Annual revenue at The Independent crossed the £50m mark last year for the first time since the brand went digital-only.
Revenue for Independent Media in the year to 31 December 2024 was up 15% to £53.2m and pre-tax profit and operating profit were each up 68% to £3.2m, newly filed accounts reveal.
This meant The Independent recorded revenue growth for the eighth consecutive year since it went digital-only in 2016. (Figures for 2023 were initially released on a 15-month basis due to a change in reporting period.)
The Independent’s revenue has almost doubled since 2019 (from £27m). The growth has been attributed to focus on several key strategic areas including: US expansion, e-commerce and video arm Independent TV.
The figures include both organic growth and the impact of The Independent taking over the operations of Buzzfeed UK, Huffpost UK, food vertical Tasty UK and black British identity brand Seasoned from Buzzfeed in a multi-year licensing deal in March 2024.
Independent Media now says this took the brands “into immediate growth and profit”.
The newsbrand said it had marked a major digital milestone in 2024 as its total revenue for the first time matched the income of all three newspaper titles run by Independent Print Ltd in the final full year before The Independent and The Independent on Sunday closed in print and The i Paper was sold to Johnston Press (it has since moved home again to DMG Media).
The publisher added that its 2024 profit was almost the same as the loss those newspapers collectively made in 2015.
Chief executive Christian Broughton told Press Gazette that having gone all-digital “does allow us to really, truly focus on the growth areas of our industry without having to constantly fight the parts of our industry that are shrinking. We’re not in those areas.”
Broughton said the company has now recycled the profits into investment in new AI summary product Bulletin and Independent Studio, which produces personality-led podcasts and video. They have contributed to “really strong growth” so far in 2025, he added.
“I think there’s plenty to learn from what we’re doing, what we’re achieving. I think there’s huge opportunity out there. I think the changes that we’re undertaking at The Independent this year and next year will be a more profound transformation, actually, than print to digital,” he said, referring to AI and the creator economy. “There’s huge opportunity for media brands amongst change.”
[Read more: Independent’s video and podcast Studio aims to become biggest revenue driver]
US now a quarter of all revenue for The Independent
The US made up 25% of revenue for The Independent in 2024, up from 20% in 2023. The US operation brought in £12.7m in 2024, up 50% year on year.
It was the first full year after former Independent chief executive Zach Leonard moved to the US to grow the business there in the new roles of global chief operating officer and president, North America. Broughton stepped up as chief executive at that time.
A dotcom URL for The Independent launched in 2024 which Broughton said had helped it be “perceived to be a very authentic newsbrand there” and accepted “as a native voice, as a very US voice as opposed to the UK view of the US”. The Independent has newsrooms in New York, Washington DC and Los Angeles and is led by US editor Louise Thomas.
Broughton emphasised that it was not just audience growth in the US but that engagement was up. He said views per visitor in the US increased by 150% in 2024 ahead of the election compared to where it was in 2023, while minutes per visit were up 343%. “So people weren’t just casually flicking over The Independent, they were really looking at it.
“I find it impossible for it not to be attributed in some way to the brand values of The Independent at a time where there was such a partisanship in the media. Each media organisation was coming at it from the left or the right… and if that doesn’t show that the world is looking for truly independent, trusted journalism, I don’t know what does.”
This year, although the election is over, Broughton said engagement in the US continues to grow. Independent Studio is set to launch several US-targeted video series while some shows led from the UK have also become big hitters in the US, namely Adam Clery’s Football Channel (ACFC) on Youtube.
“I think the creator economy is such a huge opportunity to push into in the US through platforms like Spotify and Youtube, to really build engagement and repeat visits and identify with distinct voices that you want to go back to.”
Broughton also noted that the podcasting market in the US is “hugely bigger” than in the UK, while e-commerce on social media is “being driven harder currently” in the US than the UK.
In the US, The Independent is the 51st biggest news site by number of visits in August (16.4 million) according to Similarweb.
According to Press Gazette’s latest ranking of the 50 biggest news websites in the UK, The Independent was fourth after only the BBC, The Guardian and The Sun. In July it had an audience of 22 million people, reaching 43% of the population according to Ipsos iris.
In the UK in particular, Broughton emphasised that having “direct relationships with brands is more important than ever”.
Independent TV saw a 47% increase in revenue with video views on The Independent’s website (excluding views on social platforms) exceeding one billion for 2024.
E-commerce revenue was up 17%, attributed in part to the addition of new lifestyle channels for beauty and fitness/wellbeing. Indybest reviews led to one million purchases in the year.
The Independent brought its e-commerce services, which also include a discount voucher codes site, in-house after Google’s site reputation abuse update hit publishers using third-party partners to create this type of content.
AI Bulletin summaries driving people back to main Independent articles
Overall Broughton noted that the “direction of travel is definitely towards personalisation and giving you the things you want rather than the same experience for everyone.”
For example, Broughton revealed that Bulletin, which summarises Independent articles into bullet points using AI, will launch an app in Q4 which will contain more personalised feeds, notifications, audio and other “deep engagement tools”.
[Read more: Independent says readers ‘often prefer’ stories on new AI ‘Bulletin’ to human-written versions]
The audience for Bulletin, he said, is “people who want high-quality journalism but don’t have much time. It’s as simple as that.” He said this could be the same people who read longer articles on The Independent’s website, who have more time one day than they do the next.
“It breaks this assumption that’s been in journalism for years that the longer pieces are always the best ones,” he added.
“It was an experiment. Bulletin was something that we wanted to do. You don’t know whether the world’s going to embrace it, whether people are going to really love it as much as you think they might. But it’s exceeded our expectations.”
Broughton revealed that there is a “huge referral rate” between people reading Bulletin summaries and going back to look at the original Independent article. He said the “read more” links at the bottom of Bulletin summaries are the most-engaged with links The Independent has ever had. “So it gives back to the brand that it also takes from.”
Broughton also teased that another similar project that is “human-led but with AI tools” will be launched soon.
He said the starting question when using AI is “what can we do in 2026 that we couldn’t possibly have done but would have loved to have done five or ten years ago? What we always wanted to do that we can now suddenly do because the tech can make our human journalists much more powerful in what they can achieve.”
The business reports as Independent Digital News and Media on Companies House, where the new accounts have been published.
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