When Ben Smith and Justin Smith announced in 2022 that they were going to launch a digital news publication aimed at a college-educated, English-speaking global audience, a few eyebrows (ours included) shot up.
It’s a market many publishers, from the New York Times to The Economist, The Guardian, and the Financial Times have been aiming to serve for decades. Yet [Ben] Smith saw an opportunity for Semafor to come in with a slightly different proposition.
“I think there are a lot of people all over the world who are quite unhappy with what they’re getting from the news media, and, if you ask them, they tell you.” he told The Publisher Podcast by MediaVoices this week. “So broadly, I don’t think you’re talking about a market where people feel like [they’re] getting the best service.”
But unlike more established news organizations, Smith – who has previously worked at the New York Times, Politico and BuzzFeed – saw that chasing scale would be futile for a new news company: “I feel like we were born into the post-traffic apocalypse era,” he explained. “Anyone who thought at that point that web traffic wasn’t going away wasn’t paying attention. Before AI swallowed it, TikTok swallowed it. Short video replaced web browsing as the thing bored people do at work. You could already see by then that the web was in terminal decline.”
Smith emphasized that websites are still an important surface, and will be for some time. But Semafor launched on the principle that digital media wasn’t co-extensive with the web: “Newsletters were our first digital product, because it gives you this direct connection to an audience, which you can then reach in other places.”
The publisher now has over 1 million sign ups to its dozen newsletters, covering daily global news briefings to specialised briefings across the economy, politics, policy and more. This is a much smaller audience than other publishers in the space. But this audience is high-quality, high-intent, and very influential.
More recently, it has also been experimenting with an invite-only newsletter called The CEO Signal. In order to receive this newsletter, subscribers have to be the CEO of a company with $500mn+ in revenue.
“We’ve got several thousand subscribers, which is almost approaching the total addressable market of the thing,” Smith said, explaining that it’s written like an inside conversation to the people who are actually running large companies. “It’s freed from the pull of trying to scale. And then of course it’s very valuable to advertisers because it’s a valuable audience.”
Quality audiences translate to quality events
The quality of Semafor’s readers has been key to the runaway success of its events business. Events are now more than half of Semafor’s $40mn+ annual revenue, ranging from intimate lunches to their flagship World Economy Summit, held last week, which featured 500 global CEOs, political leaders, finance leaders and bankers, and thousands of audience members.
The events business has been masterminded by co-founder Justin Smith. He had previously started The Atlantic’s events business in Washington in the mid-1990’s, and built large-scale events during his time at Bloomberg. In 2025, Semafor organized more than 100 events, all of which were invitation-only. As Flashes & Flames has noted, the business model where events were funding the company’s news operations came straight from the playbook of the best B2B media companies.
For [Ben] Smith, seeing the Semafor events grow has been gratifying: “The thing that I’ve learned – almost the thing I was worried about and that I’ve been most gratified by – is that what makes the events work is the journalism. It’s what gives you permission to host them.”
Bringing this journalist mindset to events saves them from being bland and boring. Smith says both the audience and the senior leaders and politicians which feature on stage welcome the hard questions: “We break a lot of news. We have really interesting, tough, adult conversations. And it’s really satisfying.”
Leaving the door open for reader revenue
With such a high-value audience, Semafor would be an obvious candidate for introducing readership revenue in some form. But Smith is cautious about rushing in too quickly to paid content, concerned that it could hamper their areas of strength: “Successful media companies have lots of different revenue streams, and aren’t ideological about them. We’re trying to be very focused on not doing too many things as a start-up, and to do them really, really well. We feel great about where our advertising business is at, and about the speed at which our brand is growing.”
It’s a bet which is paying off.
The start-up, which celebrated its third anniversary last October, is now profitable, and doubled its revenue in 2025. Its headcount remains relatively lean, with approximately 50 journalists and 85 total staff.
“We’re a consumer-facing news brand but we are running it like a B2B media company,” Justin Smith said at the FIPP World Media Congress in Madrid in conversation with Colin Morrison. “Events now generate a majority of our revenue which, of course, is very profitable. But we’re successful because it all starts with the quality of our journalism and how it attracts a very, very discerning audience of CEOs and C-suite executives. Just three years in, 475 of the Fortune 500 CEOs are readers of Semafor, reading our direct email newsletters. The engagement is incredibly high.”
Direct connections
Ben Smith may have come to Semafor well-armed with cautionary tales about chasing traffic. But the past few years still continue to provide valuable reminders. “The thing we didn’t see as clearly as we see now is what a fool’s errand scale in media is right now. These things change, and I don’t think anybody’s going to figure out media permanently. But in this moment, it’s very, very challenging to build the kind of scale for quality journalism that you maybe could ten years ago on the web.”
He advised others building digital media start-ups to think really hard about the quality of the audience and who they’re reaching, regardless of whether the business is subscription-driven or ad-driven. You’re just not going to build a business that can support quality journalism, at least by trying to compete with Google for traffic. When I was at BuzzFeed, that was our strategy, and we got some of the way there. And now that’s clearly just not on the cards. You think really hard about who your audience is, and connect to them very directly.”
Listen to the full session above, or by searching ‘The Publisher Podcast’ from MediaVoices on your podcast app of choice.
