Members of the Guild of Corporate Online Publishers (GOCOP) have been charged to urgently build income streams that do not depend on banners, programmatic cheques or sponsored posts, as advertising built on pageviews weakens.

The charge as given on Wednesday by the Group Chief Executive Officer, Billsbox Services Limited and Publisher, Quick News Africa, Dr. Monday Ashibogwu.

Ashigbogwu spoke during a training by the Guild of Corporate Online Publishers, GOCOP, for its members as a part of the activities to kick start its 10th annual conference holding at Raddison Blue Hotel in Ikeja.

He presented a paper titled, “Monetisation of Digital Media Business: Earning Beyond Advertising and Sponsored Content.”

He said three findings explained why the conversation could not wait.

First, according to him is the research showing that audiences are leaving publishers’ front doors.

Citing the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2026  which surveyed nearly 100,000 people in 48 markets, he said social media and video networks were for the first time, a more widely used route to online news than publishers’ own websites and apps: 54 per cent against 51 per cent.

He equally pointed to a second research  that indicates that traffic is thinning.

He said analytics covering more than 2,500 news sites show referrals from Google search fell by a third worldwide between November 2024 and November 2025, with publishers expecting a further fall of 43 percent within three years.

The third research cited by Ashibogwu shows that the money followed the audience.

He therefore warned that an advertising model built on pageviews could not hold when the pageview was captured by a platform or when an Artificial Intelligence summary answered the reader before that reader ever reached a publisher.

He referenced a warning by the Nigerian Guild of Editors of a possible media collapse.

He said Nigeria felt the shift in readership and viewership trends sharply.

In the Reuters Institute’s Nigerian sample, he stated, 81 percent of media consumers use Facebook and 78 percent use YouTube, and 34 percent say that independent news creators already meet most or all of their news needs.

But there is a fourth finding, he declared, pointing out that in the same report, 68 per cent of Nigerians surveyed said they trust most news most of the time.

“That places Nigeria joint first with Kenya among all 48 markets, against a global average of 37 per cent,” he said.

He noted the sample is English-speaking, urban and online, but that those were precisely the readers who could pay.

“We do not have a trust problem. We have a business-model problem, and our task is to convert trust into income,” Ashibogwu declared.

He said advertising rented out audience attention, while six other streams sold something sturdier – Relationship with readers, expertise, convening power and intellectual property.

He suggested six streams of income that can be explored-

Membership: Most people will not pay for news, with paying stalled at 17 per cent even across 20 mostly wealthy markets.

The model that travels is membership where journalism stays free and readers support it.

Cases cited are The Guardian which earned 126 million pounds in digital reader revenue and counted 1.4 million recurring supporters in the year to March 2026, South Africa’s Daily Maverick whose Maverick Insider brings close to half its revenue, and News24 which passed 100,000 subscribers in 2024.

Premium Times’ first attempt at reader revenue in 2019 “failed spectacularly” but a second attempt revealed Diaspora spending power, he said.

Events: Ability to bring people into a room. Semafor now earns more than half its revenue from live events. In Nigeria, Big Cabal Media turned TechCabal’s coverage into Moonshot conference which drew about 6,000 attendees from 39 countries in 2025. BusinessDay and Nairametrics also run conferences. With 2027 general elections approaching, publishers can host debates and town halls, charging all participants on same published terms.

Training: Teaching media relations, crisis communication, writing, digital skills and responsible use of AI. Cases are Nairametrics Academy and Premium Times.

Data, Research and Intelligence: Stears which began in 2017 as free publication, raised 3.3 million US dollars in 2022 and repositioned as data company by 2023; Nairametrics’ Nairalytics and TechCabal’s TC Insights.

He said every specialised publisher is sitting on a database.

Licensing and Collective Bargaining: In November 2025, South Africa’s Competition Commission secured 688 million rand, about 40 million US dollars, from Google and YouTube for news media.

In July 2026, following a joint petition by the Nigerian Press Organisation of which GOCOP is a member, the President directed the FCCPC to investigate how Meta, Alphabet, X and generative AI companies use Nigerian news content.

He cited News Corp’s reported 250 million dollars deal with OpenAI over five years and Amazon’s reported 20-25 million dollars a year to The New York Times.

He also cited UK’s NLA Media Access which represents over 280 publishers and returned over 50 million pounds in a single year.

Products, Services and Commerce: New York Times now has 13.35 million subscribers with only about 12 per cent paying for news alone at end of 2025, rest paying for bundle including games, cooking, sport and product reviews. Its digital affiliate and licensing income was 201 million dollars in 2025. Cases cited include Big Cabal Media’s Cabal Creative.

He cautioned on grants, saying when American foreign aid was frozen in 2025, it was described as “an extinction-level event” for some African media houses.

On which stream should come first, he suggested: general news sites should begin with membership; specialist titles with intelligence briefings and one annual event; state/community publishers with events, training and business directory.

He offered six practical rules: Own your audience (email/WhatsApp, comply with Nigeria Data Protection Act); Choose a niche; Start with one stream for 90 days; Protect the newsroom with published editorial independence policy; Give revenue an owner with target, and Use the Guild for shared payment infrastructure, joint events calendar, pooled archive and group training.

He also recommended that within two years, no single source should account for more than half of income.

For the Guild collectively, he recommended constituting a standing committee on revenue and licensing, collecting standardised member data on traffic, archive size and newsroom cost, commissioning feasibility study on collective licence for media monitoring on NLA model, and negotiating shared services.

Citing industry forecasts in Reuters Institute, he put Nigeria’s media market at about 540 million US dollars by 2029, roughly half digital.

“My recommendation to each publisher is to leave here with one new stream and a ninety-day test,” he concluded.