The Guardian’s digital revenues surpass print for the first time

Anca Alexe 25/07/2018 | 07:53

Guardian Media Group (GMG), which owns the Guardian and the Observer newspapers, is now making more money from its digital operations than from its print newspapers for the first time in its history, mainly due to the increased support from readers making online contributions.

GMG says it had 570,000 members giving regular financial support to the organization, up from 500,000 at the end of 2017. Revenues also came from 375,000 one-off contributions in the past year.

The Guardian is on track to break even by the end of the next financial year, after a radical turnaround plan. The Guardian website reports that it attracted 155 million monthly unique visitors on average in the 12 months up to April, up from 140 million in the year before. The publication says it focused more on retaining its regular readers than on going viral on social networks.

“We went from being the ninth largest newspaper [in the UK] to being the third largest in the world,” GMG CEO David Pemsel said. “We ended up trying to get bigger at any cost and celebrated just getting bigger and bigger. The danger of just chasing reach is you lose sense of the fact that these are just individuals.”

Digital revenue grew 15 percent, while income from the print newspaper and events business fell by 10 percent. However, Pemsel said that the Guardian’s print circulation was “less bad than forecast”, at 138,082 per day.