Author: Sara Guaglione

After the pandemic-era surge in news publishers’ subscribers, year-over-year gains are harder to come by, pushing publishers to prioritize retention, moving subscribers to higher-priced tiers and bundles, and product expansion.

Digiday analyzed the subscription and paid reader revenue trends among major news publishers that have publicly shared these numbers, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Media, The Guardian and Daily Mail.

For a bunch, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, growth isn’t just continuing, it’s speeding up, and likewise so is The Guardian’s paid reader contribution model. Meanwhile, Bloomberg’s subscription business shows signs of normalization after a 2024 spike, and Daily Mail is still ramping up its relatively new subscription business, which launched in 2024 in the U.K. and expanded to the U.S. and Canada in February 2025.

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Three days before the first ads were set to appear inside ChatGPT, the marketers testing them received a brief update: the launch date had shifted from Feb. 6 to Feb. 9. No explanation came with it – just a scheduling change from a company still working out how openly it wants to talk about becoming an ads business. 

The timing raised eyebrows. 

The same day OpenAI notified marketers about that shift, rival Anthropic began running a brand marketing campaign during its Super Bowl slot, taking aim at the idea of chatbots selling ad space — an unsubtle critique. For some marketers, OpenAI’s delay looked less like a technical adjustment and more like optics management: let the noise pass, then proceed. 

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