Inside The Economist’s plan to grow revenues in a post-search, AI-driven future

At the same time, the 180-year-old brand is working to deepen direct ties with readers, sharpen its brand marketing to bolster its discoverability, avoid disintermediation caused by LLMs – and notably, put more focus back on increasing advertising revenue. 

Many of those priorities will be locked in and expanded upon later this month, when the board convenes for a three-year strategy planning session, The Economist’s president Luke Bradley-Jones told Digiday. At the heart of its strategy is the fundamental challenge all publishers face: how to stay ahead in an AI-driven news economy.

“In a world of AI adoption, I think all of us, myself included, are going to become a little bit lazier and just a bit more comfortable getting an answer from an AI platform which is ‘good enough,’ and so you really have to work quite hard to sustain those direct relationships [with readers],” said Bradley-Jones.

The Economist isn’t as exposed to collapsing referral traffic or AI licensing battles as many of its peers, thanks to its premium subscription model (it has 1.25 million subscribers, up 3 percent year over year, with digital subscriptions up 8 percent YoY) and global brand. Its annual revenue for the 12 months ending this March was £368.5 million ($497.4 million), with digital subscriptions up 8 percent YoY.

But insulation isn’t immunity. 

Digiday spoke with Bradley-Jones about why the publisher will never make its content available to license to LLMs, video’s role in offsetting AI disintermediation, and what products are coming down the pike from its in-house AI Lab, which are designed to help deepen subscriber engagement and product stickiness. 

Offsetting risk of AI disintermediation: video series Insider rolls out

Next week (Oct. 9) the publisher is rolling out Insider, a video product built around its editors and their debates, so subscribers can have a front-row seat to the newsroom’s thinking. The long-form shows will be streamed twice a week (available after on-demand) and will be pegged around four monthly verticals: defence, geopolitics, economics and tech.

The video product, free to subscribers, will feature The Economist’s specialist editors including defence editor Shashank Joshi, geopolitics editor David Rennie, economics and finance editors Rachana Shanbhogue, Henry Curr and Mike Bird, and The World Ahead editor Tom Standage, who will be on screen with global leaders and policy makers. 

At The Economist, the byline is the brand – a deliberate counter to the personality-led strategies many publishers are chasing today to reach the creator economy. But more of its products – including Insider – are designed around opening access to its senior journalists to subscribers, with senior editors on camera and interactive Q&As offered around the new video product too. A small shift from The Economist’s traditional anonymity.

But it’s still a far cry from chasing the influencer playbook, Keeping its video aligned with its brand DNA is a good call for orgnizations like The Economist where most journalists were hired for their writing and analysis rather than their charisma in front of a camera, said Laura Darcey, research analyst at media analysis firm Enders. “The Economist must remain authentic its brand and not erode its credibility by trying to fit itself too closely into the image of platform-native creators,” she said.

The Economist has typically focused on short-form explainer videos that run on YouTube or its own site, or the occasional interview with experts. This marks the first time it has built a long-running show around 30-60 minute episodes. And that naturally opens up valuable inventory for advertisers. Anthropic’s Claude AI is the launch sponsor. 

“Our customers have said they’d love to get closer to our journalists and understand more about the debates and insights that inform all of our mainly-written output,” said Bradley-Jones. “[And] strategically, it helps deepen the moat around what we’re offering. It’s much harder for AI to substitute this kind of content, even if you’ve got all the amazing AI video technology rapidly coming down the line – it’s going to be very hard to replicate the quality of the human interaction you can have through a service like Insider,” he added. 

In-house AI products that drive deeper audience engagement 

Unlike many publishers securing AI licensing deals, The Economist is going against the grain – keeping its journalism off-limits and actively blocking AI bots from scraping its content, via its CDN vendor Cloudflare. “We’re building our business for an environment where we don’t expect to get any traffic back from those AI platforms. Fundamentally, their business models and their strategies are aligned to being end-user destinations in their own right and not providing those click-throughs,” said Bradley-Jones. 

And yet, in time, he does believe there will be ways to leverage those channels. The publisher is currently discussing how top stories could appear on those platforms as a form of brand visibility. The goal isn’t to drive traffic or revenue from them, but to use those channels as publicity, while carefully controlling what crawlers can and can’t access. 

Another strand of the plan is to use AI to build products compelling enough not only to pull readers to the Economist, but to then give them a more multi-model experience than they currently have. That includes experiments which test how readers want to consume content today, whether it’s five-minute summaries, 50-minute deep dives, text, video, or audio, he said. 

In the spring, The Economist launched its AI Lab, dedicated to using AI to define and build new ways for subscribers to interact with its content. The Lab, which comprises product engineers, product leads and designers, is currently working on a prototype that is essentially like an internal, ring-fenced LLM built into the website, that lets subscribers query and content what the article is saying via a prompt chatbot. In return, the publisher will draw on its archive of content and the expertise of its journalists to fortify its point of view and clarify the for and against arguments surrounding particular topics, according to Bradley-Jones. 

It’s very much in the testing phase, but the goal is that readers will get a much more interactive experience with the publisher’s content than they ever have before, he added.

Differentiation in an AI-driven world

Converting untapped registered users and social audiences into paying subscribers is an area The Economist is strategizing more aggressively around, noted Bradley-Jones. 

Currently, The Economist has approximately 70 million followers across its social channels, per the publisher. Now, it wants to work on migrating a decent share of those people from social to a more direct, registered user base – where people trade an email address in exchange for access to a limited amount of free content. 

The Economist’s social team is currently working on how it can provide more incentives to people following its social accounts to want to provide their email in a simple way that doesn’t require setting up a password. 

Paywalled publishers have long treated open content as a marketing tool, using it to lure new readers into the funnel and convert them into paying subscribers. Although The Economist has a hard paywall, it has “millions” of registered users, who provide their email in return for free access to a limited amount of content, per the publisher. 

“In the absence of search, rather than getting this kind of steady flow of newcomers to your site, just off natural, organic search, you’ve got to work harder to cultivate that kind of upper funnel, warm headroom,” he said. 

Over the next six months to a year, the publisher wants to slowly build these relationships with younger audiences, give them compelling reasons to want to unlock further content behind its registration wall, and in time, figure out how to monetize them, whether it’s via advertising or upselling them to its paid product, he added. 

Last month, the publisher launched a Substack newsletter as part of plans to test demand for new, niche topic areas.

Bradley-Jones said the Substack launch is an experiment, but one with a mapped-out path if it succeeds. The goal isn’t to unbundle the Economist’s core subscription, but use it to test niche offerings that can build new audiences without cannibalizing the main bundle, he said. By choosing topics that are strong but not central to its core readership, the publisher can attract fresh, engaged communities on Substack, strengthen its brand and expand its reach without risking subscribers downgrading from the main service, he added.

“What The Economist is and how we turn up for our customers, both our kind of existing core customer base, but also the next generation of customers, is changing quickly, and that’s partly about making ourselves as differentiated from the AI kind of generated content out there as possible, but it’s partly also about staying relevant to the next generation of customers, so we’re around for another 180 years,” he said.