Piers North, the one-year CEO of Reach Plc, the UK’s largest newspaper publisher, could be forgiven for feeling a bit disappointed by the listed company investors who greeted his 2025 results this week by knocking up to 10% of the share price. The £295mn enterprise value company has seen its share price fluctuate by up to 20% during the first two months of 2026.
Long-suffering investors whose fortunes have been buffeted by historic pension deficits and phone hacking legal claims may be forgiven for reacting to the plunging Google traffic (47% down in H2) and digital revenue, even though the company has – first time for a long time – been able to report an increase (2.4%) in operating profit. Given the widely-suffered publisher impact of Google Discovery, Reach’s revenue decrease of “only” 3.7% is mildly encouraging, as is the disclosure that the company’s longtime pension deficit has swung into a small surplus. Phew.
But the key to a consistently optimistic view of the future for a news company almost wrecked by the late Robert Maxwell, is in CEO North’s assertion that the company will have some 75,000 digital subscribers by end-2026. This follows six successful regional launches to date, including in Manchester, Liverpool, Leicestershire, Scotland, Wales and, recently, the Daily Express nationally. The Daily Mirror comes next. Given a cautious average £30 subscription price (the actual prices are £4.99-6.99 per month), this would add some £2.3mn of high-margin annualised revenue which, presumably, could become some £20mn in 3-5 years.
But the CEO’s assertion that his digital subscriptions revenue will in future be separately reported rather than merely being part of the c£50mn of “direct revenue” implies some confidence in the strategy of the company just one year after the previous CEO last year had boasted: “We continued to serve our audiences with free-to-access news which has proven more important than ever…”
Although the fledgling digital subscriptions are relatively small numbers in the context of a £500mn-revenue publisher, they represent major strategic progress for a company whose previous CEO denied any posssibility of developing non-advertising revenue beyond eCommerce.
In some ways, the key will not only be to monetise digital subscriptions through the national brands (the Express and the Mirror) but also through the large regional brands. Reach still generates 75% of its revenue from print and 55% from readers. While much of this is via newsstands, the next task for Reach is to explore the ways of safeguarding (and converting) a proportion of that copy sales revenue by getting paying readers to become digital subscribers as well as casual buyers.
At this stage, Reach’s digital subscribers benefit from: premium content (including, increasingly, video), fewer ads, offers and promotions, puzzles and the (still to be fully exploited) archive. Sport (especially the UK’s premier league soccer-football) continues to be a rich seam of future opportunity.
These are early days but future options may be to create a new national brand (with regional editions) for what might become hundreds of thousands of digital subscribers. Suddenly, Reach would have a media brand larger than the national tabloid dailies whose inexorable decline has been weighing it down for two decades.
In the month of Piers North’s first anniversary as CEO, it is clear he is moving quickly – and, thankfully, with a strategy that is no longer exclusively about digital advertising revenue and vainly trying to mitigate the decline in print. In his second year, we should expect to see emerging evidence that subscriptions / membership and associated eCommerce can become core revenue streams.
That may require much more development of high-value verticals including sports, puzzles, travel and money. But the UK’s largest commercial news group is operating in the same world as the Daily Mail and the New York Times. At last.
| SnapShot Reach Plc | |||
| £mn | 2025 | 2024 | 2023 |
| Rev | 518 | 539 | 569 |
| 388 | 407 | 439 | |
| Digital | 129 | 130 | 127 |
| Ebitda | 124 | 122 | 118 |
| Margin | 24% | 23% | 21% |
| Net debt | (35) | (14) | (10) |
