We were standing by the side of a road in Hamburg, waiting for a taxi after presenting the preliminary findings of this study to a group of funders and investors around the Media Forward Fund. Sebastian Klein, the co-founder of Blinkist and now the founder of Karma Capital, had been in the audience. He came over with a question. We had said that the outlets in our sample took, on average, roughly three years to break even. But why, he asked, would a company with capital want to break even at all? If investors have given you money to build and grow, surely the point is to spend it.
It was a reasonable question. In the venture-capital model the strategy runs: raise money, spend it on growth, raise more, keep scaling toward a market that may be enormous. Investors do not want their money sitting safely in the bank producing a modest annual profit; they want it used to pursue the hockey stick. Media founders have been socialized into a different world. Perhaps three decades of industry crisis have made them cautious; perhaps the economics simply demand it. Their markets are bounded by language, geography, subject matter and the finite number of people willing to pay for journalism. And for quite a few of them, the venture was never really the point; the journalism is.
Revenues
The latest closed financial years span a range from around €700,000 (Dossier) to €28.1 million (Mediapart). The median sits around €4.6 million. The mean, dragged upward by the top performers (Mediapart above all, followed by elDiario.es at €17.35 million and Contexte at €12.94 million) is closer to €6–7 million, and readers of the founding-capital chapter will recognize the shape immediately. Like nearly every money question in this study, revenue is skewed: a small group of scalers stretches the average, while the typical outlet in this sample is a €2–8 million business.
Figure 10›From €700k to €28M
€ million turnover, latest closed year, from the profiles; ~ marks approximate values, and The Kyiv Independent’s €2–3M is shown at its midpointAnd the numbers are still growing, including at the top end of the cohort. Contexte added a fifth to its revenue in 2025, on a €10.7 million base. Mediapart added €3 million in the same year, on its way to €28 million, eighteen years after launch. At the extreme sits the study’s strangest growth event: CORRECTIV’s total revenue nearly doubled in 2024, from €4.8 million to €9.4 million, in the year a single investigation made it the most talked-about newsroom in Germany.
Costs
The money is mostly spent on people. Wages and the costs on top of them absorb the dominant share of spending across the sample, typically somewhere between 50 and 75 percent of everything spent. Tsüri’s published 2025 budget is the cleanest specimen: 63 percent wages plus 12 percent social security, three-quarters of the company, with the remaining quarter split between marketing (10 percent), IT and design, operations and rent, and accounting.
A cost base that is up to three-quarters people is largely fixed, which cuts both ways: every new subscriber is nearly pure margin once the newsroom is paid for, but if a downturn arrives, payroll is difficult to trim without cutting the product itself. This may also contribute to the conservative approach to liquidity described later, in the chapter on risk and threat models: when the principal cost is a payroll that cannot be cut without weakening the journalism, holding larger cash reserves than might otherwise seem necessary is a sort of insurance.
Marketing, the largest discretionary line in a lot of online consumer businesses, is strikingly small here: a tenth of Tsüri’s budget is the high end of normal, and several publishers spend next to nothing at all. Whether that is discipline or underinvestment is precisely the question Chapter 6 examines.
P&L
Put the two lines together and the distribution of net margins has a row of outlets floating just above or a hair below zero.
Figure 11›Margins
Net result as % of turnover, latest closed year, from the profiles, some approximate. Will Media reports EBITDA; The Kyiv Independent reports a profit but no figureIn 2024, Krautreporter—a pioneer of membership journalism in Germany, now a decade old and generating more than €1 million a year—closed its books with a net result of minus €1,720, under 0.2 percent of revenue or the price of a decent laptop. Across the cohort’s latest closed accounts, result after result lands within touching distance of zero: OKO.press at minus €21,000, Dossier practically at 0, one year slightly above, one year slightly below. Million-euro businesses intent on making almost exactly nothing, year after year.
As we saw earlier, few of these ventures were built to maximize profit. Later, Chapter 10 returns in more detail to the question of dividends and exits: what happens when a surplus appears and how these companies think about financial return. For now, the important point is that narrow margins are often deliberate.
Still, there are some reasonably profitable companies here.
Mediapart earned €4.4 million on €28.1 million in 2025, a net margin around 16 percent, sustained for well over a decade. A cluster of others runs somewhere around ten percent. CORRECTIV’s €1.6 million on €9.4 million in 2024 looked like a spike-year figure, until their revenue in 2025 passed the threshold of €10 million. And Contexte shows what an invest-through cycle looks like in this sector: a €1.5 million loss in 2023, back to half a million of profit by 2025, the dip being product investment rather than trouble.
Recorder and Zetland sit at the top of the pack on margin, at roughly 57 and 34 percent, though on smaller revenue bases: in absolute terms Mediapart remains by far the biggest earner.
How long to break even
Six outlets report reaching break-even within their first year; the median is three years. The tail is long: CORRECTIV and Magyar Jeti took seven, and Telegram in Croatia took ten. The statutory filings tell the same story on a slightly faster clock: the first profitable year arrives on average 2.7 years after founding, with a median of two.
Figure 12›Three years, give or take
Years from launch to first break-evenWhat pushed them over is nearly unanimous: growth in audience revenue, named as the decisive factor by seventeen of the nineteen outlets that answered. Only one credited cost-cutting. Diversification, the perennial conference-panel answer, was almost never identified as the factor that pushed an outlet across break-even. Sometimes, however, several things simply fell into place at once. Zetland’s first profitable year, 2019, combined a one-off technology sale, a Danish VAT change (more on that later), and an ambassador campaign that grew recurring revenue by a quarter in a single month.
Contexte broke even in year one but its founder waves this away: it “doesn’t mean much.” What mattered was product–market fit, which arrived in year three and announced itself through improving retention figures and subscribers saying so.
Reaching break-even and staying there are two different problems. Smoothed over three-year windows, the sample splits into two shapes: curves that turn positive once and never look back—elDiario.es, Denník N, Mediapart after its early trough, Recorder—and oscillators. Republik is the canonical relapse: it broke even in mid-2020 only after an emergency campaign lifted renewal rates from 61 to 75 percent, returned to losses in 2022 when it launched “ambitious” new projects at “increased financial risk,” and clawed its way back again. Brief Media relapsed on purpose, following its first break-even with two years of what its founder calls controlled losses to hire ahead of revenue (and has been steadily profitable since 2020).