Sid Orlando, editor-in-chief of Meridian — the magazine published by fintech Mercury — keeps a fine-tuned dashboard of signals that tell her if the publication is doing its job. Traffic and engagement are on it. So is distribution of the print edition. But across her editorial career, including at Stripe’s Increment magazine, Orlando has also tracked what she calls “squishy signals” — the metrics that resist a spreadsheet.
How often are stories cited somewhere unexpected? Included in university syllabuses? Translated into other languages? Named by a job candidate as the reason they applied? What she wants to know is simple: whether the work matters to those who read it. No one has found a reliable way to measure that yet.
This is one of the central challenges of brand publishing in 2026.
Increasingly, companies are turning to editorial content to build brand authority. They’re hiring journalists, commissioning in-depth reporting, and even publishing physical magazines. Many of the people running these operations believe deeply that the investment is paying off. But the tools for proving it haven’t caught up with the conviction.
No widely accepted framework exists for measuring what a brand publication is worth. There isn’t an industry-standard attribution model, an agreed-upon set of KPIs, or an equivalent to the Nielsen rating. How do you assign a value to the job application that came in because of a magazine — or the sale that started as a story someone read six months ago?
The answer depends on who you ask and what their publication was designed to do.
The tapestry of data
At health technology company Oura — which boasts a valuation of $11 billion — head of health content Locke Hughes has built The Pulse, the company blog, into a property that draws 4 million page views per quarter. She does it, for the most part, alone: Hughes is the only full-time editorial employee.
A former health journalist, Hughes tracks conversions, but is careful not to call those her primary success metrics. “The main goal of content is not to sell, sell, sell,” she said. What matters most to her is whether Oura members — who have purchased some 5.5 million smart rings — read the in-app content and get more from the product because of it. It is a version of ROI that many companies wouldn’t recognize: not conversion or acquisition, but retention by education.
At another direct-to-consumer health company, Hone Health — which has raised $39 million in funding and tested 300,000 patients for hormone health and longevity conditions — senior editorial director Tracy Middleton tracks a split set of metrics. For content crafted to drive purchases, she watches whether readers go deeper into Hone’s site, visit a product page, start the checkout process, or make a purchase. For pieces designed to build brand awareness — such as the medically reviewed, deeply reported health stories Middleton presides over — the metrics shift. She tracks time spent on the page, social performance, earned media mentions, and newsletter growth.
But the figure she watches most closely is return readership. “If people continue to come back for the journalism, that tells us that we’re building something closer to a media brand than a content marketing engine,” Middleton said.
Mercury has taken that idea further than most. Meridian’s print issues are organized around single-word themes — “Pivot,” “Cycles,” and, most recently, “Details” — that feel less like topics than literary conceits, loose enough to accommodate founder interviews, reported features, worksheets, and illustrations that serve as thought experiments. They all orbit around a wider motif: explorations of the entrepreneurial imagination.
The most recent issue opens with a QR code that launches a playlist of ambient, atmospheric electronica — Burial, Boards of Canada, Speedy J — as if to say: slow down. The writing is careful, the typography is elegant, and nothing in it feels like a sales pitch. Save from the occasional ad, you could read the magazine without realizing a banking company had anything to do with it.
Meridian exists to do something difficult to measure: to shape how people think about Mercury, even if they’re not currently in the market for a banking product. “Not everything is going to translate into an immediate, measurable, down-funnel business impact. That’s not why Meridian exists. We see it as part of the tapestry of Mercury’s brand,” said Orlando.
What the numbers miss
Orlando’s brand-building approach sits at one end of the measurement spectrum. For editors with more metrics-driven leadership teams, the challenge looks a little different.
Jonah Freedman, who spent five years at Sports Illustrated before moving into brand content in 2010, has historically found that “dashboard-friendly data” — namely, SEO wins — is the most reliable way to get executives to invest in content. He’s already adapting to GEO, tracking how his content shows up in LLM results alongside conventional SEO rankings. A Pew Research Center study found that click-through rates dropped from 15% to 8% when an AI-generated summary appeared on the results page. His challenge is communicating this new landscape — and its challenges — to leadership.
“If you’re seeing our content show up on these search results, that’s success,” said Freedman, who now runs content marketing at enterprise software company Automation Anywhere. “But how are we going to measure that? How are we going to reflect that to leadership? Every time you stumble upon a strategy that works, that shows value, it’ll change again so fast that you need to go back to the table and restrategize.”
Shifting search algorithms aren’t the only way in which metrics can mislead. Sometimes the numbers look fine and still point in the wrong direction. At one point, Hone Health’s blog, The Edge, was seeing significant traffic. “We were doing just a lot of ancillary health and wellness content that was driving a ton of people to the site,” Middleton said. But she noticed that the readers coming in had little connection to the brand. “It was a vanity metric,” she explained. “We weren’t seeing purchases; we weren’t seeing repeat visitors; we weren’t seeing the success metrics we want.” She brought the problem to leadership directly: the traffic looked good, but it wasn’t supporting the business. They had to refocus.
Middleton’s answer was to go deeper instead of broader. Her three-person team began mining anonymized, aggregate patient data and running external surveys to produce original health reporting — stories that couldn’t be replicated elsewhere, because the underlying data is proprietary. It’s also, incidentally, the kind of work AI systems are likely to cite. “I’m always thinking, ‘What’s the story that we can tell that nobody else can?’” she said.
The old algorithmic rewards for churning out optimized versions of the same story are gone, Middleton believes. She considers that a good thing. “I think it’s really freeing,” she said. “It allows us to go back to what good journalism is in principle. We can truly put the audience first.”
Getting on the same page
If the numbers are unreliable, and the ground keeps shifting, what keeps a brand publication on course? Everyone interviewed for this piece gave some version of the same answer: alignment. The editorial team and C-suite need to agree on the publication’s goals before a single story is assigned.
Orlando puts this bluntly: “If your goal is to drive leads, then the publication has got to do that. If you’re building something that exists to uplevel the brand, you have to be comfortable with a degree of ambiguity.” When those goals are clear from the outset, she said, you rarely find yourself justifying the work — because everyone already understands what it’s for.
When Middleton joined Hone, one of her first initiatives was to map content types against business goals and ask leadership to place themselves on the matrix. The exercise forced a conversation that might not have happened otherwise. Different executives wanted different things — one prioritized acquisition, another brand awareness — and Middleton had to make the case that a single content program could not do both effectively at once.
She also created what she called “the circle of contention”: a bullseye diagram that forced leadership to separate what Hone’s content should cover now from what it might grow into. The founders wanted to move into longevity. Middleton’s response was practical: “That’s not where we are now. If you don’t set the foundation from the beginning, you’re not telling a consistent story. There’s no connective tissue to the brand.”
Both tools served the same purpose: getting everyone to agree — not just on what content to produce, but on how they’d judge whether it was working. “Having those visual frameworks and forcing those conversations is the key to success for an organization that wants to invest in brand journalism. It forces you to literally put yourself on the map,” said Middleton.
Without alignment between editorial and leadership, the consequences can be severe. Freedman has lived through it more times than he can count. “Chief marketing officers are like the drummers from Spinal Tap,” he said. “They’re the most expendable C-suiters. They have two- to three-year cycles. When one leaves and another one comes in, they have to make their imprint. Sometimes they will clean house to show that they’re doing things differently. Spoiler: it’s never a new model. It’s always something that’s been tried before.”
Content is a long-term play, Freedman pointed out, “not something where you’ll see the economic impact tomorrow.”
Defining success
Even when leadership and the editorial team agree on goals, the work still requires something harder to institutionalize: trust.
Mercury, which was founded in 2017, reported $650 million in annual revenue last year. Its application for a national bank charter — a process that can take years — says something about how its leadership thinks about time. That long-horizon view extends to the editorial team.
Not long after Orlando joined the company a year and a half ago, she paused the publication to assess its direction — gathering data, soliciting new perspectives, and rethinking what Meridian could be. It was the kind of move that required real trust between an editor and her leadership. Orlando refocused the publication’s editorial vision, tested new formats, and worked to grow both print and digital distribution. Post relaunch, print copies have been distributed at three to four times the previous rate. Circulation continues to grow.
“If we do a project like Meridian very well, it becomes an editorial embodiment of these exacting standards that Mercury has for our product and everything that we do. That in and of itself might be considered some kind of success,” Orlando said.
At Hone, the editorial work is yielding unexpected returns. Middleton wrote a long-form feature about veterans with low testosterone — a story that grew out of her noticing how many Hone patients were former service members. She dug into how combat-related stress, PTSD, and traumatic brain injury can affect hormone levels. The piece never tells readers to pursue treatment at Hone. It was not designed to drive conversions, Middleton said — but it did, and continues to do so today. It also won an award from the Association of Health Care Journalists, a first for a brand publication. “Brands can create high-quality journalism that supports their commercial goals. These two things are not mutually exclusive,” Middleton emphasized.
What is becoming clear, across all of these experiments, is that brand publishing does not have a single definition of ROI. Hughes at Oura is measuring retention by education: whether content makes an existing product more useful to the people who already own it. Freedman is working to tie content performance to results that leadership can see on a dashboard, knowing the measurement landscape could shift again at any time. Middleton is tracking the overlap between brand awareness and conversion, watching content that was never designed to sell do exactly that. Orlando is making the case that a magazine can change the way people feel about a company, even if that change never shows up in a conversion funnel.
Each of these strategies is leading to a legitimate return on investment. None can be captured by the same metric. Ultimately, which version of editorial value a company pursues isn’t really a question about content. It’s a question about leadership. How much risk can your C-suite tolerate? Do they trust your editorial team? And, perhaps most importantly, did everyone agree from the outset on what the publication is actually for?
The companies that get the most from their editorial investments are not necessarily the ones with the best writers or the biggest budgets. They’re the ones where leadership and editorial agreed on the definition of success early — and had the discipline to leave it alone.
—Jennifer Guay
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