London-based The Independent bets on US expansion

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The Independent, the London-based media group, is targeting US expansion around the presidential election after operating profits almost doubled last year.

In accounts filed this week, The Independent will show that visitor numbers grew by a fifth in the US last year. According to data from Comscore, it was a top 10 news brand in that market, with 26.2mn readers.

The US editorial team grew by 40 per cent last year to about 50 journalists as it added to its team ahead of this year’s presidential election. It is now led by Louise Thomas, who left her role as editor of MailOnline to join The Independent at the end of last year.

Christian Broughton, chief executive of Independent Digital News Media, said that the group was on track for “double-digit revenue growth in 2024”. Earlier this year The Independent acquired Buzzfeed’s UK operations.

The online-only newspaper has already invested in its US operations. Broughton said that American audiences were eager for non-partisan news coverage from a brand such as The Independent. It now wants to turn reader growth into revenue growth.

“The brand is taking hold in the [US] market,” Broughton said, pointing to a focus on news and subjects he said audiences were “hungry for”, in areas such as travel and politics.

“It’s the right tone and brand for America right now,” he added.

The growth of The Independent in the US will be heartening for other British newspaper brands also targeting North America as an area for expansion. Some of the parties seeking to acquire the Telegraph titles have based their strategies on finding a larger US audience.

However, the Sun and the Mail have both made redundancies to US editorial teams this month. That suggests some newsrooms are struggling to maintain growth as some social media platforms such as Facebook curtailed referrals to news sites. 

The Independent has more than 6mn registered users, of whom some pay for a subscription for its content in the UK.

For the financial year ending December 2023, The Independent increased its operating profit by 82 per cent to £3.5mn, having invested in areas such as TV, ecommerce, AI and its US expansion. Revenue rose to £56mn, from £46.3mn in the year before, with about a quarter generated in the US. 

Revenues were also driven by its ecommerce business and its Independent TV service, which makes original programming such as Bel Trew’s documentary on war crimes in Ukraine, The Body in the Woods.

John Paton, chair of Independent Digital News Media, said: “Last year we announced our key strategic pillars to increase profit and boost revenue by diversifying beyond a reliance on advertising.”

The Independent is owned by a group including media entrepreneurs Evgeny Lebedev and Justin Byam Shaw, as well as its management.

The media group has launched pilot projects — such as translation, analysing public data sets and optimising commercial data — to integrate Al in its newsroom to boost productivity. The Independent is working with Al providers to develop Al-driven products that will be launched next year. 

In March, The Independent announced a licensing deal with BuzzFeed to operate the brand and its teams in the UK and Ireland. Broughton said the deal had given the group scope to offer commercial partners a younger “Gen Z” audience alongside the older, traditional readership of The Independent. The group’s brands now include Tasty, Seasoned and HuffPost.