Ben Smith, co-founder and editor-in-chief of Semafor. Picture: Semafor
Semafor will “double down on what’s working” in 2026 with new editorial investment in London and Washington DC after reporting its first profitable year, according to co-founder Ben Smith.
Semafor was founded by Smith and former Bloomberg Media chief executive Justin Smith in October 2022 with the idea that a highly educated audience was unsatisfied with the news and wanted “distilled intelligence” amid information overload.
The publisher focuses on email briefings in several key verticals including politics, business, technology, energy and media. It also has editions for the Gulf, Africa, and an invite-only newsletter for CEOs of companies with at least $500m in revenue.
It says it has more than one million email subscribers in total.
Semafor also runs events providing a similar level of expertise and intelligence, including the Semafor World Economy Summit in Washington DC which it says is the biggest gathering of global CEOs held in the US.
In 2025, its third full year, Semafor has said it brought in $40m (£29m) in revenue and achieved profitability with $2m (£1.5m) in EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation).
Semafor also announced it had brought in $30m (£21.8m) in new financing, giving it a valuation of $300m (£217.8m).
Editor-in-chief Ben Smith spoke to Press Gazette’s Future of Media Explained podcast while he was in London before travelling to Davos earlier this month.
He said editorial investment is coming following the new financing: “We’re doubling down on the stuff that’s really working for us.”
In particular he said Semafor will invest in coverage from Washington DC, business coverage, the Gulf which he said is “such a hub for this sort of new world economy”, and Asia – in particular a new China newsletter.
Semafor prospects for 2026
Semafor has a team of just over 100 people in total, of whom nine are based on London’s Fleet Street overseeing global coverage.
Smith said this team in the UK will “definitely be growing” including the hiring of business editors and correspondents as they seek to compete with the Financial Times and The Economist.
Smith said the “basic thesis” behind Semafor, that a leadership class of audience is broadly dissatisfied with the news on offer to them, “is panning out”.
He added: “I think what we tried to do was take quite seriously the things people say when you ask them why they’re unhappy with the news. And the main one is just that it’s overwhelming and disorienting. There’s so much incoming.
“What had been the blessing of social media and of the web, which was just that you go ‘oh my gosh, I’m not stuck with my broadcast or my newspaper, I can read anything from everywhere’ has turned into this flood of content, not knowing what to trust now, not even knowing what’s real.
“A big part of what we’re trying to do is to provide orientation in that space, and then on the other side of that coin to hire real experts on key beats to break news but also to put that news in context, to explain, to share their analysis of it, but also find other intelligent analysis.”
Smith is therefore “very optimistic” about Semafor’s prospects for the year ahead despite a gloomy time for much of the media due to changing audience habits and falling Google traffic.
Smith said: “In some ways, other people’s challenges are the thing that make it an advantage to start from scratch… We were born into this weird apocalyptic landscape when it comes to the web and didn’t launch with a big bet on the web, didn’t launch with a web subscription business, didn’t launch with an advertising business that’s primarily web based.”
Semafor’s journalism is funded by brands who want to reach decision makers by sponsoring the email briefings, podcasts, website content and events.
Smith said: “One of the important nuances to do with the way the news business is working now is that consumer businesses are in real trouble. Consumer advertising is the thing that’s been swallowed up by Google and Meta. The corporate brand advertising, reputational advertising, is really a different category.”
Semafor events ensure journalism is ‘at the core’
Smith noted that the same applies to Washington DC-based businesses like Politico, Axios and Punchbowl which also target decision makers and are part of a “much healthier ad market”.
“Our event sponsorships are sort of in a parallel track,” he added, “where we’re not trying to build a mass consumer business. We’re reaching a very, very valuable subset of consumers very directly and there are people willing to pay a higher rate to reach them.”
Smith said Semafor’s “bet on convening” was paying off. “A little of it is the post-Covid thing. Some of that is the degradation of the digital space. But I think both make these in-person gatherings even more valuable.”
The flagship event Semafor World Economy Summit hosted more than 200 public and private sector executives, representatives from civil society organisations, academics and media over three days last year.
In April this year it will expand to five days and Smith said it will be “twice as big”.
He cited business partner Justin Smith who has said events are “basically the best business that’s really close to journalism – the highest margin, the quickest to stand up, and the best economics”. Semafor therefore launched events before its digital product went live in 2022.
Smith said that crucially “the core of the event is the journalism, is big interviews on stage – and real interviews…
“I had some kind of neurosis that maybe you can go to a lot of events that are really boring and where it’s sort of marketers interviewing each other about how great they are. And I did have some worry that maybe that’s a feature, not a bug. Maybe the only way to get people to these events is to be boring. And that turned out not to be true.
“It turns out that CEOs, senior politicians, also don’t really want to be bored and don’t want to sit on stage for an hour retelling tired anecdotes they’ve told 1,000 times and would rather have a challenging exchange with a journalist.”
The biggest mistake Semafor made, Smith said, was that they began with the view that video “had matured and that you could build a business around quality mini docs and things like that that were aligned to the journalism, but also to what marketers wanted.”
He hired Joe Posner, who spent nine years leading video at Vox, as head of video. But Smith said that although they “made a bunch of great stuff that I’m really proud of” they “just couldn’t figure out the business at all and pulled the plug on it”. Posner left the business in December 2023.
“Part of doing these things is you have to be really clear eyed… kind of unsentimental about what’s working, what’s not,” Smith said.
Why Semafor has still not launched a paywall
Semafor launched without a paywall, although Smith said: “Down the road we’d anticipate subscriptions, but not immediately.”
He said some news businesses choose to start with a hard paywall “partly because you’re signalling a value – maybe you have a small, discrete audience of subscribers you can target and reach, and obviously you get revenue from the start. The downside is you’re really limiting your ceiling and it’s hard to grow.
“I think the other view is you try to build a big brand and a big audience and then once you’ve proven your value to people, you start charging them.” He noted that Justin Smith did this at Bloomberg Media by building its consumer-facing presence before adding a hard paywall and “that has been a huge success for them”.
Smith continued that as a start-up it is wise not to “do too many things at the same time. We have a great advertising and are really focused on that commercially, and event sponsorships.”
Smith said what has been key was that Semafor built “very intentionally around a business, and to realise revenue is the lifeblood of this thing. We’re not trying to build something where we just raise and spend money. We’re trying to build something that is profitable, that’s sustaining.”
His advice for other journalists who are thinking about starting their own business was to “find a partner who is as obsessed with revenue as you are with scoops and with information” – referring to Justin Smith in his case.
He said: “The talent makes just as big a difference on the commercial side as on the editorial side and and I do think that a lot of news start-ups almost treat the business side, treat revenue as an afterthought, or something that the journalists will be able to figure out. I mean, that’s not wrong, but you wouldn’t do it the other way, right?”
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