Ireland’s Business Post is aiming to have its newsroom fully funded by digital subscriptions next year following the first phase of its digital transformation project.
The “profitable and growing” Business Post has in the past two years repositioned itself from a fairly traditional B2C Sunday newspaper into a digital-first premium B2B publisher with a primary focus on giving business leaders the tools they need to make decisions.
It has gone from 3,000 digital subscribers in January 2018 to almost 12,000 today after a major push was launched in 2023.
The company believes it can ultimately get to 40,000 following its shift towards more quantity and quality with a strategic focus on markets and banking – previously “massive holes” in the coverage.
Editor Daniel McConnell told Press Gazette: “Ireland still has very high concentration of newspapers, we still have a very loyal print readership, and we love that and we cherish that and we’re going to manage that as best we can but obviously the direction of travel is pretty clear. Our future is in digital subscriptions. It’s just about managing those two competing demands at the same time.
“So it’s meant for us, restructuring our working week, restructuring our workflows, our editorial processes. Everything is now done with online first as the focus, and then towards the tail end of the week we obviously still have to turn our attention to putting out a pretty large Sunday newspaper. It just has meant that Mondays and Tuesdays probably would have been relatively quiet days in our working week. Now they’re probably some of our busiest days.”
News provider Business Post Ireland grows page views by 550% in seven years
In fact, Mondays are now the busiest or second-busiest day for the Business Post website in terms of traffic, he added.
The Business Post has gone from publishing around five stories a day two years ago to 40-50 today. It used to begin publishing at around 9.30am online, after the stock market opens, but now begins updating a live news feed from 7am.
The Business Post revealed at the weekend it has gone from getting about 92,000 page views a month in January 2018 to 593,000 in April 2025, growth of 550% in just over seven years.
But metrics have also changed: one key datapoint is for a “hit” story to get at least 1,000 subscriber views (a figure that started at 150 and has been moved upwards).
A relaunch of the website and app that took place this week has seen the brand go salmon pink like other business newsbrands the Financial Times and Bonnier’s Dagens Industri in Sweden and Verslo žinios in Lithuania. McConnell described the colour as “a real signifier of quality, premium business news and we thought ‘well, that’s right up our street’.”
‘If you’re a business figure, you’ll get everything you need from us’
The journey began in 2023 when the Business Post got a new editor in former Irish Examiner political editor McConnell and strategic minority investment from Sweden’s biggest news publisher Bonnier News. The newspaper, previously called the Sunday Business Post, had been bought in 2019 by entrepreneur Enda O’Coineen and his investment firm Kilcullen Kapital Partners.
The title was also under fresh leadership in 2023, with Sarah Murphy appointed chief executive months earlier having previously managed Business Post Group’s event company iQuest.
A series of workshops took place in autumn 2023 in which discussions centred on the Business Post having “terrible” metrics, “shocking” engagement and “really poor” penetration levels compared to Bonnier’s other titles. The workshops culminated in the North Star project to move the Business Post from a Sunday print-led newsroom to a premium, digital-first organisation prioritising quality financial and markets coverage.
McConnell told Press Gazette: “I think it was a general understanding that we needed to transform our model, our function, how we operated, from what was essentially a legacy traditional printed newspaper to one where we’re publishing a large quantity of daily content with most of our focus on the business to business audience, as opposed to a more general audience.”
He said they needed to prioritise banking, markets and industry coverage in addition to other areas that already had some focus such as property, tech, law, energy and politics (where it has relevance to a business audience). Comment and analysis has also been bolstered.
“The message from us is that if you’re a business owner, business figure, someone who is interested in investing, you’ll get everything you need from us, from morning until night, seven days a week,” McConnell said. Corporate subscriptions have therefore had a big push with McConnell describing them as “a big game-changer… for us, that’s stable revenue and we’re in the businesses and organisations we want to be in and the people we’re writing about.”
It was decided that the newsroom needed to be restructured and six roles, which were centred on more general news, were cut in a November 2023 redundancy programme. A larger number of online reporter and audience engagement roles were created.
The newsroom restructure included naming banking and fintech correspondent Donal MacNamee as the “ninja” making sure the strategy was being well implemented alongside the “owners” for five pillars: audience engagement, content, employee engagement, B2B sales and B2C sales.
The team also created personas for the target audiences – the professional, the shareholder, the business owner, the business leader – and identified their needs.
‘We’ve done the fundamental shift, now for the finessing’
McConnell said print nonetheless remains a “primary revenue driver” for the Business Post still making up the majority.
The primary goal, he said, is for digital subscriptions to make the newsroom self sufficient. They are about 70% of the way there and expect to hit this milestone next year. Particular emphasis is being put on annual and multi-annual subscriptions to avoid monthly churn where people subscribe just to read one or two articles.
A monthly Business Post subscription costs £10.19 for one month then £16.99, while the annual subscription costs £101.99 rising to £169.99. But a “best value” two-year subscription for £232 is highlighted to potential susbcribers.
Last week saw a workshop for North Star 2.0 – the second iteration of the digital transformation project.
McConnell said: “We’ve done the fundamental shift in terms of the change of workflows, but now it’s really about finessing and advancing the quality and the depth of our coverage.”
Commercial property is one area of growth, markets coverage will “get another look”, and the audiovisual strategy will begin to play a bigger part.
Bonnier News made its investment in the Business Post Group because it had a “strong belief in the possibility to share B2B industry knowledge also with the Business Post and be an active part in the transformation to digital”.
McConnell said Bonnier’s “inside perspective” has been useful because they have gone through their own transformation at multiple newsbrands already. Bonnier News chief executive Anders Eriksson told Press Gazette last year its revenue had gone from being above 90% print to 51% digital.
Bonnier have “seen where processes have failed before, they’ve seen where momentum can get lost”, McConnell said, adding that they have been “instrumental in our success.
“They’re very good in terms of they don’t try and be over the top and tell you how to edit the paper but they will advise on putting a structure in place which is largely beneficial to me as editor and to my top team because it can often take the presence of a third party or an outsider to cajole people in the right direction.” He added that it has been beneficial for the team in Ireland to visit newsrooms in Stockholm that are a similar size but further along in their digital transformation journeys.
McConnell added: “The whole thinking of this was to try and reposition the business that we are meeting the needs of our readers and our subscribers and ultimately it’s one that was needed in the Irish context.
“I think we’re offering something that is unique in the Irish market but also the sometimes painful changes we’ve had to make have benefitted the organisation, benefitted our readers and benefitted our staff who work here as well so we’re trying to futureproof the business, that’s what we’re doing here, and ultimately the benefit is a more professional, much more comprehensive, much more premium product for our subscribers and our readers.”
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