Publishers leaning into subscriptions

The Daily Beast spent years acting like a free news site with a pay option on the side. In 2025, it flipped that logic and treated subscriptions as the main growth engine, pushing its core website and app past 100,000 paying subscribers in January 2026. (pressgazette.co.uk) That is a sharp turn for a publisher that spent most of its 17-year life chasing scale, traffic, and advertising. The same Press Gazette report says 2025 was the first year The Daily Beast posted an annual profit. (pressgazette.co.uk) The new part is not just charging on its own site. The Daily Beast also started selling paid products on Substack and YouTube, which means readers can now subscribe inside platforms they already use instead of being pushed back to one company homepage. (pressgazette.co.uk) That matters because the old publisher model depended on two fragile things: Google and Facebook sending traffic, and advertisers paying enough to cover a newsroom. When either one weakens, a publisher with direct billing has a steadier cash register. (pressgazette.co.uk) Substack has become one of the clearest examples of that shift. The platform said it had more than 5 million paid subscriptions by March 2025, and more than 50 writers were earning over $1 million a year there from subscriptions alone. (hollywoodreporter.com) YouTube is changing for the same reason from the video side. Business of Apps says YouTube reached 100 million YouTube Premium and YouTube Music subscribers in 2024 and generated $14.5 billion from subscriptions that year, which shows how normal recurring payments have become on a platform once defined almost entirely by ads. (businessofapps.com) For publishers, that creates a new playbook: keep the main site, but sell access wherever the audience already has a habit. A reader who opens email in Substack and a viewer who watches interviews on YouTube can now be turned into paying customers without ever typing in a homepage. (pressgazette.co.uk) The trade-off is that publishers give up some control when they bill through someone else’s platform. Substack takes a 10% cut of subscription revenue, which is the price of using its payment system, app, and discovery tools instead of owning the whole customer relationship yourself. (substack.com) So this is not a story about one outlet adding a paywall. It is a story about publishers building several checkout counters at once, with The Daily Beast now selling news on its own site, on Substack, and on YouTube because one front door is no longer enough. (pressgazette.co.uk)