El Pais on phone app store and newspaper. Pictures: Shutterstock/Bangla Press and Shutterstock/Hadrian
The publisher of Spanish newspaper El Pais has set its sights on expansion in the Americas after six years of massive growth in terms of paying online readers.
El Pais launched its first paywall in May 2020 and has gone from zero digital subscribers to 442,092 by the end of 2025 (including print subscribers that have activated digital access). It also has 12 million registered users (people who have signed up to access some free content).
British investment firm Amber Capital is the majority shareholder in Prisa Media owner Grupo Prisa and its founder Joseph Oughourlian has been chairman of the media and education company since 2021.
Oughourlian told the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress last week that when he arrived there was an “urgency” required at El Pais. “Our radio assets were doing fine, but our newspaper assets were ailing.”
Since then, he said: “We’ve grown our subscriber base, we’ve recouped our lost profitability, and El Pais now makes money. It doesn’t make enough money, but it is profitable now. It was loss-making five years ago.”
By audience reach, El Pais is the 35th biggest news website in the world according to Similarweb with 112.7 million visits in May, holding steady with 1% growth year on year unlike the majority of other major newsbrands.
Oughourlian said there are 145 million monthly unique browsers across Prisa Media, which as well as El Pais includes sports newsbrand AS, subscription-based business and finance newsbrand Cinco Dias, the Spanish version of Huffpost, and a number of radio brands in Spain and Latin America.
Prisa Media employs 1,800 journalists out of a total of 3,600 employees (of whom 30% are in Latin America).
Oughourlian said that since 2020 the primary focus at El Pais has been on subscriber growth.
“We needed to rebuild the direct relationship with what I would call our fanbase. We’ve got a lot of readers of El Pais, but like all the media organisations, like all the news organisations, we had given away our product for way too long.”
Oughourlian said he believed El Pais is now “one of the news media brands that’s grown the most in terms of subscribers” in the past five years.
“You could tell us that the starting place was very low. Still, we’re close to half a million subscribers, which isn’t bad for the Spanish market. To give you an idea, our number two competitor is at around 200,000 subs.”
Spain has a population of almost 50 million people, while there is a global population of more than 500 million native Spanish speakers.
El Pais has now set a target of reaching 800,000 subscribers by 2029.
Its other targets include growing from €58m EBITDA profit (earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation and excluding severance costs) in 2025 to €74m in 2029.
And it wants to reach revenue of €520m, up from €438m in 2025.
Oughourlian said: “We feel that a lot of our brands are underdeveloped, and there’s a lot of upside to them, and I feel… that our numbers are very conservative, and I’d be disappointed if we didn’t beat significantly those numbers.”
Latin America makes up half of El Pais audience but just 10% of subscribers
He said the Americas will be a key growth area and that Prisa Media already sees itself “as the leading publisher in the Hispanic market”.
He said they have been “beefing up our newsrooms, particularly in Latin America, where we see the next stage for our growth”. There is a growth opportunity, he said, because El Pais is widely recognised, trusted and seen as “balanced” in a region where journalists are often targeted. Mexico is consistently one of the countries with the highest rates of journalists being murdered.
He said that over the last five years “rather than chasing subscribers in those countries, we’ve tried to build a pool of what will be our future potential subscribers”.
Half of the El Pais audience now comes from Latin America but those countries only make up 10% of subscribers.
“It’s easier said than done. Those are countries that are notoriously difficult when it comes to the subscription model. People are not used to paying for subscriptions. Still, I look at the Netflix numbers in some of the countries that we’re involved in in Latin America, and there are people out there that are willing to pay for at least an entertainment product of size.”
Oughourlian said there had been one advantage to El Pais being a late arrival to subscriptions: “The nice thing about Spain and our group back then is that we were so far behind the Anglo-Saxon world, or even the rest of Europe, that we didn’t really need to think much in terms of what our strategic priorities should be. We just focused on what the others had been doing.”
However, he said El Pais had a challenge that not all newspaper brands did: it did not have an existing subscription relationship with many of its print newspaper readers.
In the 2025 Reuters Institute Digital News Report , 10% of people in Spain said they had paid for online news in the past year, level with the UK and behind the likes of Norway (42%), Sweden (31%), Ireland and the US (both 20%). In Mexico 14% said they pay for online news.
“Spain is not a big subscription market to start with,” Oughourlian said. “We almost envy the northern European nations, where they started off with a base of paper subscription in the hundreds of thousands.
“Unfortunately, in Spain, the habit was that you would buy your newspaper at the kiosk, and so you didn’t have the data, you didn’t have that relationship with your customers, and that’s why we were so late to the game of digital subscription, because there was this fear that… who’s going to come, and it turns out that actually quite a lot of people came.”
El Pais seeing Youtube growth but little financial return
El Pais charges €12 per month or €144 per year for its basic digital subscription after promotional offers (with cheaper options in some Latin American countries).
Oughourlian said he thinks the newspaper is priced “way too low” and that it should be in line with Netflix (which in Spain costs up to €21.99 for the premium package).
The other growth areas highlighted by Oughourlian were trusted news, younger audiences, digital advertising and data, business diversification, and audio/video.
But he was sceptical about the business benefits of platforms like Youtube despite their 55% ad revenue share for videos, or 45% ad revenue from Shorts.
Prisa Media has 13 million followers on Youtube overall, Oughourlian said, adding: “I’m not sure what to make of it, because I don’t see a huge financial return out of it…”
He also said: “There is obviously big growth there. We’re not, unfortunately, making the kind of money that we would want in that space, but I think that we all agree that it helps us create [value] in terms of building our brand, building awareness, growing the video side of our business, and also reaching out to a population which is not necessarily our average reader.”
Oughourlian said he viewed the news industry as “an interesting sector to invest in”, adding that this “may seem surprising at first, but I do think that there is a business case, an investment case for news – for news media, for media in general”.
But he feels the El Pais brand is outsized compared to the actual revenue it brings in.
“Everyone knows El Pais in Spain, everyone knows El Pais in Latin America, and even beyond that, but it is a tiny company by sheer revenue metric, and that’s always surprising, and so the idea is really to grow your revenues into your brand, as opposed to shrink your brand into your revenues.
“Easier said than done, but… we have, with the value of our brand, the capacity to sort of go out and reach out to people on many different other business opportunities and many, many different consumer propositions that sometimes are quite surprising, whether it’s gaming or whether it’s different types of verticals, or even going on a cruise, and that’s that’s a strong value that we should absolutely try and exploit as much as we can. The way I see it is that there’s a whole menu of things that we can do.”
Oughourlian said the aim is also for Prisa Media to develop its sport, music and lifestyle businesses – although they anticipate that news will still make up 65% of revenue in 2029.
He noted for example: “There’s not a lot of people that are very interested in the results of the elections in Extremadura, but outside of Spain, there are a lot of people that would love to know more about the quality of life in Spain, and the best restaurants, the best hotels, the best beaches.”
He also said live events “have been a key development for our group. It’s a very profitable business, and the nice thing about it is that you kind of know from the get-go whether you’re going to be profitable or not with these events.”
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