Digital Subscription Revenue Continues Rising at Telegraph as Advertising Struggles

The parent company of the UK’s Daily Telegraph newspaper notched continued digital subscription growth in 2025, its latest accounts show, while advertising failed to keep up.

The filings are the first to be published since Axel Springer’s dramatic intervention finally ended the tumultuous three-year process to sell the news brand.

By the end of 2025 the auction had cost Telegraph Media Group nearly £42 million ($57 million), accounts for parent company Press Acquisitions Limited reveal. Axel paid £575 million ($780 million) in cash for the business, which includes The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph and lifestyle publisher The Chelsea Magazine Company.

Total revenue declined 2% year-over-year to £273 million ($370 million), which the company attributed to a decline in print subscriptions, newsstand sales and other revenue.

EBITDA before exceptional items (including corporate transaction costs associated with the takeover) was £50 million, down 18% from a year earlier and also representing a margin of 18%.

Despite this Telegraph Media Group Holdings Limited, the Press Acquisitions subsidiary that as of 2024 directly publishes The Telegraph, recorded a £10.9 million loss after tax for the year, which it attributed in large part to nearly £40 million of impairment and amortization costs.

The period covered by the filings does not include the Axel Springer takeover, which was announced in March of this year and completed in June. According to reporting by The Telegraph itself, Axel Springer loaned TMGH £7 million earlier this year “when cash appeared to be tight and normal corporate financing avenues were closed off by the ownership uncertainty.”

Although the company is historically fairly cash generative, “a £50m corporate debt with Lloyds… could not be renewed when it matured last year and had to be paid off,” The Telegraph reported, prompting the loan.

At the end of 2025 the company had a total of 1,160,000 subscriptions, of which 81% were digital. Non-digital subscriptions fell 10% year-on-year to 219,000, while digital subscriptions rose 12% to 947,000. The company lost 25,000 non-digital subscriptions versus 2024 while adding 105,000 digital ones.

Digital subscriptions are by far the group’s fastest-growing revenue source, rising more than £6 million (or 8%) year-on-year in 2025 to £87.5 million. They accounted for 32% of total revenue in 2025.

Meanwhile print subscription revenue has remained effectively level: it fell 1.7% in 2025 to £68 million—essentially the same as it was in 2021.

Telegraph Media Group passed one million subscriptions in 2023, helped significantly by its acquisition earlier that year of The Chelsea Magazine Company for a £13 million total consideration.

At Chelsea Magazine Group specifically, UK and rest of world subscriber volumes fell 3% year-on-year (absolute subscriber volumes were not provided). U.S. active subscribers fell 8%, producing a subscription revenue fall of 11%. Advertising fell 12%.

The group contributed £9.4 million to the group’s revenue, down from £10.2 million the year before. UK revenue fell 9% to £5.9 million and rest of world revenue fell 39% to £861,000 while U.S. revenue rose 13% to £2.6 million.

Print continues to account for just over half (53%) of the group’s revenue via its print subscription revenue, £50 million in annual newsstand sales and £26 million in print advertising.

Print advertising revenue fell 10% year-on-year, outweighing an 8% growth in digital advertising (£21 million). This continues a general pattern in recent years whereby digital advertising revenue has consistently risen, but typically by less than print advertising has shrunk.

The company employed a monthly average of 1,286 people in 2025, of whom 861 worked in editorial or production roles (up 69 from 2024). That increase was accompanied by a £10 million year-on-year rise in total employment costs.

Upon announcing its agreement to take over The Telegraph, Axel Springer said it would “turbocharge” the newsbrand’s expansion in the U.S.

The Telegraph’s transatlantic ambitions predate the Axel takeover: As long ago as the start of 2023, the company was hiring for a U.S. homepage and app editor and a senior U.S. SEO editor as part of a push to meet its “ambitious targets for audience and subscriber growth in the U.S.”

Press Acquisitions Limited does not break out its U.S.-specific revenue, but revenue from “rest of world” (i.e. not the UK or Europe) came in at £20.4 million in 2025, up 7% year-on-year. UK and Ireland revenue, in comparison, was £243 million.

Numerous British publishers have sought to grow by expanding into the U.S., but success has often proved challenging: while the profits can be lucrative, they require a level of investment that can be eye-watering for UK publishers used to paying entry-level London reporters $40,000 a year.

The Daily Mail saw huge success in the U.S. for a period of time before Google and Facebook algorithm changes forced it to make significant cuts in its New York office. News Corp tabloid The Sun followed a similar trajectory.

Over the past decade The Guardian has become the textbook case of a UK publisher succeeding in the U.S., generating $81.4 million in the country in the last financial year. But that success was built on significant past difficulty: in 2016 the brand’s U.S. operation reportedly made a nearly $16 million loss on only $15.5 million in revenue, prompting it to lay off a third of the staff.

As Axel Springer noted in its release, however, it’s not starting from zero with The Telegraph: the German company already has an extensive U.S. business as the publisher of Politico, Morning Brew and Business Insider, whose expertise it said it would “leverage” to speed The Telegraph’s expansion.

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