Renee Doegar, publisher of London Review of Books (top left), London Review of Books website (bottom left) and December 2025 edition of the magazine. Pictures: London Review of Books
The London Review of Books (LRB) has grown revenue by an average of 6.8% year on year since the pandemic helped by consistent investment in marketing.
The independently-owned title has seen sales decline from a post pandemic high of 91,000 copies in 2021. But it has increased revenue per copy and is now focusing on that, rather than deep discounting.
Despite being distinctly high-brow (average article lengths are more than 3,000 words) – the LRB is one of the best-selling news and current affairs titles in the UK.
The fortnightly literary magazine, founded in 1979, publishes long-form essays on a range of topics including politics, technology and culture.
“In our Christmas issue we had a really interesting piece about AI and some of the possible ways that that could go,” said Renée Doegar, publisher of the title.
“But we also had a hilarious piece about Samuel Pepys’ diaries, and I love that those were in the same issue… once we had a piece about an octopus that went completely viral, so sometimes you don’t see those things coming.”
With the publisher’s core product is its print magazine , subscriptions account for 68% of its revenue. Meanwhile, circulation stands at 70,268 according to the latest ABC figures .
Other offerings from the brand include a bookshop, eight newsletters (two linked to the bookshop), three podcasts (including one subscriber-only), events, an app, an e-commerce site.
LRB employs around 65 people across the business, including its bookshop arm, with 12 full-time editorial staff.
While the magazine is not currently profitable, “that’s not our strategy”, Doegar said.
The title has historically been supported financially by the Mary-Kay Wilmers Family Trust. Wilmers was editor from 1992 to 2021.
“Over the last three years, we’ve reduced the loss by about 25% which has been really good, and that is actually our goal to keep consistency… we’ve been really pleased with the ability to be able to reduce that year on year.”
The title’s strategy is focused on increasing revenue, rather than overall circulation.
Circulation peaked during the pandemic at 91,859 , driven partly by heavily discounted trial offers, Doegar said. When many of those readers failed to renew “it was really hard to watch it all drop off”.
However, revenue was not hit “quite the same way”, said Doegar.
“We didn’t maintain that circulation growth that we had, but we maintained and grew the revenue as a result,” she added.
“I think that publishers have to be a little bit less frightened about charging for good content that’s well produced,” she said.
The LRB currently offers new print subscribers the first 12 issues for £12, reverting to £37.15 per quarter (about £6 per issue). Digital-only access is offered for £33 per quarter.
For the last six years, print sales have accounted for 66-68% of the company’s revenue, increasing by £1.5m a year over that period.
“So obviously it’s grown in terms of its revenue, but its percentage of our company was very consistent,” Doegar said.
Doegar estimated that ten to 15% of revenue is shifting all the time, and said e-commerce has performed strongly in recent years. Its bookshop is “doing better this year than it’s ever done before”, she added.
Advertising, which accounts for 6% of LRB’s revenue stream, remains strong in print, and has seen particular success in podcasts.
Doegar said: “A lot of our advertisers still really prefer print, so print is still the primary revenue for that.”
She added advertisers booking podcast ads has seen “huge growth” too.
LRB’s print circulation has been level over the last three years ( an impressive feat in the current market ).
“But we’re making more money from it than ever,” Doegar said.
“Each year, the revenue has grown significantly on that same readership, and that’s because we’ve made a concentrated effort to bring in valuable readers… the idea is make more money off the same amount of people, because we’re not getting as high churn.”
Three-year lifetime value marketing rule
A key part of this effort has been via LRB’s investment in marketing – 12.5% of its annual subscription revenue – which has supported productive audience data research to inform strategic placement of ads.
“The LRB has always invested heavily in marketing, and I think it’s one of the keys to our success – we always take the long view,” said Doegar.
The company has a strict “three-year lifetime value” rule for marketing spend, meaning any campaign must generate enough subscriber value within three years to justify its cost.
“That’s always proven really effective for us but …the shift to what’s working has been quite significant,” she said.
When Doegar first joined the company in 2011, direct mail was “king” for marketing. As this channel grew more expensive, the business has moved toward alternative ways of acquiring subscribers.
LRB uses detailed tracking to measure effectiveness of different marketing channels. Each channel, such as a podcast or tube advert, has its own code. When someone subscribes using that code, the company can track which advertisement or platform brought that reader in and measure their long-term value.
If campaigns are no longer effective, or bring in subscribers that quickly cancel, the channel is dropped from the marketing plan.
“We’re spending a lot more money to bring in people, and that’s why we need to make sure that we’re bringing in the right people,” Doegar said.
While podcast ads have been effective in the past, the channel has become less efficient as competition for ad slots increased – for example, where LRB was once one of three ads on an episode, it became one of eight.
“After that, we saw the success of them drop, and so we had to move that marketing spend to something more effective,” said Doegar.
LRB does not run adverts on its website and largely avoids placing them on its app. Instead, its newsletters, which reach around 135,000 subscribers through platform Dotdigital, carry direct-sold ads – slots that “almost always sell up”, said Doegar.
Audience data to understand readers
Audience research has been key in shaping LRB’s strategy, initially prompted by internal circulation figures showing first-time renewal rates as down while two-year renewals were stable.
“One of the reasons we were doing the [audience research] was because we wanted to improve our digital offering and our digital subscription package,” Doegar said. “We all just had assumptions of who our digital audience were.”
The research results challenged these assumptions: younger readers preferred print issues due to having screen fatigue, while older readers loved the app as they could increase the font size.
Before this data came back, LRB were working on digital offerings for younger readers, such as micropayments to allow more frequent payments at a lower rate. Font size on digital is now “an incredibly important consideration”, said Doegar.
“This never occurred to me, so I was going to be developing the wrong product for the wrong audience,” said Doegar.
“I also think that we need to spend more time listening to our audience instead of what we think about the title,” she added.
Despite LRB being “very much a print title”, its digital strategy has become a greater priority with the recent adoption of new subscriptions bureau CDS Global.
“For a while, we didn’t really put digital offers up as available, because we are print title,” said Doegar.
The new bureau makes digital-only subscription packages more visible.
Traffic and paywalls
LRB records around one million website views per month. Content on the title’s website is under a metered paywall, with readers given two free articles a month before being met with an option to subscribe.
The number of free articles offered is often experimented with, while the LRB blog – a section on its site – offers all content for free.
The blog contains shorter, more frequently published pieces and is a “good way for people be able to interact with the LRB and get to know a little bit more about us, without having it all immediately paywalled”.
LRB has seen a drop in Google Search traffic over the past year , but Doegar said the impact of AI-driven impacts to traffic have been manageable with emails and social driving direct traffic “still very effective”.
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