The lead  ·  01

The Telegraph Is Betting Its Next Chapter on Video, Not Traffic

The Telegraph, roughly six months into Axel Springer’s ownership, is expanding beyond its five current video podcasts into live events and paid memberships — podcast audience up 161% year over year.

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The week in one paragraph

This was a quiet week for volume and a loud one for control. The daily desk published only five stories on its own — the thinnest week since the Sunday Weekly began selecting rather than commissioning — so this issue adds four new pieces to hold a publisher-majority, four-perspective balance rather than run short. The through-line across all nine: platforms are automating away the settings buyers and publishers used to set themselves. Google began force-migrating Search campaigns off manual broad-match control onto its AI Max automation on September 1, the same week The Telegraph doubled down on owned video and live events as a hedge against exactly that kind of platform dependency, and Sony turned the PS5 into a FAST ad network without naming who gets to buy the inventory yet. Regulators moved on two fronts: the FTC sued Amazon over an alleged fake auction reserve price that pocketed more than $20 billion since 2019, and Brussels put ChatGPT in Google Search’s own regulatory bracket under the DSA. On the buy side, a curation platform raced to lock up premium CTV supply ahead of the midterm advertising surge, and a partnership-marketing platform put Minecraft on affiliate marketing’s map while betting its future on AI agents finding and signing creators on their own. None of these nine stories is really about a launch — every one is about who holds the dial.