Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us here today for the Reach plc 2024 half-year results presentation. It's good to see many of you face to face, and welcome to those joining us on the webcast. I'm joined by our CFO, Darren Fisher, who will take you through the financials, and then I'll give a strategic update and take you through the progress that we have made in 2024. We will both answer any of your questions at the end, and I'll assume that you've read our disclaimer. When we spoke in March at our full-year results, I said that 2023 had been a big year for the company. Our business had demonstrated the resilience underpinned by a well-managed print product and the success of our customer value strategy.
These strengths had helped us deliver in what was an uncertain macroeconomic environment, and I'm pleased to be able to stand here today and say that operationally and strategically, Reach continues to be a business that is building an ever-growing understanding of its audiences, has a strong and growing commercial relationship with its advertising partners, and is efficiently run. The performance of the last six months and in our view of the year ahead have reinforced our confidence in the path that we are on. And now, as ever, we discussed and debated the most accurate phrase to describe our performance, but solid feels right. It simply translates that we have delivered on our plans and are on track with our plans for the year ahead.
So while our performance in the first half has undoubtedly benefited from a strong news agenda, I also want to recognize that behind this performance has been our expertise. Our expertise in creating engaging content, optimizing our digital and print assets, managing our costs, and in understanding and targeting our customers, but more on this later. It's thanks to this work that we have continued to trade our assets hard and deliver this performance, despite the ongoing impact of the decisions of the tech platforms to deprioritize news. And not to downplay that challenge, along with the rest of the industry, we remain mindful of the ongoing volatility caused by changes in search, in particular, and a little more on that later. In digital, it's pleasing to report that our yield grew 32% and that we returned to growth in the second quarter.
We've made further progress on data-driven revenues, and these now make up 45% of overall digital revenue, which is a 9% increase. Print continues to be structurally challenged, but we continue to see outperformance in circulation and in advertising. The first half have also benefited from the difficult but necessary decisions we took in 2023 on costs, which have delivered an improved operating margin and allowed the business to move forward as a leading digital publisher. Please note that while the numbers show a strong performance in operating costs in the first half , we do expect this to reduce in the second half, and I'll leave Darren to speak about the details. As I've already said, data-driven revenues now account for 45% of our digital revenue, and this underpins our confidence in the resilience of this business.
While headwinds on page views are still present, we have been able to grow digital revenue in second quarter. The customer value strategy means we're getting greater engagement with our customers on topics that they want to know more about. This allows us to sell increasingly sophisticated advertising packages so that our advertisers can reach the customers that they wish to reach at good value. In the media environment, we know that standing still is not a commercially sensible option. Backed by the customer value strategy, we have been investing in products that not only improve the customer experience, but also further diversify our revenue streams to build further resilience. More of that later. Now feels like the good time to hand over to Darren to take you through the financials and the details behind the results. Darren.
Thank you, Jim. Good morning, and thank you all for joining us this morning. I'm going to take you through the financial results for the first half of 2024 and then share my thoughts on the rest of the year. To summarize, despite the industry backdrop across this period, we have made solid progress. We have continued our digital transformation, returned our digital business to growth, and our experienced operational teams have managed to deliver solid circulation and advertising performance without losing any focus on cost and cost management. Let's take a look at the half-year highlights. We delivered GBP 265 million of revenue, nearly a quarter of which was digital. 45% of that digital revenue is now data-driven, up from 41% last year. We delivered a material reduction in operating costs of 9.3%.
This is through our savings programs and from taking those tough decisions at the end of 2023. This reduction means we are currently trending slightly ahead of the 5%-6% range that we targeted. However, we expect the relative savings. What I mean by that is a percentage change to contract in the second half of this year. Our adjusted operating profit of £44 m is up £8m on last year, and our operating profit margin increased to 17%. Cash generation is strong, with cash conversion at 130%. This would be lower if we had not had the benefit of timing differences across our working capital. Earnings per share is at 10.1%, and recognizing the importance of dividends to our shareholders, we have maintained the interim dividend at 2.88 pence per share.
Before I present the financial results, let me remind everyone that this year we have moved from reporting our print business on a 4-4-5 fiscal calendar to a standard calendar basis. This means that there is a small inconsistency in the reporting periods. We are reporting the 26 weeks to 26 June 2023, with the six months ending 30 June 2024. No restatement has been made, as both periods have an equal number of days. To summarize the first half of 2024, from a revenue perspective, the overall decline in the period was GBP 14m, or 5%. Digital revenues were broadly flat, down just 1.3%. Print declined 6%, or GBP 13m, which makes up the vast majority of the revenue variance. Every year, we compensate for the 17% circulation volume decline in print. The teams operationally have performed really well, mitigating this in revenue terms.
We took the difficult decisions on costs at the end of last year, which has meant we've reduced operating costs by GBP 23m, thus down 9% on 2023. Adjusted operating profit for the period was GBP 44m, gbp 8m ahead of last year. Adjusted operating cash flow improved by nearly GBP 20m, which meant we generated GBP 58m over this period. As I said earlier, adjusted earnings per share was 10.1%, and the interim dividend has been maintained. We ended the period with a GBP 12m net debt balance, which is after paying GBP 31m of pension contributions and a GBP 14m payment relating to the 2023 final dividend. Now turning to revenue. Total group revenue of GBP 265m was down by 5%. Digital remained broadly flat, as our teams effectively traded our digital estate harder.
This drove an impressive yield performance, which we measure in RPM, that's revenue per 1,000 pages. RPMs increased by over 30% and almost compensated entirely for the well-understood industry-wide loss of referral traffic. Print revenue comprises circulation, print advertising, and other print revenues. Circulation declined by GBP 6m, or 3.6%. This has clearly benefited from cover price increases, and the teams have supported these with strong promotional activity and one-offs around the big news events. It is easy to forget we have a significant and loyal readership, with over 650,000 copies on average sold a day. Print advertising revenue continued to outperform volume trends, down only 12%, buoyed by food retail competition. This performance continues to demonstrate that our readership remains attractive to advertisers. Elsewhere within the print business, third-party printing revenues were slightly lower, reflecting the reduction in demand for print. Now turning to digital in more detail.
This slide should be familiar to you. This is the lens we put on the business internally. It is important to think about digital revenue in two component parts with differing characteristics. The strategic revenues, or data-driven, these essentially form our customer value strategy. The graph on the slide bridges the digital revenue performance. The data-driven revenues, which are the turquoise blue, really demonstrate the value this strategy creates and have grown 9%, despite being partly affected by the industry backdrop. In particular, we have seen strong growth from both direct advertising, where we differentiate with our data, and from deliberate actions to diversify into new areas such as affiliates and e-commerce. As this graph shows, these revenues are more resilient and therefore sustainable, and so it's reassuring that these continue to represent a growing part of our revenues, having increased from 41%-45% of total digital revenue.
Non-data-driven revenues include our audience variable elements, including open market, programmatic, and marketing. This segment has declined 9%, but still outperformed the volume impact it is inherently more vulnerable to. Open market prices have stabilized, which is a proxy for advertising demand in general and relates to our mass-scale advertising. Whilst it is too soon to characterize this as a recovery, this is a positive indicator. Across the whole of our digital estate, we have traded these digital assets more effectively to drive even higher yields, which are up over 30%. The momentum through this half is encouraging. Digital revenues in first quarter were down 9% and grew 7% in second quarter. This has meant that this segment was broadly flat at GBP 60m. Jim will talk more about the customer value strategy in his section. We have also continued to focus on managing our costs.
Operating costs on a like-for-like basis reduced by 9%, or GBP 23m. This reduction is a cumulative impact of cost initiatives taken halfway through 2023, in addition to the actions taken at the end of the year, alongside some unwinding of newsprint inflation. The 9% cost saving will reduce in the second half. However, we will be trending ahead of the 5%-6% commitment we made at the start of the year. Let's take a look at the main parts. Labor costs reduced by 8%, reflecting the cost reduction and restructuring programs we have delivered, with headcount reducing 14% year-on-year. Newsprint costs reduced by 34%. This is due to reducing volumes and the unwinding of inflation. We have negotiated more long-term contracts to secure these savings into the second half of the year.
We have listened to your feedback and have split out other costs into production and sales-related costs. This includes production, distribution, marketing, and other costs of sales. These are reduced by 7%. I've already covered the revenue movement, so the first thing to note on this slide is we continue to invest carefully. We continue to expand our footprint in the US and invest into products such as Mantis, our curated marketplace, as well as new concepts, including Yimbly, our e-commerce marketplace. I'm also excited about the recent trials with our new website platform, which will improve the user experience. I expect that we'll be talking more about this at the full year results. We have delivered GBP 20m of efficiency savings, reflecting the strong cost management which exists across the business. Most of the savings relate to labor costs, along with rationalizing our property portfolio and other efficiencies.
Adjusted operating profit for the period of GBP 44m is up GBP 8m, or 23%. Profit and cash remain our priorities. This slide illustrates the cash generated from operations and where it has been allocated. Let me step you through the graph. Overall, we have seen a cash outflow of GBP 2.2m over the period. Adjusted cash from operations was GBP 68m. We made pension payments of GBP 31m in line with the funding arrangements agreed with our trustees. As a reminder, the majority of these pension payments end in 2028, at which point we will see a material improvement in free cash generation. We paid GBP 5m settling historical legal issues. Our estimates and timetable for these costs remain unchanged, and we expect claims and related costs to be resolved by the end of 2025.
Restructuring outflows of £30m relate to the cost reduction measures taken during 2023. Capital expenditure of £6m is in line with our normal level of spend, and the main parts of other include £4.4m of net lease payments, £1.8m of income tax, and £1.5m of interest. We have started a program of property disposals, which have generated around £30m in sales proceeds during the period. We closed the year with a cash balance of £12.7m and net debt of £12.3m. The revolving credit facility was drawn at £25m. As a reminder, our £120m RCF facility is in place until the end of November 2026. Cash generation was strong, with 130% of our profits converting to cash, underpinned by strong working capital, some of which I expect to unwind over the course of 2024. This slide should be familiar to you.
Our approach to capital allocation is unchanged. Our performance last year in our customer value strategy gives us confidence to invest. As I've already mentioned, we have pension funding obligations, which are around GBP 60m per year in the near term. These commitments are detailed in the appendix. We continue to recognize the importance of dividends for shareholders. Before handing back to Jim, just look at the remainder of the year. As previously communicated, we actioned a further cost reduction program at the end of 2023, which means we are trending slightly ahead of our 5%-6% reduction in operating costs for 2024. I expect the phasing of profit to be more equally weighted between the first half and second half of the year than they were in 2023. Depreciation will be similar to last year.
From a cash perspective, I expect operating working capital to be broadly neutral, excluding any bonus accrual. Capital expenditure and pension contributions would be broadly in line with 2023. Finally, we remain confident in the group's outlook for 2024. Thank you all very much for listening. I'll pass you back to Jim for the strategic update before we go into your questions. Thank you very much. Thanks, Darren. We'll both take any questions at the end of the session, and I'll now say a few words on the strategic progress that we've made over the last six months. As I said in my introduction, the first half of the year have reinforced our confidence in the strengths of this business and particularly on the path that we're on.
We have operational expertise that allows us to trade our print and our digital assets quite hard, as evidenced in the results that we've presented today. We have a proven track record in managing our cost base and the resources, along with a clear capital allocation framework that Darren has just taken you through, and these are managed so that we can continue to deliver returns to our shareholders while also meeting the ongoing financial obligations that we have. Our Customer Value Strategy continues to deliver a growing level of digital revenue. It continues to grow more valuable engagement with our customers, and it continues to deliver more valuable advertising to our partners. This supports a growing yield, and as the last 18 months have demonstrated, it has given us a more resilient business in quite an uncertain environment.
I'd like now to take you through some focused areas of the last six months to give you a flavor of the work that has underpinned these results, and I'll share our outlook for the rest of the year while pointing to our direction of travel in the years ahead. Print remains important to our overall strategy. While we're under no illusions that it faces ongoing structural decline, it's important to remember that it remains a valued product to loyal customers and continues to support our digital expansion. We want to maintain this considerable revenue stream and profit generator for as long as we possibly can. So it's pleasing to report that we continue to expertly manage print performance. Our circulation has continued to do well, while our teams have carefully managed price increases while also strengthening the customer proposition and added content and strong promotions.
Our teams have also done well to respond to popular events in the news agenda, like the Euros and the Taylor Swift tour, to create bespoke publishing products. And these make good use of content and resources already in place to secure additional revenue. Print advertising has also remained strong, outperforming the volume trend. This is in part thanks to some strong advertiser opportunities in the last six months, but also from a competitive nature of certain sectors, particularly the food retail space. Looking forward, we continue to see demand for our printed product. We continue to see the need for careful price increases, as well as continued improvements in our distribution, our production, and our procurement activities. We have delivered over 30% year-over-year decrease in newsprint costs, which is a combination of volume and savings.
We have put in place longer-term contracts to give us more stability in our cost base in 2024. Before I move on to sharing more of our strategic progress, I wanted to spend some time on our approach to costs, something that I believe has kept us competitive in a challenging environment. Responsible cost management is never very far from our minds in this market, and we maintain a proactive and responsible approach. In the performance outline today, you can see the benefit of our early but difficult decisions on costs in 2023 and the delivery of our operating margin improvement in 2024. The figures for the first half and the plans for the year ahead include an already implemented 5% pay rise to our people to recognize how much they have contributed to the business in the last 18 months.
And again, I want to thank them for that. This management of our cost base and the careful work to extend and optimize the life of our print product gives us the confidence in our ability to manage capital, to continue to deliver returns to shareholders while also meeting our ongoing financial obligations. This includes making necessary investments to build on and benefit from the opportunities offered by our digital business. We have a sizable digital asset, and while we have shown this slide before, I think that it's worth sharing again. We're the UK and Ireland's largest commercial news publisher, a business with an audience of 34m people built around over 120 brands. These include The Mirror, The Express, The Manchester Evening News, Birmingham Live, or my local, The Daily Record.
This gives people a voice and plays a vital and important role in the communities that they serve across the United Kingdom. Together, these brands have a place in the digital lives of nearly 70% of the UK's online population. It's worth spending some time covering the secure audience metrics on this slide. We now have 2.4m signed up to receive content directly via WhatsApp, making a total of 9m people signed up to get content directly to their device. This is encouraging progress as we focus on securing our audience so that we are less reliant on other platforms. At the full year presentation, I emphasize that our brands already reach a large majority of the UK digital audience. Encouraging existing customers to engage more and stay with us for a longer time represents a real opportunity for us to grow.
It's working, as this greater knowledge of our customers has allowed us to grow page views per visit by 7% over the last year. Increasing engagement remains central to our strategy, and our focus remains on acquiring these high-quality customers who keep coming back to our brands. The more we learn about them, the more we can improve the experience, as well as work with advertisers to serve them the most relevant advertising. This year, we've undertaken a number of trials to improve in this work, and though it's early days, the results are genuinely promising. With homepage optimization, we're able to tailor the homepage according to the user behavior preferences to keep them engaged. For example, serving more what they enjoy, whether that's weekend what's on content or niche sports like Scottish football. Encouragingly, these are early-stage trials, and we have seen click-through rates up 20%.
Recommender tools are another way that we have been capitalizing on customer understanding to increase engagement. Put simply, these tools ensure that our customers are served the relevant read next content and ultimately have supported an increase in average page views per visit. Now, I don't need to explain to this room that some may have questioned whether our website customer experience is conducive to the growth targets that we set ourselves. We've been open to this criticism, and although we have not agreed with all of it, we certainly understand the importance of a good user experience. With the needs of all of our stakeholders in mind, the focus has been on delivering this while also maintaining commercial revenues.
I'm pleased to say that we've begun to trial a new web platform with the Liverpool Echo, one of our most well-established local news brand sites, with 2m views a day, and the results are encouraging. We're seeing faster load times, more seamless viewing experience, and a cleaner page load with a reduction in ad buffering. In our trials so far, we have seen page views per visit increase of over 10%. So I know none of you will be surprised to hear that we plan to roll this out on our platforms across more of our titles over the coming months. Finally, we continue to grow our overall audience, and while page view numbers continue to be hit by the actions of the platforms, it's all the more important we work to increase scale on a number of different fronts.
Our US expansion helps us to achieve this, giving us access to a massive audience, and while we're only about a year in, I'm satisfied that our work there is going to plan and that we continue to steadily build our capability. Our advertisers benefit from both our digital and print platforms, but in digital products, we have the ability to take our knowledge of our audience and use rich data to make advertising more effective. Of course, central to this is our in-house advertising technology, Mantis, which allows commercial partners to safely target an engaged audience who, based on the content they engage with, are likely to be interested in their product. We mentioned the competitive nature of the food retail market in print, and in digital, it's been a similar story.
Tesco have worked with us for a number of years, and as we improve our product, we are able to offer them more effective ways to reach potential customers. In this example, we see how they used our digital inventory to promote their F&F clothing range in a targeted campaign where they ran app takeovers, filling every slot on the screen, and we were able to deliver greater access to a more engaged and interested customer. For Volkswagen, we were able to offer the opportunity to make their national campaign relevant to local audiences using location and contextual signals to tailor the campaign to individuals. Our ability to reach specific local audiences continues to be a selling point for our brands and for our advertisers' capability. Boots were a new digital customer, and in the period, their targeting was for sun cream and hay fever products.
Using our customer value work and the ability of Mantis to target the right customers for Boots, they saw click-through rates of 20% above the click-through rate average. All of this reflects the benefit of the customer value strategy and the simple logic of getting the right content to the customer and our partners and being able to find customers the content that they want to read at the right time. The development of e-commerce and affiliates continues to support the performance of data-driven revenues, and as we said in March, we're excited by the growing opportunities here. In the period covered by these results, we have sold over 500,000 OK! Beauty Boxes, with over 350,000 Shopify transactions since launch. It remains an outstanding success of our e-commerce offer and demonstrates that there's more to play for.
The affiliate business is small, but it's a growing part of our digital estate. An affiliate page is worth roughly three times more than a non-affiliate page, so it's pleasing to be able to tell you that our affiliate network continues to grow. Over the last 12 months, we have more than doubled the number of affiliate partners, generating over GBP 100,000 in shipped orders from these pages. I've already mentioned Mantis and its ability to match the right customers to the right advertising. We've been clear that its potential market makes it a product with value as a tool for hire for other publishers. We have invested further into the B2B proposition this year and now have a strong team in place, including a new managing director who joined the team last month.
This is important because a dedicated team targeted with growing a third-party business moves into a much more commercial footing. As I touched on only briefly at the full year, the following is some of these early successes. We have looked at further e-commerce opportunities, and to this end, we recently launched Yimbly, our own e-commerce marketplace. We showed a similar slide at the full year to highlight the mix of our digital revenues over the last three years, and while this slide instead focuses on the last 18 months, it tells a similar but encouraging story. The chart shows a breakdown of our yield, which we measure as revenue per 1,000 pages, and splits our digital revenues into key components. Over the last 12 months, the revenues we make from every 1,000 pages have grown by over 30%, and this tells us two stories.
Firstly, the Customer Value Strategy delivered a higher yield, continuing the trend of consistently growing revenue generated by data-driven, higher value, and better performing advertising. Secondly, it also shows that our audience variable revenues, where the majority is programmatic advertising, have seen some improvement in yield. And while this is positive, I would not yet describe this as anything more than a stabilization. The chart also shows the growth seen in e-commerce and affiliates and other revenues, and while it's pleasing to see them at such high rates, we don't see this as an indicative run rate. However, if they continue to deliver growth year in year, we'll be more than happy. This slide is all about our ongoing push to be more efficient and effective in our day-to-day operations, making the best use of our significant journalist resource.
With the content hub we have created, a central editorial team dedicated to covering certain topics, take TV, for example, that works across all of our titles. We implemented this structure last month, and although the new team has only just taken shape, so far we have been pleased by the results. Although still in its infancy, we remain confident that these highly focused and data-supported teams can secure greater engagement levels. Of course, the team supports the important work still done by each of our titles' dedicated journalists, who will continue to focus on delivering a variety of content specific to their own title-based audience. Along similar lines, Reach Studio is a central approach to producing more engaging video and audio content across both editorial and commercial lines.
Here, the election and the Euros saw us deliver some strong video content, which encouragingly has also begun to attract additional singular commercial partnerships. Unsurprisingly, AI remains a buzzword across the industry, and we remain alive to the opportunity, but also to the risks. We continue to carefully focus our development on using this tech to make some of our routine tasks of journalism easier and quicker. This slide shows just some of the brilliant example of what our news teams have delivered in the last six months. I've already mentioned some of the political Euro Championship podcasts and the specialist content produced for some of the big events, such as the Taylor Swift tour. But also here, you can see the examples of some of our campaigning and investigative journalism.
For example, the Liverpool Echo, which was dogged in its pursuit of a story to hold power to account and uncovered the case of two councillors being taken to court for non-payment of council tax. The Express campaign on assisted dying, which sparked political debate and a commitment for the issue to be seriously looked at by both main parties. Or the Mirror continues its proud history of campaigning and the Justice for Daughters campaign. This work led to the then Prime Minister agreeing to end the practice of shorter sentences for domestic abusers. Finally, hidden in there is the Mirror's world-exclusive interview with Stormy Daniels. A throwback to the tabloid days for hush money trials shared across all of our platforms, including TikTok, and this was a real benefit of our US market access.
So after a somewhat whistle-stop tour, some of what is happening in the business, I would like to end by saying a big thank you to all of my Reach colleagues who have maintained the focus and belief in what we are doing. They have delivered groundbreaking stories, and they've held power to account and created a new and engaging way for readers and advertisers to connect. It is their hard work that has delivered a solid first half of the year. As I hope we have demonstrated, there are encouraging signs for the year's performance. So far, these include the return to growth in digital, the growth of data-driven revenues, and the encouraging yield performance across our digital products, as well as the continued strong performance of print. This has delivered an operating margin performance underpinned by our cost management actions.
We remain a resilient business driven by our strategy. We will continue to maximize our print product, both for its loyal readers and for its cash-generative qualities to fund our digital growth, as well as continuing to look to build a sustainable margin through our cost management. Looking even further ahead, we remain confident in the business, both in benefits to our strategy can deliver, along with our ability to create engaging and excellent journalism. There are clear opportunities here for shareholders, particularly as the fragile impacts of historical pension issues drop significantly in 2028. As a cyclical business, trading has been very tough for the last couple of years, but I will leave predicting of the economy to the specialist out there.
But I want to reiterate that if we do see an increase in business and consumer spending, businesses such as Reach, particularly with our insight into our customers, will benefit. We're very aware of our market and its dynamism, and along with the rest of the industry, we remain mindful of the ongoing volatility caused by changes in search in particular. It's why our mantra is about operational delivery day in and day out, and why it's pleasing to report that these first half show that we have delivered on our plans and are on track for the year ahead. So with that, Darren and I will now take your questions. Thank you very much. Morning, Gareth Davies from Deutsche Numis. Kick off with three from me. The first one, the +13% on data-driven, clearly really encouraging in second quarter and 9% for the half year.
Presumably, there's a bit of Euros benefit in there. When we're thinking about what you've seen in July and into the second half, is it realistic to kind of keep run rating at the nine you've done in the first half, or how are you thinking about that and what would be a good performance in second half on data-driven? Sorry, Gareth. The second one was just on the newsprint side. You've said longer-term contracts, which sounds like it gives you complete certainty on cost for the second half. Is there any hedging into next year, or is that kind of negotiations that we should expect to happen now? And then final point, you alluded to kind of a few initiatives on the video side towards the end of the presentation. Can you just talk about the monetization there and how early stage that is?
Are we getting meaningful revenues yet, or is it more still about volume of content and then getting out and commercializing it? Thank you. I'll take the video on the data-driven, Gareth, and Darren will take the newsprint. On data-driven, there was a three-week period in second quarter with the election and the Euros where we've seen a particular burst of activity. That shouldn't be indicative of what the rest of the year will be because, I mean, I can give you something today. We have a very prudent budgeting approach. We budgeted for England to make the quarterfinals, and the semifinal and the final was a real boost to us and the economy. So we see an upside there. You can maybe accuse us of being lucky generals, but sometimes we do have a bit of luck.
So we got an upside there, but that would not be reflective going forward. Without giving you any direct response to the 9%, because it would probably start to give you guidance, what I would say is that we are comfortable with our plans for the full year because of those data-driven run rates, which should give you some confidence. On video, we produced some excellent video content during the Euros and the election with The Division Bell. We had the Euros podcast. We did some work on Taylor Swift. The good thing about this video content is mainly to look for singular sponsorship advertising opportunities, which we've seen in the past. But once you get that, you can also release it in segments for evergreen content for people to revisit, which gives a sort of latent brand building for clients.
We're already seeing AV and data-driven revenues due to those individuals who have signed up and have shown an interest in politics. We will then present The Division Bell podcast, which is an Express and a Mirror podcast with two of our leading journalists to those individuals based on their data. And on the Euros, it's obviously over. Not many people want to revisit that, but during the time, that helped drive our traffic, which actually drove us above our expected normal traffic flows for that period. So it's there as evergreen, and it will be used for ongoing commercial sponsorship. And it's one of the reasons why we've invested in our studio capability. And Gareth, we took a decision very early this year that we wanted to lock in pricing for the full year.
So we put in place contracts during the course of the year as long as we could. We are now at a point where we've been able to negotiate for the rest of the year the volume that we require for 2024. We're just about to go into conversations to start looking at how we can hedge into 2025. They will start shortly. We haven't started that process yet, but we want to do the same thing as we're going to next year as well. I think pricing has been good. There's always a risk that it may start to drift the other way. Thanks, Gareth. I've just got two questions here from Jonathan Barrett, Panmure Liberum.
With regards to LADbible's comments on uncertainty over Facebook changes, can you, one, clarify the approximate portion of page views from Facebook, and two, whether you see any effects on volume and/or yield from the changes? Thanks. I'm not going to give a specific source for our page views because then you can start to sort of paint a picture of our overall page views. But what I will say, I won't comment on LADbible because we don't, but we have mitigated the page view decline from the platforms by our direct products. So we've seen a 30% decline in page views from Facebook and Meta. Last year, it was down to 25%. This year, it's in single digits, and then it will go flat. And the reason why we're mitigating that is because we created a product like WhatsApp.
So we now have 2.5m users who get direct, basically, content to them, which is more engaging than the Facebook activity. And sometimes these events, like the drop in Facebook and Meta traffic, do basically build a sense and a purpose of necessity within the business. And the editorial team have responded brilliantly. I think we lead from a WhatsApp perspective. I think our newsletters are not peerless, but are there with some of the best peers. But in WhatsApp, we're doing really well. So even though I haven't answered your question directly, Jonathan, because I don't want to give exact numbers from where you get our Facebook traffic, I will say we have mitigated that by our direct products.
The final thing that I will say, even though if you're doing a comparator on page views alone, that doesn't tell you the whole story because the actual engagement levels, the page views per visits that we get from the likes of our WhatsApp and our newsletters are much higher than the views that we would get from a single page view from Facebook, which is the reason why for second quarter in particular, but first half, we're seeing the same digital revenues as we did last year, less GBP 0.6m or GBP 0.7m. Thanks, Jonathan. Did I get all his questions? Yep. Gareth again. Sorry, I'll ask one more. The really interesting comments on the national campaign with regional activations, and certainly from a customer perspective, it feels like that's a very joined-up way to use the network.
Can you give any feel yet as to what the kind of broad uplift you'd expect from a typical brand campaign could be from doing that versus a more traditional sort of title-based? I mean, if you take the Boots campaign, which is a 20% increase in CTRs, I mean, it's highly competitive. I mean, I have sympathy for marketing directors all across the UK. I mean, they're under pressure by their chief executives and their boards to compete in a very, very competitive market, and that's why we stand out. So Boots, we delivered a 20% increase in CTR. Tesco, I won't give you the figures, but what I will say, they've come back year after year for 4 years. Something must be going well. They're a highly sophisticated organization. And then Volkswagen is the absolute classic client that we want.
We want a national brand, which is dealerships and local communities. So we'll do the brand campaign in our titles. We have the postcodes and the context data on our Customer Value Strategy, and we can direct our readers and their customers directly into local brand and dealerships. And that has proven to be successful. So I haven't answered your question directly because I know that you're looking for numbers, Gareth, but obviously, I wouldn't give you them. But I will say that what we did give you is, firstly, a Tesco who keeps coming back, Volkswagen who's seen an uplift. We can't say these things without checking their clients. And we gave you a number on Boots. So that highlights the importance of our regional business. Can I just say something else about the regionals as well? We are sitting in London in the city.
Most of the UK population live in the region, right? And we serve them. So sometimes we forget that, and we have that regional network to basically monetize. I've got a couple of questions as well on the over on the comments. We can switch over. No, no, I don't need that. Is there any—first of all, is there any more questions in the room? No? We'll go over to the phones. Thanks. Thanks. Thank you. Dear participants, if you would like to ask a question over the phone, please press star 11 on your telephone keypad and wait for a name to be announced. To withdraw a question, please press star 11 again. And now we're going to take our first question. And it comes from the line of Nick Dempsey from Barclays. Your line is open. Please ask your question. Yeah, good morning, guys.
I've just got one more. So we've got Google giving up on killing off cookies within Chrome, looking at other privacy solutions. I know that you've been focusing on your first-party data, and you were confident of being able to navigate that, whatever the situation. But I guess there was always a risk that could have been a bump in the road for UK online advertising when cookies went. So does this remove a risk for digital growth over the next couple of years? Yeah, it's a really good question. I was expecting that to be answered. We built a strategy. We used cookies as the example, but the strategy was built to get a one-to-one direct relationship, basically to retain and build control of the relationship with our audiences.
The Google news on cookies is welcome because it gives publishers and online advertisers just a sense that there's not anything else they need to deal with. But it doesn't take away the risk that you need to mitigate to ensure you do not lose control of your audience. So our strategy still stands strong. We welcome the news. The question is, can you rely on that news from the platforms? Will it change in six months time? So we will continue to build direct relationships in the event that something else occurs. I've been in the business now for 5 years. I fully expect that it will. I don't know what it will be. It will probably be when I leave this room today, but we will be prepared for it.
The key for us with regard to our strategy is that we are competing with all of the online publishers in the UK We need to go in and win business to say that we can deliver higher yield because we know our customers better. And whether that's through cookies being there or not, it doesn't make any difference. We are still in a better position due to the strategy that we've pushed through. Thanks, Nick. Any more? Dear speakers, no further questions over the phone. Please continue. No more questions from the phones. Any more questions from the floor? I'm sure everyone wants to go and get a cold drink. Thank you very much for your interest in our company. We don't take it for granted. I appreciate it. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you.