As the 77th World News Media Congress approaches, which will take place in Marseille from June 1 to 3, Fabrice Fries, CEO of AFP, analyzes the difficulties of the sector and the reforms he intends to put in place to stay on course for profitability, notably with the growth of non-media.
JDN. AFP achieved a positive net result in 2025 but with revenue down 2.2%, a first since 2018. How does 2026 look?
Fabrice Fries. The start of the year is less chaotic than what we experienced last year with the unexpected impact of the election of Donald Trump on our commercial contracts: for purely political reasons, Meta had decided to stop without notice the financing of the fact-checking activity that we carried out in the United States and we also lost several contracts, with the American federal administration and with Voice of America.
We have budgeted for stability in our commercial revenues for 2026, which is already ambitious in the current context of the media crisis. We are aiming for an eighth year of positive results, to extend an unprecedented streak for the AFP in its 80 years of existence, and we are continuing the agency’s debt reduction process, which should be completed in 2028.
Since last summer, you have been defending the need to reform the organization of the AFP, recalling that the agency is suffering the consequences of the poor health of the media, its clients. How do you see their future?
The latest report from the Reuters Institute calls the media an existential crisis. A few brilliant exceptions, including Le Monde or Le Figaro in France for example, should not hide a worrying overall picture. Having media clients all over the world, we are in a good position to know when things are going badly. Let’s not forget that in many countries the media aid that we know in France does not exist, so the situation there is often much more difficult than in our country.
The causes of this crisis are multiple: the acceleration of the decline in advertising revenue with the fall in traffic to information sites; the plundering of information content by AI models which act as economic parasitism; populist attacks on media all over the world, including on our own doorsteps. That’s a lot…
Your media contracts account for 75% of your revenue. And for the remaining 25%?
The remaining 25% are by definition made with “non-media”, namely platforms, companies, administrations and foundations. The platforms have contributed significantly to the growth of AFP in recent years, notably through the fact checking program financed by Meta since 2016, of which we became the first partner, and through the neighboring rights agreements that we have signed with several of them. Today Meta, Google and TikTok are among the top 10 clients of AFP, whereas when I arrived at the agency, in 2018, they were not among our clients. These platforms have therefore helped us a lot but now, unfortunately, they are abandoning the news field, the most emblematic example being that of Meta.
We therefore need to conquer other spaces, particularly among businesses. AI can also open up new categories of customers for us, with new uses of our content. This is the case, for example, in the insurance, risk management and consulting sectors. They discover that thanks to its global network, AFP is a valuable source of real-time information on fields as strategic as geopolitics or global warming.
How many customers do you have? How is this figure evolving?
We have around 5,000 customers worldwide and that number is pretty much stable. We of course sometimes face unsubscriptions, it is never for questions of coverage or editorial quality but because certain clients simply no longer have the means to keep up given their budgetary constraints. Media clients will remain dominant in our turnover, but economic logic would dictate that the share of non-media clients increases.
How does AI threaten your business? For example by weakening your customers or by facilitating the resumption of your dispatches without financial compensation?
Yes, our clients are weakened by AI due to the drop in traffic sent to their sites and the non-remuneration of their content. The threat also takes on other aspects: the invisibility of journalism by the summaries of chatbots which mix sources and erase signatures, the risk of loss of central judgment and decision-making faculties if we automate excessively, or even the risk of loss of decision-making autonomy over technological choices.
Do you intend to sue AI players?
I’m afraid we can’t afford it.
AI is also a source of opportunities like your contract with Mistral. What is the weight of this income in your turnover? Do you have other agreements of this type in sight?
This is the equivalent of a standard subscription contract that we can have with a major media outlet. We don’t have any deals in sight with other big AI players, like OpenAI or Anthropic, because they don’t show any particular appetite for it at the moment. On the other hand, we enter into agreements with niche players, for example to supply internal RAGs in sectors such as risk management.
Your agreement with Mistral was very harsh criticized by the Alliance of the general information press which sees a risk of cannibalization or unfair competition. How did you receive these criticisms?
I understand these criticisms, which reflect the great nervousness of our sector. The media are very worried about the idea of being replaced by conversational agents. It was very complicated to involve our clients in these commercial discussions protected by trade secrets. We are taking their reaction into account and in any case we are not having discussions of this nature at the moment with similar actors. That said, I continue to doubt that Le Chat de Mistral represents a significant risk for our customers.
What are your strategic priorities now?
One, the diversification of our revenues outside the media. Two, the integration of AI into all our business processes, to continue to provide the best service to our customers and remain competitive.
