Business newsbrand City AM has started turning a profit, according to CEO Harry Owen who spoke to Press Gazette as the title announced commercial expansion.
City AM went into administration in July 2023 but was saved by entrepreneur Matt Moulding’s THG, the e-commerce giant and owner of Myprotein and Cult Beauty.
Owen told Press Gazette business is looking up for the title as he shared details of three new commercial platforms: City Winners (a paid-entry prize-draw platform), Toast The City Awards for London’s hospitality industry and commercial video arm City AM Studios.
He said the mission when THG acquired City AM was “pretty simple: it was to get the company as quickly as possible to break even and then move into sustainable profit, and we got to the break-even position in H2 last year and now we’re into that profit world”.
Adding that City AM is in profit for the year to date, he said: “I’m proud that we’re running a profitable company right now.”
He revealed City AM’s revenue performance this month (May 2025) has been the best since pre-pandemic October 2019.
City AM’s revenue for the year to date is up 33% year on year – building on 12% growth in the first two months of 2024 as reported previously by Press Gazette – while the EBITDA margin performance is up between 30-70% year on year.
Owen said that restructuring and dropping the Monday edition of the London newspaper at the start of this year (two years after stopping the Friday edition) had “made a big saving in terms of our cost base” alongside improved revenue performance. There is still flexibility to produce a Monday paper on a major news day, however.
Owen said it was “100% the right decision” to close the Monday paper. “I was in two minds a little bit, but it’s facilitated a stronger editorial resource mix, like not having to bring in everyone on a Sunday has freed us up to, I guess, launch these products, concentrate on newsletters. It’s just the right mix right now.”
Digital advertising revenue is up 53% year on year so far for 2025 and print is level (considered a success due to having one fewer edition per week).
Owen cited two factors that are driving revenue: audience growth and responding creatively to commercial briefs.
In March 2024, Owen told Press Gazette one of his goals for growth in the year ahead was to reach 100,000 app downloads: he said it has in fact now has 200,000. The app was launched in September 2023 soon after the THG takeover.
According to Ipsos iris, cityam.com had a UK audience of 1.6 million in March, up 5% month on month and 6% year on year. Total minutes spent in the month were up 50% compared to March 2024 (to 2.6 million).
Owen noted that the size of City AM’s social audience has grown from hitting around one million impressions a month in Q1 2024 to 15 million now.
From late 2023 Owen charged the video team with finding out what worked and what didn’t with no KPIs. He said this week that this approach seemed to have worked: “It’s the immediacy of the journalists, who are all quite young, because that’s always been the City AM way, and them going straight into the City AM studios and doing explainers on the day of the news.
“We’ve seen prolific growth in Youtube, Facebook, Linkedin, Tiktok. The only channel that isn’t growing is Instagram. But maybe we’re not right [for that].”
City AM moved offices in July last year where it has a purpose-built video studio, primarily used for editorial content but also responding ad-hoc to commercial content briefs which detracted from the former. Owen said the studio had “dramatically changed our output capability” and that City AM Studios “is a response to the amount of potential work out there”.
City AM Studios is a collaboration with content agency Itch, which was founded by Owen’s brother George and is used to working with financial clients. Itch has a team of 30, based ten minutes from City AM, and Owen said the partnership “allows us to respond to those briefs and expand what we can do”.
City AM is ‘doubling down on events in the Square Mile’
Owen said the Toast the City Awards celebrating the Square Mile’s best best pubs, restaurants, entertainment spots, sandwich shops, hotels, venues and outdoor spaces is something he has wanted to do for 20 years but needed the right partner. City AM is now working with the Square Mile’s five Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) and the event will take place in October.
It builds on the existing City AM Awards, the set of business prizes which returned two weeks ago after a two-year gap. Owen said it was the biggest in the event’s history for both revenue and participation, with Santander as the headline partner.
City AM has also taken over the Dragon Awards for social impact in business, running it for the first time in November 2024, from the Lord Mayor of the City of London after 40 years. The event “helped move City AM in H2 into that break-even period,” Owen said.
“So the events are really important to us. That’s something we can own: to state the obvious, no-one else can put on the City AM Awards. I feel like that about the Toast Awards because it is just the Square Mile. I am doubling down on events in the Square Mile… For the internet, I’d like to be global. For events, I’m doubling down in the City.”
City Winners prize draw launched
The totally new addition to the business is City Winners, an idea that was brought to the newsbrand by Allan MacCaskill, former marketing director for The Sun and The News of the World and now a marketing consultant.
The idea is that people will pay to enter prize draws initially focused on City experiences such as Michelin-star dining and backstage access to sporting and cultural events.
It will be at its own URL of citywinners.co.uk with the taglines “Be a City winner” and “Prizes with Personality” building on City AM’s “Business with Personality” branding.
Owen compared it to Bauer Media’s Win Happy which allows people to enter cash draws and prize competitions for a price. At the time of writing, people can pay £5.50 to have the chance to win one of several categories: a kitchen appliance, garden furniture, home electronics, or one of two smartphones. He also cited the example of Omaze, which runs lotteries to win a luxury home.
However the difference, Owen said, is that as a media business City AM has strong relationships with many venues “so collating that, bringing those experiences together under one roof, and offering a interaction with the reader that’s transactional, is quite a good thing, we think, to build out.
“It’s a soft launch right now. We’re not going to start putting it on the tube. But it’s an interesting revenue stream because you don’t have to read City AM to partake in this… I’m cautiously ambitious about having potentially a really, really good competition platform for experiences, because I can see there’s a gap in that market.”
Owen joked that the City AM team didn’t thank him for launching three new products on the same day but noted: “It’s amazing what you can do with 50 people who are really well motivated and aligned. I’ve worked in bigger organisations but it’s a perfect size for working together creatively.
“This is the most collaborative I’ve ever seen a team in terms of editorial and commercial working together.”
He added: “I’ve got to thank THG as well, because they provided the support to build that culture over the last year. City AM would have died were it not for Matt Moulding, and that would have been a shame.”
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