DMG Media is no longer treating social as the place where its journalism goes to find readers. It is building social publishing into a business that can sell its own briefs, develop its own formats and create new relationships with younger audiences.
That shift is already visible in the numbers. In Digiday’s report, DMG’s New Media director Nathan Aspell said campaigns built exclusively for social now account for 30% of the division’s revenue, a stream he said did not exist before the unit launched a year ago.
Social is becoming a destination for publishers
DMG’s New Media operation now has more than 100 staff across 11 brands, including the Daily Mail, Mail Sport, This Is Money and Eliza. The team includes 25 salaried creators working with producers, videographers and editors. According to Aspell, the division produces around 2,000 pieces of video, static and carousel content every month across Instagram and TikTok.
The scale matters because it shows what is being built. This is not simply a newsroom repackaging headlines for feeds. DMG is creating a production system designed around social viewing, then selling access to the audience and the formats it develops.
The division says its content has generated 3 billion monthly views since launch. It also says creators appear in 90% of branded content and that integrating them into the wider content strategy has lifted engagement across the network by 50%. Those are company figures, but they point to a commercial logic that many publishers are now testing: if social audiences are increasingly difficult to convert into site visits, the feed itself has to become valuable enough to monetize.
That is why DMG is developing recognizable shows rather than relying only on individual posts. PM for a Day gives creator-journalist Mikey Olympitis a repeatable premise. Metro’s Rush Hour Crush turns a newspaper feature into a social format fronted by creator Erica Figueiredo. The ambition is to create IP that audiences can return to and brands can buy around.
The creator is moving inside the production model
DMG’s approach also reflects a more consequential change in how publishers define a creator. Aspell described creators as participants in the making of the work, sitting with videographers to shape how a piece will be shot, rather than simply appearing in front of the camera.
That distinction gives publishers a way to combine editorial authority with the familiarity and personality that social platforms reward. It also changes the value proposition for talent. DMG says it looks beyond follower count, including creators with small audiences but strong subject knowledge and clear potential.
The model is closer to building a media franchise than commissioning a post. The publisher owns the IP, the creator supplies a recognizable voice and the production team turns that voice into a repeatable format. For advertisers, the offer is no longer only reach against a publisher brand. It is access to a host, a premise and an audience habit.
There is a tension in that model. DMG still wants social content to support its own websites, while also earning platform revenue through arrangements including Meta revenue sharing. Aspell said the team uses a mix of video, static posts and links so the formats complement rather than cannibalize one another.
That balancing act is the real business story. Publishers are learning that social can be both a distribution channel and a product, but the two objectives do not always reward the same behavior. A link may serve the website. A personality-led show may serve watch time, sponsorship and platform monetization.
DMG’s move suggests the next generation of publisher social teams will be judged less by how efficiently they move audiences elsewhere and more by whether they can create formats audiences choose to watch where they already are. For brands, that makes publisher-made social less like an ad placement and more like a programming partnership.