To share our insights beyond the Festival, here are eight common misconceptions about donations, debunked.

Misconception #1: “There’s no framework, nor advantage to a donation model.”

This is, of course, false. While donations have long been seen as a source of revenue that only works in countries with a strong philanthropic culture, this is no longer true today, and the French legal framework has contributed greatly to this change.

Since 2015, the “Charb amendment,” a provision adopted after the attack on Charlie Hebdo, has allowed political and general news media companies to receive tax-exempt donations through associations dedicated to press pluralism. In concrete terms, individuals can deduct 66% of their donation (up to a limit of 20% of taxable income); the organizations Presse & Pluralisme and J’aime l’info are responsible for collecting and tracking donations. This is a strong argument that puts France in an advantageous position compared to its European counterparts.

Misconception #2: “In France, donations are limited.”

This is no longer the case. As documented by La Revue des médias de l’INA, the J’aime l’info platform raised more than €7 million in 2024, compared to €5.1 million in 2023 and €1.8 million in 2020, with a trajectory that could exceed €10 million in 2025 or 2026.

In practice, donations can finance an entire model: for example, Reporterre, a pioneering media outlet in France, claims to be 98% donation-funded in 2024, up 30%. As detailed in their impact report, this represents €3.5 million, the result of donations from 45,821 donors, with 2 million unique visitors to its website and more than 180,000 subscribers to its newsletters. Another example is Vert, a new environmental media outlet launched in 2020, which announced that 90% of its revenue in 2024 would be funded by donations, with more than 12,000 financial supporters, more than 120,000 newsletter subscribers, and 340,000 followers on Instagram.

And they aren’t alone: on the investigative side, StreetPress, a media outlet specializing in the far right, reports 36% of its revenue coming from donations in 2023 and 77% growth in 2024. Disclose is approaching 60%, while Brittany-based Splann! has reached 75%.

Misconception #3: “Only activists are interested in donation models.”

The Guardian has been building its counterexample for the past decade. Without restricting access to its content, the publication is based on a clear vision: “Open to all, funded by many, beholden to no one.” The audience that supports it is not a self-perpetuating circle of activists, but a broad group of readers who defend the common good because they see its value. The nuance is essential: support does not come from a sense of belonging to a particular camp, but from a promise of public interest and a contract of trust.

The motivations put forward are consistent: protecting press freedom, preserving editorial independence, supporting investigation, recognizing the reliability and quality of the work, and holding the powerful to account.

The results speak for themselves: in ten years, revenue from digital readers has grown from around £5 million to £107 million. Now, 72% of the publication’s total revenue comes from digital sources (readers, advertisers, and other sources)—proof that a civic contract can become an economic pillar.

The base of regular supporters has reached approximately 1.3 million people, including more than 182,000 in Europe, with growth of around 20% over one year.

> Read about The Guardian’s reader revenue growth and proposition development

Misconception #4: “Donations cannibalize subscriptions.”

La Croix proves the opposite. The daily newspaper has opened a tax-exempt donation channel via Presse & Pluralisme, alongside its subscription offer.

• Subscriptions sell a service—convenience, apps, frictionless reading.
• Donations fund a mission—pluralism, solidarity formats, tool improvements, investigations.

At La Croix, 90% of donors are also subscribers: donations do not cancel out subscriptions, they add to them. Presented in this way, coexistence becomes natural and editorial balance clearer.

Since 2022, the Catholic daily newspaper has internalized fundraising and reworked its campaigns (targeting, media, messages). The model is gaining momentum and becoming established with a philanthropic approach, leading to the creation of a Philanthropy Manager position in 2024.

As a result, donations now account for 2% of revenue, with around 3,400 donors, most of whom give less than €500.

Misconception #5: “Donations only concern older audiences.”

This is changing thanks to the internet. While the median age of donors in France is 62, a growing number of young people aged 15 to 35 are now contributing financially to the media. Supporting content is part of their habits: online tips, support subscriptions, live fundraising. In other words, the gesture of “I support because it has social value” already exists; the media are getting better and better at activating it.

StreetPress, a free-access investigative media outlet celebrating its fifteenth anniversary, now derives more than a third of its revenue from donations. In its best months, its content reaches around six million people on social media and through newsletters, and nearly three-quarters of this audience is under 35. This requires campaigns to be designed differently: embodying faces and stories, linking donations to a specific format or project, and showing the impact in concrete terms.

The result? After an initial campaign in 2021 that raised €75,000 to launch a newsletter dedicated to the far right, followed by €185,000 in 2023 to develop a collaborative platform on the same subject, StreetPress had gathered more than 6,000 regular donors within a club by 2025.

Misconception #6: “It’s just another source of funding.”

That would be a lot, but if donations work, it’s not just about money. It requires a clear editorial model, a coherent marketing strategy, and rigorous governance.

Vert is proof of this. The media outlet has turned donations into a clear editorial contract, funding open-access environmental journalism, and has translated this into a controlled conversion and loyalty process. The inserts are easy to understand, recurring donations are offered by default, and tax exemptions are explained without jargon. Conversion and follow-up messages are tailored to profiles and synchronized with current events. The relationship is maintained over time through concrete expressions of gratitude, behind-the-scenes insights, and impact reports.

This rigor pays off. In 2024, Vert finances 90% of its budget through donations, with more than 12,000 supporters. On the governance side, transparency is not just for show: reports are public and objectives are clearly stated. In other words, at Vert, donations do not simply add to the revenue stream: they guide the way we produce, explain, and report.

Misconception #7: “Donations are only small amounts.”

Editorial philanthropy exists, and it mainly finances time, which is the lifeblood of production.

Kometa, a media outlet dedicated to literary journalism, photo essays, and debates, is a prime example of this: beyond the fundraising that enabled the media outlet to launch in 2023, raising €760,000 from six investors, grants of €12,000 finance a year of work by authors in difficult fields, with a net cost to the patron of around €4,000 after tax relief. The mechanism is straightforward: a clear offer, symbolic rewards, follow-up, and often a round-table approach where one donor leads to others. It is therefore not just a matter of scattered micro-contributions, but also of major donations that can structure ambitious projects.

Result: in less than two years, the company collected €300,000 in donations, including individual donations, support from foundations, and a crowdfunding campaign.

Transparency note: Médianes, the studio, supported Kometa in its fundraising campaign in 2023.

Misconception #8: “Donations are a one-time thing.”

Recurring donations are becoming commonplace on both sides of the Channel, and even across the Atlantic. At Vert, the club requires a monthly donation for membership; most of its budget now comes from these recurring donations, which give the editorial team visibility.

At The Guardian, transforming one-off donators into regular supporters has become a discipline – “We thank donors, we explain, we give them a behind-the-scenes look, we follow up with substantive reasons, and we build a relationship.” This shift changes everything: cash flow is smoothed out, editorial planning becomes possible, and independence is better protected than it would be with sporadic donations.

Now what?

These cases prove it: donations work when you honestly say what they fund, when you show what they change, and when you agree to be accountable for them. They don’t replace subscriptions, they don’t conflict with advertising: they balance the whole by making it more readable. Guardian, La Croix, Vert, StreetPress, Kometa: they all tell the same story—a contract of trust forged with an audience that chooses to support a common good.

One requirement remains: consistency over time. A clear mission, genuine transparency, regular recurrence, and regular proof of public utility. This is the price that must be paid for donations to definitively move from prejudice to model.

Would you like to learn more about Médianes’ expertise in fundraising campaigns? Visit our website.

Changes in reader habits mean that we must also evolve.

Three quarters of the Guardian’s digital readers now access our journalism daily via mobile devices. Our premium news app, which prompts users to subscribe after reading a set number of articles, attracts one million daily users and has become the second biggest revenue driver for the Guardian. And while this model is working, growth relies on two things:

1. Generating new installs and converting casual mobile web users into app users
2. Increasing frequency and loyalty for existing users

To respond to this, in May 2025, we went to market with a relaunched Guardian News app, with new features and a major redesign. Here are the three main areas we improved on:  

Discovery & Personalisation – Your News, Your Way

In an era of news overwhelm, it’s important to give users the ability to craft a feed of topics and stories they want to read quickly and easily without the need for endless scrolling. We learned that Guardian readers still love curation and are resistant to the notion of having an algorithmic feed.

In response, we created ‘My Guardian’ – a section of the app focused on personal curation, with a more intuitive set up experience. We made it easier to switch between topics, and changed the UI to make it more resemble a social media feed. We also redesigned our homepage to have more curated highlights, aiding discoverability and breadth and depth of reading. 

It would’ve been easy to assume My Guardian was a way of avoiding news you don’t want to read – but we know from research that Guardian readers don’t want to live in echo chambers. So instead, our marketing focused on the choice and diversity of topics you can follow. 

Audio experiences

Our data suggested two key bits of insight: our app is heavily used in the mornings, and our readers find it hard to consume long form journalism when life responsibilities are keeping their hands busy.

Now that podcasts are a well established form of media consumption, and data suggesting this is only rising, we brought generative voice to the app. Now every article can be listened to, not just read. And we introduced a new dedicated Audio tab, putting podcasts and longform reads front and centre, particularly valuable for morning users on the move. 

Whilst text-to-voice and podcasts aren’t new to the industry, our goal was to provide accessibility and flexibility to how users consume journalism. We’ve had a 34% uplift in podcast listens, and we can now piggy back onto the podcast launch calendar – particularly useful for App Store promotion.

Upgrading Downtime

We know the news is overwhelming, and we wanted to provide readers with a reason to use our app in those moments of downtime that doesn’t involve news. That’s why we introduced the Puzzles hub. 

The hub contains daily puzzles that readers can engage with in a fun and challenging activity, including crosswords, sudoku, Wordiply and Word wheel – with more to come in the very near future. 

Suddenly, we have a completely new dimension to how we market the Guardian app, and target new audiences. We will be targeting a full Puzzles campaign later this year (more on this soon!). We’ve gone from thousands of page views to millions almost overnight and I’m very excited about the future from here.

For a Product Marketer, it’s important to remember 4 fundamental things with a go-to-market launch:

Work hand in glove with your product team. Join their meetings, learn their language, build those relationships and foundations. Essentially, become one team – believe in each other’s mission. It makes working together a breeze, and you understand the product from a different perspective.

Audience research is crucial to understanding the customer problem and solution –  their pain points and gains, what makes them install and subscribe? Don’t make assumptions – getting into the minds of your users or readers is invaluable. It helps you develop your messaging and creative approach and stay true to the customer’s needs. 

Have clear creative principles and goals but challenge yourself, too. We had fun leveraging our brand’s more playful assets (e.g. illustrations), avoided cliches in our creative work (like hands holding phones), and leveraging UI in our creative. Everyone’s approach will be different!

Translate your existing customer insight and product research into a value proposition and positioning framework that you can launch into market with – and build on over time as your product develops.

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Shout out to Nazeerah Makda, Daniel Bhattacharya, Paul Heron and the entire Apps Experience team at the Guardian for an amazing launch.

But it’s not just about the hard data. Ultimately, she learned that there was very little existing data on reader demographics however, readership did skew older and whiter. Despite not being able to know the exact racial makeup of readers, she sees success as improving the performance of stories coming out of the race and immigration desks, plus engagement through high touch promotion on socials such as Reddit, or shares in community groups, such as those on Facebook pages run by affinity groups.

The Race and Equity desk has strong coverage on Black US culture and key issues, so engagement from Black US readers was a clear initial target.  

This work in context: The Great Fertility Divide

The Great Fertility Divide is an ambitious editorial series looking at racial disparities in fertility care in the U.S. The subject demanded nuance, credibility, and above all trust. She knew that the target readers (Black US millennial women) are likely not going to the Guardian website for these kinds of stories. 

Rather than treating engagement as a last-minute callout or just social promotion after the stories were published, Ava embedded herself in private online communities to learn about audience needs, designed callout questions with care, and ultimately helped the stories  reach real target readers who felt that stories were written for them and not just about them. 

The engagement loop: More than a callout

From the start, the team’s goal wasn’t just traffic — it was engagement.

Ava identified Facebook groups for ‘Black women trying to conceive’ as both a primary audience and sourcing ground.

She reached out to group admins and sources that writers were already working with, some of whom became advocates for the project, and generated leads for future reporting.

She collaborated with the editor to  publish a clear and gender inclusive callout on The Guardian and shared it within these communities. Each story within the series also had the callout linked in the standfirst, so readers could continue to contribute ideas for future reporting.

This wasn’t a fishing expedition. It was a targeted strategy designed to earn trust.

“We approached people not just as sources, but as co-owners of the topic. That changes everything.”

Platform-specific strategies that paid off

• Facebook groups

Guardian US joined and actively engaged in private Black TTC (trying to conceive) groups.

Admins were consulted early, which gave the project legitimacy and organic reach by sharing trusted sources within tight-knit communities.

These spaces weren’t used for promotion but for listening, sourcing, and relationship-building.

> Key takeaway: For sensitive topics, skip the public page and go where real conversations are happening — even if it’s behind a gate.

• Instagram: 

Instagram emerged as the highest-engagement platform. It was key for the team to share the story on Instagram, given that Black, female news consumers use Instagram at slightly higher rates than other groups.

A December 20th post to both Guardian US and Guardian main accounts generated 233 shares, 4,800 likes, 583 saves and 83 comments, showing depth of connection.

> Key takeaway: Use saves and shares, and comments as leading indicators for emotional resonance, not just traffic.

• Reddit: 

Posts in infertility subreddits like r/infertility and r/IFchildfree brought over 12,000 views in total.

The Guardian team shared entire stories and callouts, inviting ongoing conversation, not just drive-by clicks. For Ava, the most valuable part was reading comments from women who said the stories resonated with their own experiences, and knowing that stories had reached and were serving the target reader.

“I am a Black woman and this is so validating. Navigating racism on all the levels while trying to have a baby is so challenging and dangerous. And the wealth inequality on top of it. ….Thank you for focusing on this! It is so important!”

> Key takeaway: On Reddit, value comes from being part of the community, not just mining it for reach. The platform also encourages more thoughtful, longer form responses. 

Lessons to take from this strategy: 

1. Don’t just ask for stories — build around communities.

The project’s biggest strength was that it didn’t treat engagement like a box to check. It started with the audience and shaped editorial decisions from there.

2. Make an effort to share your story in niche communities

Mainstream channels might deliver volume — but in this case, intimate, topic-specific groups delivered trust, nuance, and authentic responses.

3. Close the loop

Responses from callouts were used to generate follow up story ideas, but not in published stories. It’s important to communicate with sources and callout respondents about how you use their stories, and share the final articles for transparency – and to close the engagement loop. This isn’t extractive journalism, it’s participatory.

The Guardian report card: 
1990s = 8th biggest UK paper
2024 = 350m site visits, #7 global news site
Free & open model = no paywall
£88m in digital reader revenues in 23/24
57% digital reader revenues = outside of UK
Guardian Support = voluntary payment 
(includes legacy products: membership, subscriptions and contributions)

Introducing a key acquisitions channel

Traditionally reserved for advertising, the end of an article is perhaps the most lucrative real estate, and a place that The Guardian has really made their own, making it deeply complementary to the journalism.

Today, the famous Guardian ‘Epic’ is their primary acquisition channel.

Running over 1500 A/B test variants in the last few years, the team have made the most of their high traffic, and free, open model to experiment.

Optimizing message copy

‘Supporter motivations’ are a critical building block for driving acquisition and creating a two-way dialogue with readers and supporters. These are largely global, product agnostic, and stable over time.  

1. Editorial independence  
2. Protect the free press  
3. Investigative journalism  
4. Trustworthy, factual, high quality  
5. Holds power to account  
6. Open for all, no paywall  
7. International perspective 
8. Financial challenges in media  
9. Better understand world events  
10. It’s only fair to pay

And translate these motivations into impactful copy:

Whilst A/B testing small aspects of the copy takes time, it really isolates the learning and helps the team better understand where readers see value.

Leaning into news cycles, and speaking to events:

Testing different ways to speak to the news:

Having fun along the way with some tongue and cheek:

Being sure to carry wins across:

And learning from failures:

Optimizing everything else

The famous Guardian article count: a fitbit for news

And testing integrating the payment flow directly into the ask:

• Optimize for recurring revenues via choice
• Push people where you want them to go
• Suggested price points anchor people in but give options for every price point

Whilst continuing to listen to readers: over half of one-time contributors said they were willing to be reminded to give again in the future, under certain conditions. 

Piecing it all together

It’s of course note been a straight trajectory, and there’s always room for development, but this work has paid off in building a world renowned support model.

It’s also been fundamental in allowing them to scale growth alongside their global reach, as well as reshape the existing choice architecture with 3 clearly defined levels of support:

£4 /month – Support

“Our most popular route to support – providing a low barrier to entry and creating a large base of paying readers. They get little in return (Supporter Newsletter) but offer a commercial opportunity to upsell.”

Supporter+ – Subscribe

“Our hero product, which will be maintained at a fixed price point. This will be the best way for readers to support us, it gives Supporters full access to our suite of digital products.”

Supporter Premium – Subscribe

“The premium experience of the Guardian, if Supporter+ gains full digital access, the premium experience offers the same but with as little friction as possible and with the option of bundling with print products.”

So, they shifted from a fundraising mindset to a more traditional subscription….but maintaining the option to give as and when a reader wishes to.

Leaning into the feedback, they’ve clarified the choice and highlighted the value that you’ll get back in exchange for this payment whilst still maintaining the ‘support’ option. It’s about balancing support language, getting people to the point of acquisition, but also getting the most value out of them with flexible options.

And establishing premium experiences as something to pay for.

Knowing that app readers are highly engaged, The Guardian team recently developed the premium Feast app, a cooking companion, and the news app where they introduced the first paywall style format last year. App users can access 20 articles for free before being asked to subscribe.

Thank you so much to Jim and Julia for sharing their insights!