British broadsheet Financial Times’ recently published financials for 2022 presented further vindication of legacy media’s pivot to paywall-based subscription models.
Though print readership fell another 16% to just 135,000, the Nikkei-owned paper booked a 13% year-on-year increase in paying digital readership to a record 1.097 million subscribers.
Much of this growth was attributed to corporate subscriptions, which grew 17%.
Digital content revenues rose 16% to £193.1 million, while advertising revenues nudged 8% higher to £149.7 million.
Total firmwide revenues jumped from £369.5 million to £422.5 million, with operating profit nearly tripling to £13.4 million.
Having bounced back from lockdowns, events revenue surged 37% to £30.8 million.
FT flipped the table on the bottom line, posting nearly £6.8 million in pre-tax profits compared to more than £3.2 million in losses in 2021.
These results follow the Conservative-leaning broadsheet The Telegraph’s 16% increase in underlying earnings and a 20% increase in operating profit in July, despite an ongoing ownership blackhole at parent company Telegraph Media Group.
Left-leaning paper The Guardian, which operates a hybrid subscription-based and free-to-read model, also posted record revenues in its last financial year.
Ethnicity pay gap widens
FT conceded that the paper’s UK-based median ethnicity pay gap increased by 4.6 percentage points throughout the year to 14.2%.
This was “primarily due to more highly paid minority ethnic staff leaving the company compared to previous years”.
“Efforts to hire and retain more ethnically diverse talent and increase representation at senior levels continued through focused recruitment, talent development and sponsorship programmes,” read the directors' report.
The group made a one-off payment of £1,800 to all employees in October 2022 to help with inflationary pressures and the cost-of-living crisis.
This contributed to staff costs growing by £19.2 million to £151.3 million, in addition to overall headcount increasing by 8% to 1,500.