The Financial Times made more than half a billion pounds in revenue for the first time in its history in 2023.
The FT Group globally brought in revenue of £510m amid growth in all its major revenue lines, according to consolidated and unaudited figures shared internally and seen by Press Gazette.
The FT is wholly owned by private Japanese firm Nikkei, which does not publish any global FT financial figures. This report is therefore the best indicator of the 136-year-old newsbrand’s financial health.
The internal performance report also shows operating profit of £30m, which chief executive John Ridding described as “healthy” and “keeping us on track for our medium-term targets and a sustainable operating margin”. Operating profit was £28.7m in 2022, meaning 5% annual growth.
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Separate accounts filed on the UK’s Companies House for Financial Times Ltd report revenue of £444m (up 5% year-on-year) and operating profit of £9m, a drop of 33% put down to inflationary pressures, an increase in staff costs of £15.1m to £166.4m partly because of an increase in average headcount of 78 people to 1,586 in 2023 to as well as a £2,000 one-off payment to all employees.
The accounts said the company “has sought to balance employee compensation with the longer term needs of operating a sustainable business which resulted in a further cost of living payment in order to support employees”.
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The FT’s UK accounts do not include all of international revenue, making them an incomplete picture.
FT global paying audience ‘North Star’
The FT has set a new “North Star goal for the business”: global paying audience, which includes subscribers to the FT Specialist portfolio and FT Chinese but extends further to include those paying in other ways to consume its content such as through events, services and apps.
At the end of 2023, the internal report said, the FT Group had a global paying audience of 2.57 million people.
It has set a goal of reaching three million people on this metric by 2028.
The FT alone, according to the Companies House accounts, reached 1.4 million paying readers across all formats in 2023 of which almost 1.3 million were digital subscribers.
Ridding said: “Our digital FT.com audience reached 1.85 million, up 19% year on year, and the number of engaged readers rose to 552,000.”
The FT Group covers the newsbrand’s operations across the world including the FT Specialist portfolio of 18 brands, the B2B thought leadership agency Longitude, FT Chinese and some other services and joint ventures. It says it employs more than 3,000 people, including 700 journalists in almost 40 countries.
All ‘major’ FT revenue streams up in 2023
The internal report said advertising on the FT website and newspaper “saw its best year since 2012”, contributing £134m in revenue.
Print advertising was up 11% year-on-year and digital was up 6%.
“We continue to evolve our advertising business to reflect the changing media landscape and client requirements, and invest in our commercial content division,” the report said.
“We rebranded FT Studio (formerly Alpha Grid) to support the development of our commercial content capabilities across multi-media formats, from scrolly storytelling to mini documentaries.”
FT Professional, the rebranded B2B division aimed at corporate, government and academic customers, delivered an unspecified “double-digit revenue and profit growth year on year”.
Meanwhile the FT’s Consumer Revenue Group, which won the reader revenue strategy category at Press Gazette’s Future of Media Awards last month, increased revenues by 10% to £103m.
This was put down to a focus on “increasing value from our core customers and optimising average revenue per user” alongside investment in the “subscription experience platform and access model, including new barrier technology and in-app purchases” and the introduction of a new “recognised users” metric.
The Future of Media Awards judges said: “This was a perfect case study of how media companies should approach reader revenue strategies, creating multidisciplinary teams that use tech, data and knowledge to launch new products, improve current ones, AB test, redefine goals, move fast and optimise results.”
Events business FT Live achieved its best-ever financial performance for the second year running, with revenue up 14% to £34m. It ran 238 paid-for events (down from 270 in 2022) which included the Commodities Global Summit, Future of the Car and the Global Banking Summit.
FT Specialist was said to have grown revenues by almost 13%, excluding biopharma outlet Endpoints News for which the FT took a majority stake in April 2023.
And media consultancy FT Strategies was said to have “continued to deliver on its accelerated growth trajectory in 2023”.
The report also cited the FT’s growth in the US, where it reached its 2025 target of 125,000 “engaged users” (a data point used internally that looks at metrics like frequency and volume) early. It said the US is now its biggest audio market by audience size having reached 795,000 podcast listeners in September 2023.
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