “Because it’s such a big market and it’s very verticalised from an advertiser point of view. You have to be diversified in the audience offering to meet the needs of a motoring client or a finance client or a luxury brand.”
Reeve will be monitoring Ozone’s success in the US in part by measuring how many new advertiser clients are brought into the fold and how much of their domestic ad budgets they can tap into. He pointed out that Ozone currently has advertisers “into the hundreds” that spend with Ozone, whereas the aim and challenge is to close the gap with a platform like Meta and its millions of advertisers.
“I appreciate that there are going to be a whole set of SMEs that aren’t relevant to what we do, but there is a big set of mid-tier and bigger brands that we do work really well with, that are not currently investing. That is really our opportunity, to prove to that set that we do create value, that we are a comparable channel [to the tech platforms].”