News giant Gannett now reports having 1.63m digital-only subscribers, up 49% over the past year.
The Press-Gazette reports the publisher, which owns USAToday and hundreds of news brands across the US as well as Newsquest in the UK, expects to top 2m digital subs by the end of this year.
Reporting its fourth-quarter results, the company said its total revenues in 2021 were $3.2bn, down from $3.4bn in 2020. Digital revenues accounted for $1bn, or 32%, of the total.
Gannett has been building its US local news digital subscriptions business for several years. The publisher put its American national title, USA Today, behind a paywall last year. In the UK, Newsquest rolled out digital subscriptions for 70 of its largest sites in spring 2020.
He also said the company had offloaded “70 very small, non-strategic properties across our newspaper portfolio – properties that either were not profitable or didn’t fit at all” within its digital strategy. Some of these sales have been reported on by Poynter.
“The sales… allowed us to exit markets with a low total digital addressable market and with an over-dependence on print.”
Overall, these sales meant that the company lost around 27,000 digital subscriptions, said Reed, which meant Gannett just missed its target for the year.
“The disposals were 100% the right strategic move, but had we not done those, we would have ended the year with 1.66m paid digital subscribers. Our goal, previously stated, was 1.65m paid digital subscribers.”
The next goal, he said, would be to hit 2m to 2.2m paid digital subscribers by the end of 2022. The company expects to reach 6m by 2025.
In January, Gannett announced more than half its papers across the US would soon begin publishing digital-only Saturday offerings. Reed told investors on the call the change would take effect “in the majority of our markets late in the first quarter of 2022”.
The hope, Reed said, was to net more digital subscribers and expand the company’s value for advertisers.
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