Daily Beast subscription sign-up page
The Daily Beast saw double-digit percentage growth in subscribers in 2025 after starting to treat subscriptions as a “core growth engine”.
Paying subscribers to the core Daily Beast website/app surpassed 100,000 in January.
Daily Beast president and chief operating officer Keith Bonnici told Press Gazette the brand saw double-digit year-on-year growth, describing subscriptions as a “meaningful revenue influencer” for the business.
“We’re investing in it so that should actually be something that continues to drive our growth.”
The Daily Beast reported an annual profit for the first time in its 17-year history in 2025.
It has launched separate paid offerings on Substack and Youtube , hoping to reach different audience bases. Four Substack newsletters collectively have thousands of paying subscribers and the Youtube channel has a further few thousand.
[Read more: AI is ‘direct contributor’ to increase profitability at The Daily Beast ]
The newsbrand began to ramp up subscriptions marketing late last year after hiring Reema Rao, who had been leading subscriptions growth at the Wall Street Journal and previously helped to launch streaming service HBO Max, as senior vice president of consumer marketing and subscription strategy. She is now leading a dedicated consumer marketing team of five people.
The changes have taken place after the April 2024 takeover of The Daily Beast by former Hearst Magazines chief content officer Joanna Coles and ex-Disney executive Ben Sherwood, who each took a minority stake from majority owner IAC. Bonnici, who had advised on the deal, formally joined the leadership team later that year.
Bonnici said: “When Ben and Joanna and I came on board in mid-2024, we came in because we knew that the Daily Beast brand was strong enough to actually have a subscription-based business.
“It takes a certain type of product for people to be willing to pay for it. And so that was the primary driver for us taking on the Beast.”
He added that the leadership team is “investing heavily” in journalism and “needed to have a sustainable revenue source, and that’s why we made the investment” in subscriptions.
Rao added that before the takeover, subscriptions were treated as “a nice-to-have, not a core part of the business”. They are now a “core growth engine”.
[Read more insights aimed at US-based readers of Press Gazette via our weekly Future of Media US newsletter ]
The Daily Beast has been added to Press Gazette’s annual ranking of English-language news and magazine publishers with 100,000 or more digital subscribers.
Bonnici noted that there are “only a handful” of publishers on the list, such as Business Insider and The Free Press, “that were not either magazine or newspapers in the past. The Daily Beast is one of the only digital native, digital-only, never-been-print businesses that have got that volume of subscriptions. And I take pride in that.”
A Daily Beast website subscription includes full access to the website and app, ad-free newsletters, subscriber commenting access, and early information about events. Users are told they are supporting “fearless journalism” and funding “the stories others won’t tell”.
Following a recent price increase as part of the new strategy, it [now costs $35 (£26) for the first year](https://www.thedailybeast.com/membership/) and then $59.99 (£44.60). For an ad-free website experience the cost is $99 (£73.65) for a year and then $119.99 (£89.26).
Bonnici said he believes the subscription is still “underpriced in terms of what our audience is willing to spend”.
He described the core audience as “very affluent” and “very loyal”. Direct traffic is the biggest source for The Daily Beast on 35.3% globally, according to Similarweb, just ahead of organic search on 34.8%. Social media is next on 25.1%.
The website audience overall was down 16% year on year in February to 19 million global visits according to Similarweb, but appears to have largely stabilised following a peak in July 2024 of 35.1 million.
Bonnici said any declines in search because of changing audience habits and the arrival of Google’s AI Overviews “are being more than offset by our growth from other areas”.
Rao noted that across the industry “where everyone is going is building those direct relationships, and those direct relationships are most successful when it is a subscription”.
The Daily Beast audience has a fairly even split between men and women, Bonnici said, adding that people may be surprised that it is “pretty evenly distributed” politically between conservative, liberal and independent voters. Subscribers are primarily in the US although international expansion could become a long-term goal.
The audience skews older, which Rao attributed to the fact that The Daily Beast’s loyal readers have grown older with it over the past 18 years. She therefore sees a “big opportunity” to grow a younger audience, in particular “young professionals”.
According to Rao, who described The Daily Beast as a “highbrow sort of tabloid”, political and opinion content are the biggest subscription drivers.
Daily Beast Substack newsletters backed with staff investment
The Daily Beast’s subscription offerings on Substack and Youtube are separate editorial products, all of which were launched last year under what Bonnici described as a “portfolio product approach”.
The Royalist by European editor-at-large Tom Sykes was The Daily Beast’s first launch on Substack last summer, offering regular deeper dives into the royal family. It now appears in Substack’s top paid news bestsellers list (35th at the time of writing) and has more than 65,000 subscribers (free and paid). Sykes also continues to write for the main Daily Beast site.
The second launch, Obsessed by Kevin Fallon, is 30th in the film and tv bestsellers list with more than 28,000 subscribers. It builds on the website’s pop culture hub Obsessed.
The two latest newsletter arrivals, The Swamp from The Daily Beast’s Washington DC team, and Primal Scream from Joanna Coles are on the Substack “rising” lists for US politics (currently second place) and culture (55th) respectively.
Top of Daily Beast Substack newsletter The Swamp on 8 April 2026
Each Substack costs £46 (about $62) per year for full access, with the option to pay more to support the brand.
The Daily Beast is backing the Substack launches with specific investment and has built a dedicated paid newsletter team to support the journalists putting them out.
Bonnici said they expect to more than double the number of paid newsletters this year.
Explaining why they had chosen to launch separate subscriptions on Substack instead of making newsletters part of the core website package, Bonnici said The Daily Beast is “trying to get ahead of AI in a way” and described the “journalist-to-consumer pipeline” as “extremely important…
“People come to the Beast to interact with all of our journalists, but there’s some demand for people that want to just interact with one of our journalists – so Substack is a way to allow for that. It allows our journalists to both contribute to the greater Beast, but also have a supplemental content relationship with consumers directly.”
He added that Substack enables Daily Beast journalists to put out content that might not make a whole website article “but are just engagement moments, notes or short off-topic conversations”.
Bonnici also described the Substack audience (said to be more than 50 million active subscribers, with five million who pay) as “a robust audience set that is very subscription minded and willing to support journalists and support journalism directly through subscription”.
Rao said Substack was a “complementary part of our broader subscription strategy” and that it has a distinct audience from the main Daily Beast website which means “cannibalisation is not concerning at this point”.
Daily Beast sees paid opportunity in huge Youtube audience
On Youtube, The Daily Beast has a channel hosting its video podcasts which Bonnici said had added 500,000 free subscribers since May 2025 to reach 607,000.
A paid subscription tier has recently been added to the Youtube channel, costing $1.99 or £1.99 per month for members-only polls and posts and custom emojis and loyalty badges in the comments and live chat.
The next tier costs $4.99/£4.99 monthly and includes early access to videos, members-only livestreams and shoutouts, plus 83% off a one-year website subscription to The Daily Beast. The final tier, which costs $24.99/£22.99, includes a website subscription as well as the Youtube perks.
Bonnici said “only a fraction” of Youtube users come to The Daily Beast. “So by not having a subscription product on that platform, we’re basically ignoring” hundreds of millions of potential subscribers.
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He continued: “You create a product for the environment that you’re in, and we are a multi-platform publisher, we’re on Yahoo and MSN and Apple News+ and we’re on Youtube and we’re on Substack and we’re on podcast channels, soon to be FAST.
“We are multi-platform, so putting a product that fits the audiences on those platforms is really important to us and making sure there is a subscription product on those platforms for our audience there is important to us because if we didn’t have those products, we’d basically be saying we’re a subscription business, but only on a portion of where our audience is.”
Overall Bonnici feels subscriptions are “the purest form of recurring revenue that you can actually plan a business around, because it’s less subject to the whims of the macroeconomy”.
Even if major news events such as the Iran war lead to greater consumer uncertainty, Bonnici cited several reasons he still felt confident, including the fact that a large part of The Daily Beast’s subscriber base are signed up annually instead of monthly and that they are “hyper engaged” and hit the site daily.
He added: “And in times of war, frankly, where you see people spend is comfort, whether it’s alcohol or food or The Daily Beast, [which] I consider a guilty pleasure for a lot of people. They come there because it is a form of information but it’s also information in a way that’s entertaining.”
Daily Beast president Keith Bonnici speaking on a panel at Press Gazette’s Media Strategy Network USA event in New York on 12 March 2026. Picture: Nick Starichenko/Press Gazette
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