B2B publishers targeting niche audiences must understand the individual readers behind their corporate subscriptions, said Steve Matthewson, head of news at S&P Global Market Intelligence.
S&P Global is a financial information and analytics company made up of four divisions – Ratings, Market Intelligence, Energy and S & P Dow Jones Indices – serving professional users across financial and corporate markets.
Its Market Intelligence division offers a flagship desktop product, Capital IQ Pro, which combines company and market data with research, news, analytics and workflow tools. The UK government puts the cost at £55,000 per user per year.
Capital IQ Pro users can access news as one component of the product, with this being a personalised news homepage combining S&P Global’s own specialist journalism with content aggregated from other publishers like the Wall Street Journal. It also offers customisable dashboards and market alerts, alongside archived content, newsletters, podcasts, video content and in-person events.
S&P’s Market Intelligence division has around 360,000 active users, according to Matthewson, with its niche audience including: investment managers, bankers, corporate strategists and sector analysts.
Market Intelligence generated $4.9bn in revenue and $991m in operating profit in the year to 31 December 2025, while S&P Global as a whole reported $15.3bn in revenue – $7.9bn of this subscription revenue – and operating profit of around $6.5bn.
Matthewson joined S&P Global as London bureau chief and senior news desk manager in 2016, becoming Market Intelligence head of news in 2020. He was head of business and development professional networks for The Guardian from 2014 to 2016 and before this was group managing editor at South Africa-based Business Day-Financial Mail newsroom.
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How to identify a niche audience
Publishers in the B2B sector must go beyond the company that pays for the subscription to understand the individual users consuming content, said Matthewson.
“You have to get into the user’s day to day, and you have to go beyond the logo itself,” he said.
He added: “It’s really important, whether they are big or small, to really – as a news person – sit alongside your client-facing commercial colleagues and really understand who they’re talking to, who they’re trying to reach.”
Publishers should think about their audiences in layers, he said: first the segment (whether the audience is sell-side, buy-side or corporate), then the persona, and finally the specific workflow that person is trying to complete. At S&P Global, for example, this might mean identifying an investment bank as the segment, mergers and acquisitions advisers as the persona, and then understanding the specific research they need as the workflow.
“How am I adding value to this client’s workday?… I’m helping them be better at their job,” he said. “A lot of people will read news to sound smarter with their peers and their own customers. But a lot of it is about saying, ‘Well, you know, how can I deliver news that is really hitting the spot that does all those things?’”
How to keep the audience once you’ve found it
In order to track and retain its audience, S&P Global combines feedback from clients with reader engagement data, Matthewson said.
Feedback is received through forms on its website and at events, and data is collected through tools that track performance of stories, industries and themes.
“Apart from dwell times being obviously super important, those looking at how people get to a story is super important because quite apart of what you cover is how you present it.”
The data can also show how audiences consume content at different points in the working day, helping the company understand when particular types of journalism are most likely to be read.
Benefits of a niche audience
“The ability to carve out a very specific niche with highly differentiated content is simply that it becomes, in the long term, a more sustainable offering that is easier to defend, whereas the more generalist content you can widen it up to a bigger audience,” he said. “Differentiation has to be at the heart of that, so that people can’t delink easily from that content without them suffering some real loss.”
For S&P Global, this differentiation is delivered most in data that “clients can’t get elsewhere”, but for any publisher it requires a clear understanding of “where your audience starts and ends”, said Matthewson.
“You have to have something that equivalent providers just don’t have.”
What is the role of data?
If a reporter at S&P Global has spotted a particular hook, said Matthewson, they will go deeper on the story using the company’s extensive proprietary data resources
“They’ll be looking at the data at the same time as talking to people in the industry, talking to analysts, talking to academics, talking to regulators… The data can illustrate the trend, support the narrative and really become the nose of the story. In some cases, sometimes it’s just like background that helps add context, but it functions at a number of different levels.”
Matthewson said this model of journalism “supercharges your ability to service that niche”.
“If journalism is supportive of the workflow that they have, it’s very complementary to the rest of the product. But it also makes the product more valuable because it’s making them aware of those high-value, often very scarce, very differentiated data assets that you have,” he said. “You’ve created that hook, and then you build on that hook.”
How can publishers turn their niche audiences into loyal readers?
Matthewson said the key to obtaining loyal readers is to build habit, adding this means understanding when your audience has time to consume journalism.
S&P Global doesn’t have “a lot of readership” over weekends, said Matthewson, with it being largely used as a weekday service.
“You’ve got to obviously learn to read those patterns. So, where are readers at different points in their day?… A lot of our informational journalism will be packaged in full-text newsletters that will hit their inboxes first thing in the morning… They have a little bit of bandwidth before their meetings, and those do incredibly well.”
Newsletters, which contain “a huge amount of human judgement” can help build trust.
“You’ve got habit, and then you’ve got trust, where people rely on that information arriving.”
Can you go too niche?
Matthewson said there is a “risk” in becoming too focused on a niche audience – “you can go down very narrow rabbit holes and service a small audience”.
“There is a scale and a cost challenge there, right? How many resources do you devote to a very small and sometimes even a declining audience?” he asked.
Publishers therefore must keep assessing the value and size of their audience and avoid complacency.
“I think there is a risk of doing something because you always did it, because you always had an audience,” he said. “But how big’s that audience, and is it really economic?”
He also warned against assuming that users are happy because they are consuming content – when one or two readers complain about content, they are “often represented by a vast majority who haven’t complained”.
“The problem with the B2B environment in which we work, which is through corporate subscriptions, is that there may be 100 users at a place. Twenty will be deeply unhappy, and only one will complain. And you’ve got to take every complaint seriously.”
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