>The Guardian US expects to hit $44 million in voluntary reader donations in the U.S. and Canada this year, up 33 percent over last year
>"We’re now at a place where our audience is actually bigger in the U.S. than The Wall Street Journal’s audience in the U.S."
That feels like not that much money considering the readership, right? The WSJ has somewhere around 3 million subscribers; they would need to be making only 14 dollars per subscription per year to do that sort of revenue.
Not to say that's necessarily a bad thing, but more that you need a pretty substantial readership to get there.
Put another way, that revenue is like 200k subscribers at 20 bucks a month. That would put you at the level of a newspaper like the Minnesota Star Tribune as far as subscription revenue.
>that revenue is like 200k subscribers at 20 bucks a month
I suspect donors (as opposed to subscribers) pay much less than $240/year.
That's my point. This is a website with readership comparable to the WSJ that is pulling in reader revenue closer to the Minnesota Star Tribune.
It's just something that I feel should be in the conversation. The Guardian's business model is clearly successful for them, but IMO it's not something that can apply to most other newspapers.
Based on my napkin math for the WSJ compared to the Guardian, the WSJ would only expect to get ~5% of their revenue replaced if they switched business models. Even if I'm off by a factor of 5, you'd still be looking at a 75% reduction.
I don't say this to be critical of the Guardian. I love their work and I'm happy they've chosen the model they have, because it enables access to high-quality journalism for free. It is also a great case study proving that this business model works and can be sustainable. But I don't want people drawing the conclusion that every newspaper could survive like this.