Point being: there is a steep hill to climb in 2022 to get a lot of that growth under its belt.

In other words, Gannett’s subscriber growth rate will need to more than double from 2022’s 600,000-subscriber trajectory to average more than 1.26 million new subscribers per year for 2023, 20. That would leave at least 3.8 million subscribers to add by the end of 2025. In its latest earnings report, the company projected it will add 100,000 subscribers in the first quarter of 2022 and then another 300,000 to 500,000 subscribers over the following three quarters to end the year with between 2 million and 2.2 million subscribers. Gannett’s subscriber growth does not appear set to accelerate all that meaningfully this year. That’s compared to the company’s print subscription revenue (includes print and digital bundles) that reached more than $1.1 billion and accounted for the remaining 92% of subscription revenue and 36% of the company’s total overall revenue for the year. Per Gannett’s earnings report for Q2 2021, the company already had a total of about 1.4 million digital-only subscribers before the company introduced USA Today’s paywall and vertical products. By the end of 2021, Gannett was sitting on about 1.6 million total digital-only subscribers, and the bulk of those are people paying for Gannett’s 200-plus local publications, not USA Today.ĭigital-only subscription revenue, which hit $100 million by the end of 2021, was only 8% of Gannett’s total subscription revenue and 3% of total overall revenue last year.

New york times wirecutter moves paywall