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Fighting for journalism and profitable news media
FT revenue hits record £566m | BBC puts 90 local radio and TV jobs at risk
And how Advance Local went from zero to 250,000 paid online subs in eight years
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👋 Hello from the team at Press Gazette on Monday, 28 September.
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Corporate subscriptions were the biggest growth area, up 11% year on year, suggesting that smart paywall tactics and clever marketing strategies will only get you so far. This revenue will largely come via salespeople making deals.
Average revenue per individual subscriber at the FT is now said to be £412 a year, underlining the fact that a great many of these will see their subscription as a business expense.
The FT’s success and growth is based on the fact that subscriptions, and having a direct relationship with readers, has been the main focus of the business for around 20 years.
It still makes some £64m a year in print advertising, largely from its Saturday weekend edition and in particular the How To Spend It (HTSI) supplement targeted at the super rich.
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It is the latest part of the BBC to be hit by proposals to cut £500m from the corporation’s £6bn-plus annual budget over the next three years. Some 90 jobs are set to go from local radio and regional TV news.
It’s strange to me that they would seek to cut local radio by replacing it with national programmes – since it rather defeats the whole point of the service. Wouldn’t it be better to find cheaper ways to keep coverage local – perhaps by partnering with universities and other news providers?
BBC local radio has been on a downward spiral since 2022 when significant resources were moved away from it into local online news that directly competes with, and undermines, local commercial news outlets. Listening has fallen from around 7.7 million per week in June 2022 to 6.9 million per week in June 2026, according to Rajar.
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How did they do it? What’s in the secret sauce?
SVP for digital consumer revenue at Advance Local Ann Poe did not have any easy answers for me when I interviewed her for the latest Press Gazette podcast. The winning recipe is, it turns out, pretty complicated.
She came on the podcast along with Ariel Burkett of Mather to talk about their success in deploying dynamic paywalls across ten major US local news websites over the last few years.
Simply put, they no longer think about what content to put behind a paywall – but instead they use AI to figure out which offer to present a particular reader at that moment. That involves ingesting all the types of information that a publisher can gather to decide whether the reader sees a paywall, registration gate or free ad-supported article.
Locking content down with an all-or-nothing paywall approach kills page views and advertising revenue and also removes the opportunity for casual readers to develop a habit and become paying customers.