Three Dow Jones publications are joining Ozone: The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and MarketWatch.
Owned by News Corp, Dow Jones has reached an agreement with the UK publisher alliance to integrate its UK audiences.
Dow Jones’ readers are primarily workers and leaders in business. The Wall Street Journal, for example, claims to reach 48% of C-suite leaders globally.
Analysis: Affluent audiences
For Ozone, the inclusion of these titles’ UK audiences will therefore enhance its ability to understand and target affluent and educated business audiences.
News Corp’s British publisher, News UK, is a founding shareholder in Ozone, which launched in 2018. Other founding shareholders include Guardian News & Media, Telegraph Media Group and Reach.
The alliance has seen its membership grow over time. Last year, Ozone added Mail Metro Media on a pilot basis, as well as LGBTQ+ outlet PinkNews, special-interest publisher Our Media and The Jewish Chronicle. In 2022, digital joiners included BuzzFeed, HuffPost, Mumset and Asian Media Group.
Ozone helps to pool publishers’ data and sell display ads at scale. Among other tech products, it also offers a biddable management service for small and medium-sized publishers and last autumn launched an in-house creative studio.
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Tech expansion
Ozone has progressed from focusing primarily on helping UK publishers monetise their assets to also delivering tech to publishers outside the UK market. In fact, according to Danny Spears, Ozone’s chief operating officer, the majority of Ozone’s customers for its tech products are US-based.
“I would characterise the Dow Jones partnerships as a further evolution of that,” Spears told The Media Leader. “We’re supporting a US-based global publisher outside of their core market.”
He added: “Ozone is utterly publisher-centric and community-minded. We’d love to work with other titles — major US titles with a global audience for sure — but we’re mindful that this has to work from a publisher perspective.”
There is a potential “appetite” for Ozone to apply its UK-based audience and data pooling to other markets, according to Spears, but any such expansion would need to be led by the publishing community.
He added: “It’s on us to understand publisher strategies and where Ozone can be additive.”
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