Digitalbox, the AIM-listed owner of Entertainment Daily, The Tab and The Daily Mash, slipped into a half-year loss after an early-April shift in how Meta distributes video on Facebook shrank the audience its social posts could find beyond their own followers. Interim results published on September 23, 2026 show revenue down 7% to £1.7 million for the six months to June 30, and an adjusted EBITDA loss of £43,000 against a £289,000 profit a year earlier.

In Short

Facebook changed how it chooses which posts to show people in April, giving more room to videos made by creators, and a British company that runs entertainment, comedy and student news websites saw far fewer people arrive from Facebook as a result. That matters because the company earns most of its money from ads shown to visitors on its websites, so fewer visitors meant less money, and it went from a small profit to a small loss in the first half of 2026. It now works with more than 200 video creators on a plan to publish around 500 videos a month on social apps, aiming to earn from those videos and from brands rather than relying only on website visits.

What changed on Facebook in April

James Carter, chief executive of Digitalbox, dated the shift almost to the day. In an earnings call today he said Meta rolled out an algorithm change across its platforms on April 2 or 3, 2026, altering the way creator-led video landed in users' content feeds, according to Press Gazette. The company's written account in the interim statement is less precise on timing, placing the disruption "from Q2 2026" after what it calls strong trading in the first quarter.

Changes by technology platforms have put businesses like his, which rely chiefly on programmatic advertising served on websites for revenue, under pressure, Carter said, according to Press Gazette. What the April update altered, by the company's description, was not its standing with existing followers. Audience reach among followers of its brands on Facebook was retained, Digitalbox said, but amplification of its content to users across the wider platform was "crushed". In some instances the audience its brands found on Facebook shrank by three-quarters, according to Press Gazette.

Press Gazette drew its own reading from the case: the traditional publisher Facebook post, a teaser pointing to an article on the publisher's website, appears to have been heavily downgraded in favour of original video published directly to the platform. Carter supplied an example from the other side of the ledger. Georgia-Blu, who creates videos about Love Island and other entertainment topics, saw a large boost after the change, with 96% of her reach on Facebook and Instagram coming from non-followers, according to Press Gazette.

Carter cast the change as one front in a wider contest, describing an "almighty battle" between Facebook and TikTok to see who can "harness the best creators in order to make their platforms as sticky as possible for users". Neither the interim results nor the Press Gazette report carries a response from Meta, and the only measurements offered are Digitalbox's own figures and the single creator example Carter cited.

The direction of Meta's product decisions has been visible for more than a year. Facebook tightened its rules against unoriginal content in July 2025, removing monetisation access from accounts that break them, and in January 2026 Meta detailed a survey-based model for ranking Facebook Reels that looks beyond engagement signals. On July 24, 2026, the company said it would test a version of Facebook that opens directly into full-screen video, moving the classic Feed to a second tab, starting in video-heavy countries. Referrals from the platform to publishers had already fallen well before any of this: Chartbeat and Similarweb data showed a 50% drop in Facebook referral traffic to publisher websites in the year to May 2024.

The half-year in figures

Revenue for the six months to June 30 was £1.706 million, down from £1.826 million, a decline the company rounds to 7%. Gross profit slipped to £1.409 million from £1.455 million, while gross margin widened to 83% from 80% as cost of sales fell to £297,000 from £371,000.

Adjusted EBITDA moved to a loss of £43,000 from a profit of £289,000. The comparison needs care. In 2025 Digitalbox excluded £160,000 of new product development costs from the measure, and its 2026 definition refers to that exclusion only "in prior periods". Including development spending, the first half of 2025 produced £129,000, shown as £0.1 million in the company's highlights table. Press Gazette rounded the swing to a fall from £300,000 to zero.

Below that line the picture worsens. Administrative expenses rose to £2.392 million from £1.672 million, lifted by a £634,000 impairment charge, amortisation of £225,000 and one-off restructuring costs of £59,000. The operating loss widened to £983,000 from £217,000, and the loss after tax to £951,000 from £163,000. Basic loss per share was 0.81p, against 0.14p.

Contribution before head office costs fell to £513,000 from £713,000, cutting the contribution margin to 30% from 39%. Restructuring at the end of the period addressed that decline, according to Digitalbox, which expects the savings to show in the second half. Head office costs in the segment table rose to £556,000 from £424,000. Remuneration of key management personnel, defined as the board, rose to £306,000 from £234,000.

Three divisions, three directions

The damage was concentrated in one division. Entertainment, which includes Entertainment Daily, TV Guide and specialist sites such as Emmerdale Insider, Coronation Street Insider, EastEnders Insider and Film Shrine, generated £783,000 against £1,018,000, a fall of 23%. Its segment adjusted EBITDA dropped to £252,000 from £457,000. Entertainment Daily was "particularly affected" by the changes to social distribution in the second quarter, according to the company. The division's share of group revenue fell from 56% to 46%.

Youth, built around The Tab and its network of university contributors, grew revenue 17% to £636,000 from £545,000, with segment adjusted EBITDA rising to £218,000 from £190,000. Humour, covering The Daily Mash and The Poke, grew revenue 10% to £287,000 from £262,000, although its adjusted EBITDA fell to £43,000 from £66,000. The Daily Mash runs a subscription offering alongside advertising.

The geographic split, which Digitalbox reports by location of the paying customer rather than of the reader, moved sharply. UK revenue rose to £653,000 from £499,000. Revenue from European customers fell to £834,000 from £1,002,000, and from the rest of the world to £219,000 from £326,000.

A write-down that leaves no headroom

The £634,000 impairment comprises £614,000 against goodwill allocated to the Entertainment cash-generating unit and £20,000 against the Daily Mash brand. Digitalbox named two indicators: the continued decline in programmatic revenue caused by changes to social media algorithms, and "the displacement of search referral traffic by AI-generated search results".

The method is set out in some detail. The review assessed value in use over ten years, applying expected values across outcomes ranging from a 5% decline to 10% growth in compound annual terms, with a pre-tax discount rate of 17.7% in the base case and 19.5% in a downside case, rather than higher internal forecasts. After the charge, the value in use of the Entertainment unit equals its carrying value, which leaves no headroom against any further deterioration.

Entertainment goodwill now stands at £2.216 million, down from £2.830 million at December 31, 2025. Youth goodwill is unchanged at £118,000, and no impairment was needed for the Youth or Humour units. Total intangible assets fell to £3.366 million from £4.175 million, and net assets to £6.416 million from £7.352 million. One inconsistency sits in the filing: the impairment note places Reality Shrine in the Youth unit alongside The Tab, while the product review lists it among the group's specialist entertainment properties.

Larger publishers have taken bigger charges on similar grounds this year. BuzzFeed's full-year 2025 results carried a $30.2 million non-cash goodwill impairment, Teads booked a $352.1 million goodwill impairment with its fourth-quarter figures on March 5, 2026, and on August 6 Ziff Davis wrote off $54.8 million against its health media segment.

Cash rose despite the loss

Cash at bank was £1.985 million at June 30, against £1.653 million a year earlier and £1.820 million at the end of 2025. The group had a £38,000 bank loan at June 30, 2025; none remained by December. Operating activities generated £208,000, against an outflow of £166,000 a year earlier. Working capital did much of the work: trade and other receivables fell to £718,000 from £1,080,000 at the end of December, releasing £363,000 in cash. Spending on intangible assets dropped to £50,000 from £253,000.

Fewer visitors, each worth more

The company's central argument is that its difficulty was volume, not monetisation. "The principal challenge during the period was therefore audience volume rather than the Group's ability to monetise the audiences it reaches," according to Digitalbox. Carter put figures on that in the call. The website audience fell 28% in the first half, while the advertising value of individual website sessions rose 20%, according to Press Gazette. The second figure is a form of revenue per session, the visit-level yield measure that captures what one arrival is worth across every ad slot it loads. Digitalbox also states that its mobile-first approach delivers significantly higher revenue per session than industry averages, a company claim for which the documents supply no benchmark.

Carter placed the decline in a longer frame. "Website, direct website journeys have come under pressure over recent years. And the big tech players are increasingly trying to hold consumers within their walled gardens for longer," he said, according to Press Gazette. "That's a result of changing technology, AI answering consumer questions. It's a result of elevating on-platform video distribution above publisher distribution of content on the platforms and a whole raft of measures which the big tech players are using in order to steal audience share."

The pattern of fewer visits and higher yield per visit matches what larger publishers have disclosed this year. Reach plc reported on July 22, 2026 that Google referral volumes fell 55% in its first half, dragging on-platform page views down 40% while revenue per thousand page views rose 49%. Teads told investors on August 6 that page views at its premium publishers were down 15% to 25%, depending on country. Index Exchange found that 69% of publishers on its exchange recorded year-on-year declines in ad opportunities during 2025, averaging 14%. Yield gains have generally not closed the volume gap. At Digitalbox, the combination still left group revenue 7% lower.

The impairment note's reference to AI-generated search results points to a second front. Ahrefs research found that AI Overviews correlated with a 58% reduction in click-through rates for top-ranking pages by February 2026, and Chartbeat data showed small publishers losing 60% of search referral traffic over two years. Digitalbox does not split its traffic loss between social and search in either document.

Two hundred creators and 500 videos a month

The response has two parts: cost reduction, and a larger creator operation. The Digitalbox Creator Network combines The Tab Student Network with the group's Entertainment Network and comprises more than 200 creators, according to the company, which expects to be publishing about 500 original videos a month by October 2026. Creators work with Digitalbox on a revenue-share basis, according to Press Gazette. The group puts its combined social following at more than 30 million.

Two revenue layers sit on top. The first is a share of advertising revenue paid by platforms such as Facebook, TikTok and Instagram on video published there. The second is native marketing and branded content sold directly to advertisers, combining creators, video, editorial and social distribution in campaigns that, according to Digitalbox, can target both broad national audiences and tightly defined communities. The Tab Student Network is being developed as a direct offer letting advertisers reach students nationally, through individual universities or through local social channels.

Carter described the pitch to creators in the call. "By offering creators the chance to work under the entertainment umbrella as an example, with its 2.5 million followers, it affords them an opportunity to get much greater reach than they would have otherwise done," he said, according to Press Gazette. In the results statement he said the network "gives us an increasingly compelling proposition for advertisers across editorial, social, video and creator-led content".

The unit economics remain undisclosed. Neither document gives the revenue-share percentage paid to creators, the cost per video, platform payout rates or the revenue the network has produced so far. Nor do they say how many of the 200-plus creators were active during the first half.

The move places a listed publisher inside a market that platforms are courting hard. IAB projections put US creator economy advertising spend at $43.9 billion in 2026, up from $37 billion in 2025. It also places the publisher's new output on the platforms' own terms, inside ranking systems of the kind that produced the April shock. Ad tech vendor JWX has pitched the opposite route, swipeable vertical video on publishers' own sites, keeping the viewing session on owned pages.

Guidance implies a sharp second-half turn

The board expects second-half revenue to decline by a similar percentage to the first half, measured against the second half of 2025. It had already warned, in a trading update on August 6, 2026, that full-year revenue and adjusted EBITDA would come in below previous market expectations, and it now targets an adjusted EBITDA margin of about 8% for 2026. The board says it takes a cautious view of session volumes for the rest of the year "despite more recent reach returning within Meta", the only indication in the documents that distribution has partly recovered.

What does that target require? The second half of 2025 produced revenue of £2.084 million and adjusted EBITDA of £390,000, figures derived by subtracting first-half results from the audited full-year totals of £3.910 million and £679,000. A 7% decline would put second-half 2026 revenue near £1.94 million and the full year near £3.64 million. An 8% margin on that base equals roughly £290,000. Having lost £43,000 in the first six months, the group would need about £335,000 in the second, a margin near 17%.

The comparison base matters here as well. On the 2025 definition, which excluded development spending, the second half of last year delivered an 18.7% margin. Deducting the £195,000 of development costs incurred in that half leaves £195,000, a margin of about 9.4%. Measured that way, the target asks for a second-half result well above last year's, from lower revenue. The company expects the restructuring carried out at the end of June to benefit the second half. The board states that the group's cash position gives it flexibility to manage what it calls the current platform transition.

Why a small publisher's disclosure carries weight

Digitalbox is small: half-year revenue below £2 million and 117.9 million shares in issue. Its value to the wider market lies in the specificity of what it has disclosed. Most of the audited evidence on publisher traffic loss in 2026 has centred on search, with Reach's referral decline the clearest case, while BuzzFeed has reported a 23% fall in second-quarter advertising revenue. Digitalbox has attached a date, a mechanism and a percentage to a Meta distribution change, and tied it, alongside AI search, to a goodwill write-down.

For advertisers and agencies buying open-web inventory, publishers built on social referrals are supplying fewer sessions at higher yields per session, which thins the pool of that inventory. Part of the editorial output that once generated those sessions is now moving into creator video on the platforms themselves, sold through revenue shares and direct deals rather than website ad auctions.

Meta's own results moved the other way. The company reported second-quarter 2026 advertising revenue of $59.36 billion, up 27%, after first-quarter results on April 29 in which ad impressions rose 19%, less than four weeks after the change Carter described. He argues the platforms' gains and publishers' losses are connected; the documents offer no Meta perspective on that claim.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Digitalbox plc, the AIM-listed owner of Entertainment Daily, The Tab, The Daily Mash, The Poke and tvguide.co.uk, led by chief executive James Carter. Meta Platforms, whose Facebook algorithm change the company blames for its audience losses. Advertisers buying programmatic inventory on publisher websites, and the more than 200 creators in the new Digitalbox Creator Network.

What: Half-year revenue fell 7% to £1.706 million and adjusted EBITDA swung to a £43,000 loss from a £289,000 profit. Entertainment revenue fell 23% while Youth grew 17% and Humour 10%. A £634,000 impairment, mostly against Entertainment goodwill, pushed the operating loss to £983,000. According to Press Gazette, the website audience fell 28% while the advertising value per session rose 20%, and in some instances the audience its brands found on Facebook shrank by three-quarters. Digitalbox targets about 500 creator videos a month and an adjusted EBITDA margin of about 8% for 2026.

When: Results were published on September 23, 2026, covering the six months to June 30, 2026. Carter said the Meta change rolled out on April 2 or 3, 2026. The earnings call took place today, September 24, 2026, and a profit warning preceded the results on August 6, 2026.

Where: The United Kingdom, where Digitalbox is based and listed, with the audience effects arising on Facebook and Instagram. Revenue by customer location rose in the UK and fell in Europe and the rest of the world.

Why: Meta changed its algorithms to favour video-led creator content, reducing the distribution of publisher posts to non-followers, according to Digitalbox. The company's impairment review also cites the displacement of search referral traffic by AI-generated search results. Its response is cost reduction and a shift toward creator video and direct sales to advertisers.