We will never have a marketing department

On Saturday mornings, somewhere in the Netherlands, a reader opens a printed newspaper and finds a full-page advertisement for Follow the Money, one of Europe’s most digital-native investigative newsrooms, buying space in one of the oldest mediums there is. In the corner of the page sits a QR-code. Scan it, and it drops you into a trial membership. The whole loop costs Follow the Money about €55 per new member, against a lifetime value of roughly €300. It is one of the best-performing acquisition channels anywhere in our sample, and its existence raises the question this chapter keeps circling: if deliberate, measured marketing works this well for public-interest journalism, why do relatively few in the cohort actually do it?

Not knowing your numbers

Successful as they are, quite a few in our cohort cannot tell you what a customer costs to acquire. Data-driven CAC calculation is not universally implemented across the sample; several publishers, including some of the largest and most mature, report no established figure at all, still relying on organic, largely untracked growth.

Part of the reason may be cultural. One publisher put it plainly: “I always said we will never have a marketing department,” and did not build one until the venture’s ninth year. Beneath this lack of intentionality lies a belief that the value of public-interest journalism should be self-evident, while marketing belongs to a more commercial, faintly tainted world. Growth expertise is also scarce and expensive, a hiring problem we return to in the next chapter on HR.

Sometimes that capacity can come from a funder: a Media Forward Fund grant enabled Dossier to work with students from the Hamburg Media School, who calculated an acquisition cost of €70 against a customer lifetime value of €232.98 in 2025.

And sometimes the expertise does exist in-house. Even before launching Mill Media, Joshi Herrmann calculated his CAC from testing and projections and spent his own money on Facebook ads before the company earned any revenue. The model since day one has been simple: roughly €5 buys a free newsletter signup, “and then the journalism converts them.”

The other publishers that know their numbers tell a similar story. At Brief.me, acquisition is held strictly below the €69 price of one year’s subscription, against a lifetime value near €200. Zetland’s blended Danish CAC is about €30 against a €150–250 lifetime value; Contexte recoups its B2B acquisition cost in about a year. Wherever the ratio can be calculated, lifetime value covers acquisition cost three times over or better.

Organic social on top

For all the justified controversy around their power, social-media platforms remain the cohort’s number-one acquisition channel: every publisher in our sample uses them to acquire new paying customers. Newsletters are also a great conversion bridge: at founding, only six publishers ran a newsletter or email channel; today, sixteen do. Paid channels barely existed at launch: only three publishers ran any paid social at all; today fourteen do.

Outliers include Follow the Money, which now names ‘offline’ as its primary channel (the weekend-paper code above); Republik, which buys billboards; and Krautreporter, which lists Pocket, a read-it-later app that no longer exists, among its best-performing channels.

Set marketing spend against turnover and the ratios are strikingly small, for most of the cohort, low single digits of revenue, against the double-digit shares routine in consumer-subscription industries; several publishers spend under €10,000 a year, and only Mediapart and Zetland (the latter driven by international expansion) reach the €500,000–1,500,000 band, though they certainly have the results to show for it.

Growth arrives as an event

Publishers can build growth deliberately through distribution and marketing. But even among those that do, the largest jumps in our sample arrived through shocks, political crises, legal attacks, war and pandemic, that suddenly made the value of trusted journalism visible to far more people.

CORRECTIV’s revenue nearly doubled in 2024, from €4.8 million to €9.4 million, in the year its Geheimplan investigation put secret deportation planning on Germany’s front pages and hundreds of thousands of people into the streets. Our own conservative attribution puts the investigation’s revenue effect north of €1 million; CORRECTIV puts it closer to €4 million. A SLAPP suit against Dossier brought 3,000 new members. The Kyiv Independent gained almost 7,000 paying patrons within weeks of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. And 444 launched its most successful fundraising campaign in August 2020, into the wave of public anger that followed the capture of Hungary’s largest newsroom.

We also asked every publisher whether the surge of audience attention during COVID benefited them financially: fifteen of twenty-one answered “completely true.” Several told us, in so many words, that this was when the business got built; that it could not have been built otherwise.

When uncertainty rises, people seek out sources they trust and are willing to pay for reliable information. That gives the sector a counter-cyclical dimension: public need, attention and willingness to support journalism can rise precisely when the surrounding environment deteriorates. Publishers, of course, cannot schedule these moments, but they can have the membership offer, acquisition funnel and payment systems ready when they arrive, and respond quickly enough to turn a sudden surge of attention and trust into durable support.

Priced to just survive

Mediapart launched in 2008 at €9 a month, deliberately under the psychological ceiling of ten, and has raised the price only twice since: to €11 in 2018 and €12 in 2023, and only under cost pressure. Zetland waited more than four years for its first increase, then raised by roughly 30 percent and kept growing. Denník N pushed print prices up sharply in 2023 and set a record revenue year doing it. Dossier moved its membership from €52 to €65 in 2023, lost essentially nobody, and in our interview talked itself upward in real time to €79, “maybe even more.” Across some fifty hours of interviews, nobody told us a story about a price increase that went wrong.

There is something in the nature of public-interest information ventures that underprices the value they deliver. We have seen it throughout this cohort and, just as consistently, in our consulting work beyond it: the founder asks €6 where the product justifies €9, prices for the mission’s sense of accessibility rather than for the value delivered, and treats the price lever as if it were wired to an alarm. It is probably the cheapest unexercised asset in the sector.

The only outlet in the cohort that does not have this problem is Contexte, and it does not let you subscribe directly: there is no online checkout (deliberately, so individual sales never undercut the model) and no individual licenses. You start a trial; a sales department researches your organization, reads your usage data, and calls you with a recommended tier. Contracts average around €9,000 and run from €500 for a small NGO to €150,000 for a large corporation or public institution. Contexte prices (and sells) like the software company it structurally resembles, and it is no coincidence that this is also the cohort’s fastest-growing business. Almost everyone else prices like a cause.