The Spectator’s record subscriber numbers

Something remarkable is happening at the world’s oldest weekly magazine. After years of relatively flat subscriber numbers, The Spectator has surged past its Covid-era peak and now has more paying subscribers than at any point in its 198-year history.

Today’s ABC circulation figures show that, while most of our competitors have been on a downward trajectory in recent years, The Spectator is bucking the trend. Even more remarkably, new readers are increasingly choosing to get the print edition – it is our fastest-growing type of subscription. Meanwhile, our American edition is growing every week and has also achieved its highest-ever subscriber numbers.

The foremost reason for this is, of course, the sheer quality of our writing. The network of columnists and contributors at The Spectator has grown over many decades, and this vast collective brainpower is shepherded onto the pages by a first-class editorial team. New editor Michael Gove has reminded the world that he was a journalist before he was a politician and has deftly navigated the magazine through new political terrain with open-mindedness and flair. To the fantastic pre-existing team, he has added new talent: Tim Shipman’s regular must-read insider accounts of Westminster and Madeline Grant’s inimitable sketches, along with a slew of up-and-coming young writers who feature in the magazine each week. Our US editor Freddy Gray is also building a formidable team to bring The Spectator’s distinct voice to our friends across the Atlantic, with both the US and UK publications united on a new Spectator.com address.

We have also launched a new morning email, with ‘Spectator Daily’ briefings now keeping more than 200,000 people informed every day – more than any other political newsletter. Our podcast and TV collection has expanded, with Michael Gove and Madeline Grant’s Quite Right! winning best new podcast at the political podcast awards last month. And every week, the magazine spreads its intellectual tentacles far beyond politics, with books, arts and lifestyle coverage that is second to none. The Spectator Club offers cultural tours and marvellously boozy lunches with our star columnists. And our live events are some of the biggest and most stimulating around – with everything from debates and small salons to sell-out interviews with audiences of 1,800. In short, Spectator subscribers are buying membership of a club, a refuge of humanity and sanity in an increasingly mad world.

Dare we hope that, as social media becomes ever more stuffed with shrill partisan voices and AI slop, our success is evidence of a broader flight to quality? Perhaps, even, the luxury of a print magazine to pore over on a Saturday morning is being rediscovered as a tonic to doomscrolling and the tyrant in all of our pockets? Time will tell, but we are delighted with the direction of travel.

There is another key ingredient to our success: technology. From the moment we acquired The Spectator in September 2024, we knew that fixing its subscription platform would be key. Like many of the world’s top publications, The Spectator was stuck using old-fashioned and expensive ‘bureaus’ to manage its subscriptions. These companies make life frustrating for readers and result in high churn – people cancelling their subscriptions. It’s no exaggeration to say that solving subscriber churn is a big part of saving the future of quality publications.

To fix this, we couldn’t find the technology we needed off the shelf, and so we invested in building our own solution from the ground up, with single-click sign up, seamless billing, data collection, dramatically improved retention, marketing and in-house customer service all on a single platform. The short story is: it’s working. The charts above tell the story: from the moment our subscriptions platform was launched, the trajectories of all our publications turned around. We call it CoEditor, and we are now offering it to other publications and subscription businesses around the world – we already have our first external clients.

We believe in quality journalism, and want other publications to succeed and flourish as well. To do that they need a sustainable business model, and we’ve built a crucial part of that.