The Guardian making most of its money from reader contributions
The Guardian Australia has managed to make over half its revenue from reader contributions, despite not operating a paywall.
According to the company’s ASIC filings for the 12 months to March 31, as first reported by Capital Brief, 55% of the $42 million generated in that period came through reader donations and subscriptions. Revenue jumped by 9%, from $38.6 million in the prior 12 months, with the publication turning a $1.7 million profit.
The Guardian’s funding model is unusual: it doesn’t paywall its content, however stories are tagged with regular reminders of this generosity, with prompts to consider an all-access digital subscription (which removes advertising); a running count of how many Guardian articles a reader has accessed (for free) in the past year; and a list of reasons why “one of the Guardian’s greatest assets is its reader-funded model.”
Cute, but ask anyone under the age of 45 do you watch FTA..?! “Whats that?”
The reported number for News Corp Australia would include subscriptions to Courier Mail, Adelaide Advertiser, Herald Sun, Gold Coast Bulletin, Cairns Post, etc etc as well as The Australian and Daily Telegraph.
It would also count corporate and student accounts, where large scale licenses are sold to universities at nominal cost and provide a significant bump to volume.
But lets be real – do more than 1 in 20 adults in Australia subscribe to a News Corp publication?
The Nine number is – I reckon – vastly inflated. Maybe something to do with their new uni partnerships or corporate subscribers, but the number of direct subscribers at end of FY24 was less than 400 thousand.
Mind you, can you trust news organisations not to spin those numbers? Hmm….
As I understand it, NYT bought a number of adjacent properties such as a word/number game, food sites and perhaps some others which have fed its subscriber growth more recently. 2012 seems so long ago. Small note, when I tried to unsubscribe a few years back they made it inordinately difficult – a problem ultimately solved by just blocking payment.
Curious for your take on the outsized increase of YT subscribers at The Benny Show
Telling me you have 900K subscribers is like radio stations saying they have 10% share. It’s funny numbers to inflate performance.
Wanna bet a good chunk of those are on those umpteen $1 for your first three month deals then cancel a month or two into their full price sub?