Is the Guardian dying?

The Guardian ran at a £39 million deficit in 2023 after declining ad revenues, falling paper sales, and below expectation subscription sign-ups.

The Guardian has announced yet another deficit in their accounts, blaming the £39 million shortfall in 2023 on collapsing online ad revenues, falling newspaper sales, and below expectation subscriber sign-ups.

The Guardian were expecting to make £60 million in advertising revenue in the period, but they fell £12 million short. This 20% shortfall is responsible for a big chunk of the deficit, and things are likely to continue to get worse for the Guardian after Google follow Mozilla and Safari in phasing out 3rd party cookies, turning off the fortunes available to news websites by allowing advertisers to pay to snoop on their readers’ online activities.

It’s no surprise that paper sales are down again given how "dead tree technology" is rapidly going out of fashion. It’s the same across the rest of the newspaper industry.

The Guardian’s subscription model is faltering despite readers having to click through exhortations to subscribe to actually read articles they’ve been sent, and ever-longer begging letters at the foot of every article.

It’s hardly surprising that many former decades-long readers are now unwilling to bankroll the current mob at the Guardian given how the paper led the demonisation of the Labour left during the Corbyn years, declared open season on a significant proportion of their own readership ("cranks", "dog", "trots", "cultists", "extremists", "antisemites" as they repeatedly called us), and then celebrated as The Silent Knight and the Saboteurs gleefully ripped up all of the election pledges they fabricated in order to steal the Labour leadership back into the hands of the pro-austerity, ultra-capitalist right wing of the party.

It’s a bit much to spew absolute contempt at your readers for years, sabotage their aspirations of a slightly fairer society, help install Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, and then beg them for financial support.

Then there’s the collapse in social media traffic to news and politics sites of all descriptions as Facebook and Twitter have tweaked their algorithms to pivot dramatically away from distributing links to external sites towards becoming online "walled gardens". Within a few years huge torrents of social media visitors to viral articles have become small streams, and the constant general flow of traffic has been reduced to an intermittent trickle.

The Guardian is far from alone in suffering these kinds of issues, and making substantial losses:

•News UK (The S*n, Times, TalkTV) lost a whopping £127 million in 2022.

• The Daily Mail Group no longer publishes the scale of their losses after their non-dom owner converted it from a public company into a secretive private offshore operation in 2022, but they used poor financial performance to justify even more downscaling and redundancies the following year.

• In November 2023 Reach (Mirror, Express, multiple local outlets like Manchester Evening News) announced 450 redundancies across its titles as a result of poor financial performance.

• GB News lost £31 million in its first year on air, almost ten times the channel’s revenue of just £3.6 million!

Enormous financial losses at capitalist media outlets make it clear that the purpose of these businesses isn’t to generate profit, but to control and dictate public discourse at the financial expense of the owners, who clearly have very deep pockets to continue bankrolling these lossmaking propaganda outlets.

The Guardian Media Group is owned by the Scott Trust Limited which is a private wealth fund worth £1.2447 billion. This fund exists to bankroll the Guardian newspaper operation but it’s run as a profoundly undemocratic cartel, with Guardian staff, readers, and subscribers having absolutely no say who is appointed to the board.

The mega-virality of independent left-wing sites during the 2017 General Election made it absolutely clear that there was a huge public appetite for left-wing policies like ending austerity ruination, renationalisation of core industries and services, scrapping rip-off tuition fees, fairer taxes, affordable housing, dignity for disabled people, and a proper pay raise for downtrodden British workers. However the Guardian didn’t just turn their back on the millions who wanted these things, they worked tirelessly to oppose them, and endlessly platformed and encouraged the absolute worst of the Labour right ghouls to hurl smears and abuse at a significant swathe of the paper’s own readership.

Of course it’s difficult to turn a profit when you deliberately insult and abuse your own readers, and work tirelessly in opposition to what they want, but a £39 million loss doesn’t look all that bad when it only adds up to a tiny fraction of the £1.2 billion slush fund behind your liberal-capitalist propaganda operation.