AFP, published on Sunday 06 December 2020 at 17:57
The daily Le Monde will have 450,000 subscribers at the end of 2020 and could reach its goal of one million subscribers “in advance”, by the end of 2023 instead of 2025, its director said in an interview on Sunday. to the Italian weekly L’Espresso.
“We will end this year with 350,000 digital subscribers plus 100,000 paper subscribers (…). This means that we will not be very far from 500,000 subscribers at the end of 2020, that is to say halfway towards the goal of one million ‘subscribers that we had set for 2025, “says Jérôme Fenoglio.
“Things are going so fast that we even think that we will reach this objective in advance, at the end of 2023”, adds the director of the daily. He is delighted that “the boom in subscriptions which has been accelerating for the past 3 years largely offsets our losses in other sectors”, particularly advertising.
A year ago, Le Monde had some 230,000 purely digital subscribers, and 180,000 at the end of 2018.
“One million subscribers will be a revolution: it will fundamentally change our turnover, which will be much more stable, much less exposed to the vagaries of advertising,” he adds, while saying he hopes that “advertising remains an important resource (…) because I think that it is good for a newspaper which wants to remain independent to have a balanced turnover, not to depend entirely on its subscribers”.
Le Monde is owned by telecoms magnate Xavier Niel, Madison Cox (widower and sole legatee of Pierre Bergé) and businessman Matthieu Pigasse. Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky has become an indirect shareholder of the daily, buying 49% of Matthieu Pigasse’s shares in 2018.
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