Monetizing audience insights: How Mediahuis created innovative first-party data strategies that grow revenue

Mediahuis is a European media group built around independent journalism and strong, relevant news brands, with its core markets in Belgium and the Netherlands, where it owns around half of the Dutch news publishing industry. Alongside those foundations, Mediahuis also has major publishing assets in Ireland and Luxembourg, reaching millions of readers every day across print and digital.

Over the past five years, premium Irish titles like the Irish Independent and the Belfast Telegraph have passed 100,000 digital subscribers, reinforcing the value of trusted content in a changing media landscape.

That relationship with readers shapes how Mediahuis approaches advertising. As privacy expectations rise and traffic becomes less predictable, the company has focused on building an advertising model that is privacy-safe and works with audience trust. The goal is simple: help advertisers reach relevant people and achieve measurable results, without compromising the environments that readers value.

At last year’s Piano Academy in Paris, Mediahuis shared how this thinking has guided its first-party data strategy and the audience solutions it has developed over time, with Piano being at the core of their audience engagement strategy.

Moving away from third-party cookies

When Google announced plans to deprecate third-party cookies in 2020, it forced everyone across the business to rethink their strategy, including Mediahuis. Over the past five years, they steadily shifted their approach to audience data.

Paywalls were introduced on premium titles, starting with the Irish Independent and then the Belfast Telegraph, and a cross-departmental team was formed to align advertising, editorial, and subscriptions around a shared first-party data strategy. Registration journeys were expanded to capture more useful audience insight and later supported by a registration wall and metered paywall to reach the scale needed.

Today, Mediahuis has 1.2 million registered users, around half with first-party data profiles, and has moved from cookie-based segmentation to audience-driven advertising solutions.

Making first-party data work at scale

As Mediahuis built out its first-party data strategy, close conversations with advertising agencies highlighted a shared concern: scaling is only useful if the data behind it is consistent and reliable.

“We’ve engaged a lot of our stakeholders, particularly in advertising agencies, and they're concerned with media companies' ability to scale first-party data. Their preference is to buy from one as opposed to try and buy from multiple. Because in their experience, buying from multiple media there's issues with both the consistency and the quality of that first-party data,” says Connor Diamond, Group Head of Digital Insights at Mediahuis.

As a result, Mediahuis has focused on solving that challenge – moving beyond driving traffic and focusing on what advertisers care about most – conversions. Besides audience monetization, they worked on providing good quality leads and supporting their privacy-first commercial strategy. That’s how their two products – ReClick and InMarket – were born.

ReClick: reaching people who already showed interest

ReClick was built to help advertisers move beyond traffic and focus on conversions. It uses privacy-safe first-party data and previous engagement with ads and branded content to identify users who have already shown interest in a category.

These signals are brought into Piano, where Mediahuis builds sector-based audiences (such as automotive or retail) and re-engages them across its network. By focusing on people who are more likely to act, ReClick delivers stronger conversion rates and higher-quality leads, which is why it has seen growing adoption and repeated demand from advertisers.

InMarket: asking instead of guessing

InMarket takes a more direct approach by capturing declared intent. Simple questions are embedded directly into display ads (usually a yes/no or A/B choice) allowing users to signal interest in a single click.

Responses flow straight into Piano, where audiences are created and activated at scale. Moving these questions from articles into display inventory made the product far more scalable, reduced wasted impressions, and unlocked mass-market use.

Creating clear audience segments

One of the most important decisions Mediahuis made was to simplify how audiences are defined and sold. Rather than offering endless segments, audiences are grouped into three clear tiers, each designed for a different advertising need.

1. Behavioral and contextual audiences

The first tier focuses on behavioral and contextual audiences. These are built from what people read and engage with – topics, keywords, sentiment, and location – including hyperlocal audiences supported by regional content hubs across Ireland.

2. Engaged and loyal readers

The second tier brings together engaged and loyal users: subscribers, registered readers who have shared first-party data, frequent visitors, newsletter subscribers, and users engaging with audio or video content. Campaign results consistently show that these audiences interact more with advertising because they’re more invested in the content.

3. First-party data and intent-based audiences

The third and most premium tier is built on first-party data and intent, including the new products: ReClick and InMarket. Here, Mediahuis uses registration data such as age groups and occupation alongside declared signals to create privacy-safe, high-value audiences designed to support performance and conversion, with brand safety included as standard across premium inventory.

Innovation as the engine of advertising growth

“Our first party data strategy is an ever-evolving suite of documents and presentations,” says Connor Diamond. “If you have first-party data strategy, and you're not reviewing it every 12 months at least, you're falling behind. Things are moving so fast in this space.”

Medahuis also invests heavily into educating their sales team. “We do a lot of work with our sales team,” says Connor. “It can be quite painful at times, but we do. But we need a high-performance sales team because if we're going to build great products, we need them to sell them.”

Just as importantly, Mediahuis prioritizes sharing important assets – product storytelling, clear naming, logos, and other creative – with their salespeople, for bigger impact.

“Innovation remains the engine of advertising growth. That's our motto.”

Close partnership with Piano at the core

Piano plays a significant role in Mediahuis’ audience activation strategy. The teams work closely together, with frequent collaboration that goes beyond implementation – shaping products, sharing feedback, and influencing each other’s roadmaps. That partnership has helped Mediahuis refine and evolve its audience solutions over time, making Piano a trusted partner in turning audience insight into action.

Best practices for other publishers

What Mediahuis’ experience shows is not a single solution, but a set of practical lessons that other publishers can take forward.

1. First-party data is only valuable when built on trust and scaled thoughtfully. Registration, paywalls, and premium environments are more than revenue levers – they make meaningful audience insight possible in the first place.

2. Simplicity matters. By organizing audiences into clear, understandable tiers, Mediahuis made it easier for advertisers to know who they’re reaching and why those audiences perform. That built confidence, especially as agencies grow more cautious about data quality and consistency.

3. Move beyond assumptions. Focus on users who have already shown interest or are willing to declare it. For Mediahuis, it proved far more effective than relying on inferred signals alone. Products like ReClick and InMarket worked not because they were complex, but because they aligned closely with how people actually behave.

4. Finally, innovation doesn’t succeed on technology alone. New products only drive growth when teams understand them, can explain them clearly, and trust the story behind them. Sales enablement, naming, and positioning were just as important as the data itself.

Final words

Mediahuis’ journey shows that privacy-first advertising and performance can work side by side. With a strong data foundation, a clear audience strategy, and a focus on real intent, audience insight can drive sustainable media revenue growth – while preserving the trust and reader relationships it depends on.

Read next: How to start using first-party insights to drive revenue in 3 steps

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