Media Power Monitor Breaks Even Six Months After Relaunch as Research and Intelligence Service

Media Power Monitor, a project launched in 2015 to investigate media ownership and influence, has broken even six months after being relaunched as a commercial research and intelligence service.

The change followed a reassessment of the platform after it was taken over by the Media and Journalism Research Center (MJRC) in 2025.

For most of its first decade, Media Power Monitor operated primarily as a journalistic platform. Its writers followed media owners, political influence, state funding, corporate interests and changes in the economics of journalism.

By 2025, however, maintaining a standalone journalistic publication had become increasingly difficult to justify financially. At the same time, artificial intelligence was accelerating changes in how information was produced, distributed and discovered, putting additional pressure on traditional publishing models.

MJRC decided to use the asset Media Power Monitor had accumulated over the previous decade: its data.

The platform was redesigned in early 2026 around a broader research question: identifying the organisations, people and financial relationships behind information circulating online.

The resulting service is built around information provenance. A client may want to establish who owns a website, who finances an organisation, which company sits behind an online account, which advertising or public-relations agencies are involved in a campaign, how a political message is being distributed, or how apparently separate organisations are connected through ownership, financing, management or commercial relationships.

The longer-term objective is to make it possible to trace the funding and organisational trail behind almost any significant piece of online content.

That requires considerably more information than a conventional media-ownership database.

Media Power Monitor collects data on corporate ownership and control, parent companies and subsidiaries, shareholders and management, funding and revenue sources, government subsidies and public spending, advertising and sponsorship, political and institutional affiliations, commercial relationships, websites and social-media accounts, telecommunications and platform distribution, advertising and media-buying intermediaries, partnerships, and changes in those structures over time.

The research can follow a single organisation or account, but it can also reconstruct networks involving media companies, corporations, governments, political organisations, technology platforms, telecom operators, advertising agencies, investors and other intermediaries.

More than a decade of data collection gives the service a substantial starting point.

As of August 2026, the Media Power Monitor directory contains 4,348 entities across 103 countries. They are divided into seven broad groups: News & Media; Politics & Public Actors; Platforms & Infrastructure; Advertising & Influence; Business & Finance; Civil Society; and Regulators.

The public directory represents only an index of the organisations being mapped. The underlying research is considerably more detailed and is used to prepare bespoke investigations for clients.

The work is also deliberately human-led.

Media Power Monitor is not an automated database assembled from AI-generated company descriptions. Much of the underlying information is sourced and checked locally by researchers familiar with the markets they cover, most of them journalists, alongside specialists in other fields and consultants with relevant expertise.

Researchers work with company registries and corporate filings, annual reports, regulator databases, public procurement and government spending records, ownership disclosures, company websites, advertising and distribution information, archived material, academic and journalistic research and, where necessary, locally gathered information and interviews.

Automated tools and AI can assist with finding or organising material, but they do not establish the findings. Material relationships are assessed and verified by researchers, conflicting evidence is examined and uncertainty is retained when the available evidence does not support a definitive conclusion.

That approach has found a commercial market faster than MJRC expected.

Most Media Power Monitor clients are commercial organisations. They include companies in finance, investment funds and banks, as well as foundations, corporate groups, human-resources companies and recruiters, political consultancies, think tanks and other organisations that need to understand who stands behind a company, information source, network or narrative in a particular market.

The questions vary. An investor may need to establish who ultimately owns a group of companies and whether its owners have political or government connections. A bank may need to identify the people and organisations behind a media or communications business. Recruiters and human-resources companies may need to understand the background and networks surrounding an executive or organisation operating in an unfamiliar market.

Increasingly, however, clients are asking questions about specific information campaigns and pieces of content.

They may want to know who is behind a media campaign targeting a company or industry, who paid for a series of apparently organic posts on social media, whether influencers promoting the same message are being coordinated or financed by a common organisation, or which agencies, companies, political actors or other intermediaries are supporting the circulation of particular articles and narratives.

In those cases, the research follows the message backwards: identifying the organisations producing or commissioning the content, the money supporting it, the advertising or public-relations companies involved, the accounts and influencers distributing it, and the corporate, political or institutional relationships connecting them.

The central question is what financial and organisational forces are driving the spread of a particular message online.

Each assignment is researched separately rather than generated automatically from the database.

Within six months of the 2026 relaunch, revenue from this work was sufficient to cover Media Power Monitor’s operating costs.

Those costs are now relatively low. The platform operates with a lean structure: part-time staff handle web design and database maintenance, while journalists, researchers and other local experts are brought in according to the country, sector and type of information required by individual clients.

This allows much of the research spending to follow actual client demand rather than maintaining a large permanent operation.

The commercial model was not designed simply to make Media Power Monitor self-sustaining. Once its own costs are covered, part of the income is used to finance MJRC’s public-facing research projects.

For MJRC Director Marius Dragomir, the rapid development of the business was unexpected.

“When we started Media Power Monitor more than ten years ago, it was basically a journalism hobby. A group of friends and I put some money and a lot of time into it because we thought these ownership and funding relationships were worth investigating. I had absolutely no idea where it would eventually go,” Dragomir said. “What matters to me now is not that the project has become commercially successful. It is that, if this continues to grow, it can give MJRC more of its own money to research whatever we think needs researching. That makes us less dependent on what funders happen to be interested in and strengthens our independence.”

Financial independence has long been a central concern for the research centre. MJRC does not accept government funding, a policy intended to protect the integrity and independence of its research.

Like many research organisations, MJRC continues to use grants and other external funding for some of its work. The revenue generated by Media Power Monitor, however, creates a separate stream of unrestricted income that can be directed towards research questions selected by the centre itself.

That distinction matters as grant funding is normally tied to particular projects, themes and deliverables. Commercial income generated by Media Power Monitor can instead help MJRC finance investigations, datasets and other public-interest work for which no dedicated grant may exist.

Dragomir said this may ultimately be more significant than the commercial success of the platform itself.

“The best position for a research centre is to be able to say that a question matters and then have the resources to research it,” he said. “If Media Power Monitor can increasingly give us that freedom, that is much more important to me than turning this platform into a successful business.”

Media Power Monitor continues to maintain a free public directory and publish journalistic material. Its main economic function, however, is now the research infrastructure built beneath them: more than a decade of locally sourced data used to establish who owns, finances, controls, distributes and ultimately stands behind information circulating online.