A digital news publisher is a company that publishes journalism on websites and apps, and pays for it with ads beside the story, subscriptions, newsletters and events. It includes companies that began online, and the digital arms of India's newspaper houses, which run their websites and apps.
A publisher that lives online is really a software company. Its stories are written in a newsroom CMS. Most of its readers arrive from search engines and social feeds. And every page earns money only if the software around it works.
Ads are the largest source of money for most publishers. Each time a page loads, each ad space on it is offered for sale. A supply-side platform (SSP), the publisher's selling software, offers the space to many advertisers at once, and the highest bid wins. The whole auction takes less than a second. One showing of one ad to one person is called an impression. Ad space is usually priced per thousand impressions, which is called the CPM. This is explained in impressions and CPM.
Here is an example with numbers. Imagine a Hindi news website in Lucknow that publishes a story about a new metro line. The story is read 2 lakh times in a day. The page has four ad spaces, so the story produces 8 lakh impressions. If the average price is ₹40 per thousand impressions, the story earns ₹32,000 from ads that day. A story that is read only 5,000 times earns ₹800. This is why publishers care so much about traffic.
Publishers also sell ads in other ways. A native advertising platform places sponsored stories that look like the other stories in the feed, marked as sponsored. Large deals with brands, such as a month of ads on the home page during a festival, are still sold by people. They are booked in an ad order management system.
Two changes are pushing publishers away from ads alone. First, browsers now block the third-party cookies that let ads follow a reader from site to site. So publishers choose ads by what the page is about, which is called contextual advertising. Second, search engines now often answer with an AI summary, and the reader may never visit the page. This is called zero-click search.
So publishers want readers who pay them directly. They add a paywall, newsletters that arrive every morning, and events with sponsors. They also take stories from a news agency, so that their own reporters can spend more time on stories that readers cannot find elsewhere.