The growth and “relative stability” of reader revenue is helping The Guardian reinvest into journalism, its chief financial and operating officer has said.
Keith Underwood told Press Gazette investment in journalism outside the UK in particular has been “the main driver” of increased financial contributions from readers in the past year.
“We don’t have lots and lots of really different properties. The business is built on journalism, and as a result what we’ve been able to do is we made an investment in recent years in America, and you can see from the numbers that’s paying dividends. We made a comparatively modest investment in Europe, and that’s driven revenues from £16m to £20m…
“What we’ve done is made, I think, really considered, strategically aligned investments in our journalism, which we’re now seeing are driving real results when married to very, very good commercial thinking with it as well.”
Underwood was speaking after the publication of its financial results for the year to the end of March 2025, which saw a bumper year for digital reader revenue – up 22% to £107m. Total revenue rose 7% to £276m.
Annual losses (which The Guardian describes as operating cash flow) fell to £24m from £37m.
Underwood said the reader revenue growth – for which it won at Press Gazette’s Future of Media Awards this month – came in a “tough market when, obviously, our journalism is also openly available on the web. That’s a phenomenal achievement…”
The newsbrand now has 1.3 million “recurring supporters” – people paying simply to support The Guardian’s mission of free journalism, or for subscription products that include ad-free reading and unlimited stories on the app, access to recipes app Feast and the Guardian Weekly print magazine.
Digital reader revenue is “more stable and more predictable” than other types of revenue through economic stability, Underwood said.
“I think the momentum that we built in reader revenues, and the relative stability of that revenue stream, gives one confidence in further investment… it’s a real sort of flywheel within the business.”
A “significant amount” of the growth in number of paying supporters came from the US.
US and Canada revenue rose 23% year on year to £55.5m and Underwood said that despite this, “we think there is still considerable headroom in the US business and we’ll be investing further in that.
“And we’ll be investing in formats going forward as well, so investing in multimedia journalism as well to reach further audiences and to drive engagement with our product.”
The average revenue per subscriber also went up, he said, “through a combination of greater clarity of proposition, more value, clearer marketing and really the development of our products and journalism during the year”.
Feast, which launched in April 2024 and received more than 100,000 downloads in its first three months, is perhaps the largest non-news addition to the core Guardian journalism product in a long time. Underwood said it has “proven a really useful part of our consumer proposition” as part of a bundled subscription product.
“We’ve seen materially lower churn for people who have used Feast as part of that bundled proposition, and therefore it’s driven real value.”
The Guardian has also joined the roster of publishers using their trusted names to provide product recommendations for readers and receive affiliate revenue for clickthroughs, via new vertical The Filter.
Since its launch in October last year, The Filter has driven 62 million page views and eight million clicks to retailers.
Underwood said it has “got good traction from readers. Readers recognise that for a trusted brand like The Guardian, that’s a really good editorial service proposition that we offer.”
Advertising revenue was up 2% year on year to £68.4m with growth coming from direct sales (rather than programmatic).
Underwood said there is “no doubt that the market is challenged for advertising at the moment” with a “lack of confidence” among businesses and consumers.
But he added: “We know that we’ve got a good product. We’re focused on driving a direct sales strategy, which is forming direct relationships with advertisers who really value the quality of the proposition and the context within which their brands can appear… That’s driving real results for us.”
Underwood also discussed the future of print: print reader revenue was £68m in 2024/25, up 1% year on year and down 4% since 2020/21. The Guardian no longer publishes its UK print circulation figures but sold 105,134 on average each day in July 2021. If sales have fallen in line with industry trends, print circulation is likely around half that total currently.
He said: “We think print as a format provides a really valuable proposition to our readers. It works well for us. There is no doubt that there are structural challenges in terms of circulation which we’re managing through, but for the foreseeable future, we think print is an important part of our business.”
The Guardian has signed AI deals with market leader and ChatGPT creator OpenAI as well as Prorata, which remains a smaller business but plans to share advertising revenue proportionally with publishers whose content is used to answer queries.
The president of The Economist told Press Gazette’s Future of Media Technology Conference this month that they have not done any AI deals because products like ChatGPT are competitor publisher platforms.
But Underwood said The Guardian believes it “is important to do those deals in a manner which respects our intellectual property, reaches new audiences on new platforms, and also gives us brand attribution and traffic back to our core sites.
“Of course, we are reviewing and looking at the way in which search is evolving and the potential of that to reduce clicks back to our site, and we’re working on a series of measures with the platforms and also with other publishers to try and combat that.”
Underwood was speaking on Thursday hours after it was announced he would be leaving The Guardian in January to join book publisher Bloomsbury as chief financial and operating officer.
Underwood told Press Gazette he was leaving The Guardian in a “great position” after five years in his role.
He noted the publisher is “more global, obviously more digital, more reader funded than it’s ever been. If I look over the last five years, it’s been a phenomenal transformation and growth. And even over the last year where we’ve seen international revenues up 16% to £205m, we’ve seen US revenues within that up 22.5% to £55m.
“With £1.25bn in the [Scott Trust endowment] fund, which is certainly up from when I joined, and with revenues, and the mix of revenues very much improved, I think we’re in a really good position.”
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