Youtube-based publisher TLDR News has increased its revenue by 28% year on year after its print magazine and merchandise became its joint biggest source of income.
The publisher said it made £1.3m in revenue in the year to 30 June 2026, while pre-tax profit increased to £72,402, after a £7,918 loss the previous year.
Founder Jack Kelly told Press Gazette TLDR News has “accidentally stumbled backwards into being a print media business”, with its Too Long print magazine and merchandise sales now exceeding sponsor and programmatic ad revenue from Youtube.
Too Long made £515,410 in 2025/26, up 228% from £157,039 the year before.
The magazine’s revenue combined with physical products makes up around 55% of total revenue (£663,905), while digital revenue accounted for the remaining 45% (£544,801). When Press Gazette spoke to Kelly in 2024, the publisher made 80% of revenue from Youtube advertising.
TLDR News was created in 2017, and is primarily known as a Youtube title publishing explainer news videos that last around eight to ten minutes across six channels.
One of its most-watched videos to date, according to Kelly, is an explainer on “Why Putin Couldn’t Invade Finland” which has accumulated 2.3 million views since 2022.
TLDR entered Press Gazette’s ranking of top publishers on Youtube in 2026 as its Global and EU channels each have around 1.1 million subscribers. Across its six channels, it has 3.7 million total Youtube subscribers.
Each print issue grows subscriber base ‘up to 20%’
In December 2023, the publisher made a £50,000 profit selling its magazine as a one-off edition in newspaper format.
“We announced it as a Christmas gift novelty thing that we thought the audience would enjoy as a slightly tongue-in-cheek [move], like why is a Youtube channel making a newspaper,” said Kelly, adding there was “irony and humour” in the newsbrand “going backwards in the evolution of news”.
Strong demand led the publisher to make it an annual product in 2024, increasing to quarterly in 2025.
Kelly said the magazine allows for a “more zoomed out approach” that doesn’t require the same reactivity as the Youtube channel, with Youtube and Too Long serving “different purposes and are aiming at different segments in the audience”.
“We are able to pick the stories we truly think are the most interesting, not the combination of the most interesting and the most marketable,” he added of the magazine.
The magazine has around 8,300 subscribers, and makes money from one-off sales and subscriptions.
The print edition costs £13.99 per issue (less with a subscription), or £9.99 for a digital version.
It’s made up of around 80 pages, carrying ads only related to TLDR News products such as its latest documentary, and its first 20 pages are dedicated to the cover story.
The cover story for the most recent issue was about “Trump’s Rules of War”, including a world map analysing everywhere US President Donald Trump has invaded, bombed or had some kind of military involvement.
The remaining 60 pages are split into three sections of UK, Global and European news to reflect TLDR News’ Youtube channels, and are made up of around 20 to 30 articles including an interview.
Kelly said that every time a new issue comes out, its subscriber base increases by between 10% and 20%.
“We’re able to have this pretty consistent growing subscriber base that really allows us to project our revenue into the future, and allows us to use that to plan future growth,” he added.
TLDR News is now adding four people to its team “on the back of the growth of Too Long”. Its 11-strong full-time team will increase to 15, including two EU writers, a business writer and an animator/editor to work on both print and digital.
“The growth of Too Long has substantially shored up our finances and given us much more confidence to enable us to be able to hire these people and grow the business more generally,” said Kelly.
Magazine success due to relationship with Youtube audience
Kelly tied Too Long’s success to the “broader relationship” TLDR News has already built with its Youtube audience.
“If this was just started up separate from TLDR, I would struggle to imagine it being as successful as it was. It’s because it builds on that relationship with the audience, because we can promote it in videos, and we can say ‘we talk about this more in our magazine’.”
He also said that the magazine stands out from the Youtube channel for allowing journalists to have “more freedom and flexibility”, in some instances voicing opinions that wouldn’t be possible on Youtube.
Some readers buy a single issue before converting to a subscriber after underestimating “the quality of what goes into the magazine”, Kelly said, estimating this to be around 25 videos’ worth of work.
Transparency over the company’s finances has also helped build support for the brand. When TLDR News announced it had made a loss in 2025, Kelly said “there were a bunch of people that we saw immediately signing up to the magazine because they were invested in us as a business and wanted to support us as a business”.
Too Long expected to overtake ad revenue by end of year
Programmatic ad revenue from Youtube totalled £332,723 (down 10% year on year) in 2025/26, equating to around £0.002 per view. Overall TLDR Youtube views were down 11% year on year to 157 million views last year, a decrease from 172 million in 2024/25.
Across specific channels, TLDR Global earned £138,500 in programmatic ad revenue, TLDR EU earned £125,500 and TLDR News (918,000 subscribers) earned £64,000.
Sponsorship revenue was down 14% year on year to £212,078.
Kelly said the sponsorship market “is a lot more difficult these days”, citing less spending, the growth of AI and gambling-related sponsors TLDR is not willing to work with.
In terms of other revenue, TLDR News earned £8,786 from TLDR Party, a members’ site launched a few months ago that gives access to documentaries, behind-the-scenes podcast and audio versions of articles.
It earned £113,996 from its book Assembly Required, which launched at the end of 2025, and contains guides to the “world’s most beautiful parliament buildings”.
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