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March 19, 2024

Newsonomics: Is The Washington Post Profitable?

Post publisher Fred Ryan laughed Wednesday when I pointed out the considerable skepticism I’ve heard since the Post announced its second year of profit success — with precious little other data — last month. He points to both its digital subscription growth and greater ad selling engagement as the key reasons. While Ryan won’t divulge numbers, the contours of the Post’s march toward profitability can be estimated.

The Post has reached the 1 million digital subscription mark, and that generates about $100 million a year in revenue, almost all of it new in the last several years. You can do the math: about $100 per digital subscriber per year, achieved even with Kindle, Apple News, and Prime discounting — roughly in that order — and over-the-digital transom subs for the full-price payers. (By comparison, The New York Times, with twice the number of digital news subscribers, averages $125 per sub.)

 

First published at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab on Feb. 14, 2018

Follow Newsonomics on Twitter @kdoctor

 

Then there’s the Post’s more than tripling of digital audience in four years. That hasn’t quite led to a tripling of programmatic ad revenue, but it’s more than doubled — add another $100 million or so a year.

Takeaway: Jeff Bezos’ annual investment in tech and newsroom staff — now up to about 775 — has meant an investment of about $40 million a year. Yet, the reinvestment seems to be paying off. Just Tuesday, the Post announced an expansion of its international news efforts — new bureaus, new staff. That’s a part — a long-term part — of the Post’s tilt toward digital subscription emphasis, ready to harvest payers from the audience it’s quickly grown.

 

 

As with The New York Times, and with players as diverse as Business Insider, HuffPost, and BuzzFeed, it’s global that aims to provide small but growing streams of new readers and new payers. Top of the list for both the Post and Times: Canada. It’s well educated, (mostly) English-speaking — and suffering from sprawling news deserts coast to coast, as its major chain Postmedia (the DFM of Canada) continues to retrench.

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