Mediengruppe KLAMBT

MVFP Chair Demands Zero Percent VAT for Press

At a Bavarian MVFP summer event in Munich, new Medienverbands der freien Presse (MVFP) chair Lars Joachim Rose called on politicians to strengthen economic support for the press, renewing his demand to reduce VAT on periodical press products to zero percent. Speaking before about 150 guests, Rose also criticized competitive conditions for publishers in the digital market, expressed concern about AI platforms disadvantaging journalistic content, and called for improvements to the draft 12th amendment of the German Act Against Restraints of Competition (GWB) and the planned Digital Media State Treaty. Bavaria's media minister Florian Herrmann endorsed the importance of independent quality journalism and urged adaptation of copyright and neighbouring rights for the AI era.

Publishers Monetize AI Visibility in LLMs

Publishers are packaging a new performance metric—AI visibility in large language models—into commercial offerings for brands, pitching GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) products that aim to improve how often brands are surfaced and cited in AI answer engines. Major and regional publishers (Axios, Forbes, Time, The Washington Post, German media houses) are exploring measurement and monetization strategies, but analytics methodologies vary widely and lack standardization. Some publishers use proxies such as AI bot traffic; others buy third-party measurement. Agencies and brands are rethinking visibility metrics as AI chat interfaces become part of the discovery journey. Incidental data points: many publishers block AI crawlers, AI-driven traffic grew rapidly in 2025, and publisher coalitions and tooling (e.g., SPUR, Profound) are emerging to track AI usage and citations.

Björn Osterndorff joins BCN as Chief Revenue Officer

BCN has created a new Chief Revenue Officer role and appointed Björn Osterndorff to lead it. Osterndorff will head a newly formed Business Intelligence division that consolidates Agency Partnerships, Investment & Revenue Management and Revenue Intelligence, and he will join BCN’s management board. The move is part of a wider organisational restructuring at the Burda‑Funke‑Klambt‑owned sales house to centralise commercial decision‑making and steer revenues and market potential more centrally across all business areas. BCN says it represents more than 300 brands and roughly 500 media offerings from shareholders Hubert Burda Media, Funke Mediengruppe and Mediengruppe Klambt and reaches about 63 million people. Osterndorff brings over two decades of experience across marketing, media and commercial leadership, most recently as Chief Commercial Officer at a Dentsu agency holding.