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How Advance Local went from zero to 250,000 paying online | FT now makes $546 per subscriber
And how S&P Global nurtures the audience behind a $5bn a year news business
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Welcome to the Press Gazette Future of Media US newsletter on Friday, 25 September.
🧱Howdy partners! Dom here, standing in for Charlotte who is currently on a cultural tour of Italy.
US local news publisher Advance Local has gone from zero to 250,000 paying digital subscribers in the space of eight years.
How did they do it? What’s in the secret sauce?
SVP for digital consumer revenue at Advance Local Ann Poe did not have any easy answers for me. The winning recipe is, it turns out, pretty complicated.
She came on the Press Gazette podcast along with Ariel Burkett of Mather to talk about their success deploying dynamic paywalls across ten major US local news websites over the last few years.
Simply put, they no longer think about what content to put behind a paywall – but instead they use AI to figure out which offer to present a particular reader at that moment. That involves ingesting all the types of information a publisher can gather to decide whether the reader sees a paywall, registration gate or free ad-supported article.
Locking content down with an all-or-nothing paywall approach kills page views and advertising revenue and also removes the opportunity for casual readers to develop a habit and become paying customers.
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London-based business publisher the Financial Times makes most of its money in the US and is one of the world leaders when it comes to reader revenue.
Today we exclusively reveal FT Group’s latest financial results for 2025 - up 5% year on year to a record $750m. Within this they reveal that average revenue per subscriber is now $546 per year - which is more than I pay for my gym membership.
Another specialist publisher doing incredibly well on both sides of the Atlantic is business intelligence giant S&P Global.
Their market intelligence division generated revenue of some $5bn last year and the average cost of a subscription to their flagship Capital IQ Pro information platform is, wait for it, $73,000 per year. Or about the value of a starting salary for a journalist working for the FT in America.
S&P Global head of news Steve Matthewson answered our questions about how to nurture and retain a niche audience.
He said it’s about asking yourself: “How am I adding value to this client’s workday? Am I helping them be better at their job?”.
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