At the Audiencers’ Festival Montréal, Emilie Harkin, SVP of Growth at The Guardian, broke down what actually motivates readers to give money to a publication with no paywall.

The Guardian doesn't have a paywall, anyone can read it, whether they pay or not. So the 1.4 million people who choose to give money anyway aren't paying for access, they're paying for something else entirely

> Ownership is the product: The organisation's value proposition comes down to three words - global, independent, free. Owned by the Scott Trust, their sole purpose is to ensure The Guardian can keep publishing. It's this that's sold to readers

> One email, built entirely around that pitch, generated $2 million. When The Washington Post and LA Times pulled their 2024 election endorsements, The Guardian sent readers a simple message - we published ours, and always will, because no billionaire can tell us not to

> But it's the method that's worth noting rather than the moment: The Guardian surveys readers right after they give, with the goal of understanding the why. The top answers include protecting the free press, editorial independence, or the journalism itself

> These surfaced motivations don't just become a slide that's presented once to the team, they're used to build every single message that asks for support. They keep telling the story, deliberately and repeatedly

The Guardian doesn’t have a paywall. Anyone can read it, regardless of ability to pay. So every dollar it raises from readers is, in Harkin’s words, an elective transaction: nobody is required to give anything to keep reading. That constraint is exactly what makes The Guardian’s reader revenue data useful to anyone running a subscription business, paywalled or not, because it isolates motivation from access. People aren’t paying to get in the door. They’re paying for something else entirely.

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The Guardian is pretty unique in the US media landscape. Unlike most major players, it’s not owned by a billionaire or conglomerate, it’s owned by The Scott Trust, a mission-driven structure that ensures editorial independence and, crucially, allows the site to remain paywall-free.

Instead of a traditional subscription model, The Guardian relies on voluntary support. This makes their US “End of Year” (EOY) campaign, running from early November, through Giving Tuesday and on to midnight on December 31st, the most critical window in their financial calendar.

> With no paywall, The Guardian relies on voluntary support, making End of Year its most important financial window in the US. The 2025 campaign raised $3.1 million by 31 December, an estimated $8.6 million in lifetime value

> The work happens in the other ten months. New messaging must beat benchmarks during low-stakes periods before it earns a place, and the gains are small: the order of bullet points, the colour of a Support button

> For anonymous search traffic they test non-blocking walls asking for a newsletter signup rather than a donation. That grew the mailing list 66% in three months, creating warm leads for December

> A/B testing is too slow for Giving Tuesday or New Year's Eve. They run multi-armed bandit tests across 8 to 10 variations, with traffic shifting automatically to whatever is winning

> Recurring support went from 51% of the mix in 2023 to 65% in 2025. The reward for committing is a cleaner site, with fundraising modules suppressed for recurring supporters

Why is EOY so huge in the US?

• The cultural “season of giving”: It leverages a peak period of philanthropic behavior in American culture, as nonprofits and mission-driven organizations all fundraise towards an annual New Year’s Eve deadline.
• The revenue bedrock:  For mission-driven organizations like The Guardian, these final weeks often generate a large portion of their annual voluntary support revenue, providing the financial bedrock for the year of reporting ahead.

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For a long time, donations were presented as a nice little extra source of income, reserved for radically committed media outlets, cannibalizing subscriptions, and condemned by the sociology of age. However, in France, as in several European countries, donations are experiencing unprecedented growth. They’re increasing turnover for both established and emerging publications, as well as attracting younger audiences.

So why is the media industry struggling to take donations seriously? Well, because of stubborn preconceptions and a lack of concrete examples…

From The Guardian to Vert, La Croix, StreetPress, and Kometa, here’s what the facts show when we lift the veil – a model that appeals to publishers, mobilizes new readers, and finances open, accountable journalism in the public interest.

At The Audiencers Festival in Paris, we explored the donation model with Médianes, a studio that helps media outlets strengthen their editorial, economic, and technical independence with a 360° approach. The round table brought The Guardian, La Croix, and Kometa together to discuss acquisition and conversion, followed by a workshop where Médianes shared best practices for campaigns, with use cases from Vert and StreetPress.

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Craig Law is a Product Marketing Manager at The Guardian, responsible for marketing the Guardian Premium News app and the Guardian’s print subscription products. In this article he explains the context and decisions behind The Guardian’s app relaunch.

> Three quarters of the Guardian's digital readers arrive on mobile, and its premium app now has a million daily users and is the second biggest revenue driver in the business

> The finding that cuts against the industry: Guardian readers actively resist an algorithmic feed. My Guardian is built around personal curation, with readers choosing topics rather than a model choosing for them

> They also refused the obvious pitch. Research showed readers don't want echo chambers, so the marketing sold the diversity of topics you can follow rather than the ability to filter news out

> Audio came from noticing the app peaks in the morning, when hands are busy. Every article can now be listened to, and a dedicated Audio tab lifted podcast listens 34%

> The Puzzles hub gives readers a reason to open the app when they can't face the news. Page views went from thousands to millions almost overnight, and it opened a whole new marketing angle

As with other media organisations, the Guardian has been establishing ways to better understand reader behaviours and how they continue to evolve and change.  A number of factors have changed how readers now consume news today, from the rise of AI chatbots and ‘click-less’ news, to the growing dominance of video-driven content on social media platforms like TikTok, as well as increasing levels of news fatigue and avoidance.

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

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Ava M. Macha’s unique job title, Audience Engagement Editor for Underrepresented Communities at The Guardian, caught our attention immediately! We sat down with her to hear all about arriving into this first-of-its-kind role, the work in practice and discover how it’s paid off for The Guardian’s wider strategy.

> The Guardian US created a first-of-its-kind role, Audience Engagement Editor for Underrepresented Communities, sitting between editorial and community rather than inside social media

> Ava M. Macha's first move was an audit of what the Guardian didn't know. There was very little demographic data on readers, and what existed showed an audience skewing older and whiter

> For a series on racial disparities in fertility care, she joined private Facebook groups for Black women trying to conceive and consulted the admins before anything else. Listening and sourcing first, promotion never

> Success was measured in saves, shares and comments rather than traffic. One Instagram post drew 583 saves and 83 comments, and Reddit threads brought 12,000 views alongside replies from the readers being written about

> The rule she keeps is closing the loop. Callout respondents are told how their contributions were used and sent the finished pieces, which is the difference between participatory and extractive journalism

The engagement editor as community strategist: Ava’s role in redefining audience journalism

As the audience engagement editor for underrepresented communities, Ava sits between editorial and community, helping the newsroom design engagement strategies that serve underserved audiences. This includes regular audience editor tasks, but also working closely with the immigration, race & equity and west coast desks to build relationships with diverse audiences, both through pre-publication listening and post-publication amplification to the communities where it matters most. 

“I’m not just here to publish tweets. I’m here to ask: ‘Who should we be speaking with? Who needs to see themselves in this story? And how do we build those relationships early, and ethically?”

Stepping into this first-of-its-kind role

Stepping into her role, Ava’s first strategic move was to investigate The Guardian’s existing US audience. This meant diving deep into comp score studies and surveys to truly learn about who Guardian US readers are (age, race, sexuality, gender identity, location) – “What can we learn about the demographics of the audience? What can we NOT know?”. Then, crucially, defining what “underrepresented” readers the brand was actually trying to reach, and then establishing the right metrics to track them, became foundational to measuring her impact and defining success.

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For our second event in London, The Audiencers’ Festival on June 21st dived into the digital reader revenue models of publishers from no fewer than 7 countries around the world, sharing their solutions to some of the challenges being faced across the industry.

Up first, The Guardian’s Jim Scutt and Julia Hinds captured the audience’s attention by revealing how the publisher famous for huge success in gaining reader support has developed their reader revenue strategy and proposition.

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Craig Law, Product Marketing Manager at The Guardian, spoke at ACE's Subscriptions Seminar this November about the British publisher's "12for12", Guardian Weekly, campaign. The project led to an impressive 2,754 new subscribers, reigniting their previous 6for6 offer, as well as better supporting retention efforts as readers had longer to build a habit.

The context

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