Free London business newspaper City AM has claimed a healthy return to print profitability over the last year.
City AM chief executive Harry Owen told Press Gazette that the print newspaper had a gross profit margin of 50% last quarter excluding labour costs, as these are now hard to split between print and digital.
This is up from around 25% in the first quarter of this year and a loss in early 2024.
Overall (including digital) City AM’s earnings before interest and taxes were said to be up 52% year on year in January to August compared to the same period last year, Owen said.
“There’s no doubt that 2024 was transformative,” Owen said.
City AM is not required to publish its full financial accounts and has not shared specific figures.
City AM, which celebrated its 20th anniversary last week, was bought out of administration by online beauty and wellbeing retailer THG in July 2023. It soon invested in the newsroom including its first UK editor, launched its first app, relaunched City AM Magazine, and developed new events.
City AM is currently putting out an average of 68,512 copies a day via 530 distribution points on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.
It dropped its Friday edition in January 2023 and Mondays in January this year in response to changing commuter patterns, helping to improve profitability.
Owen said they are seeing “consistent pick-up” as the trend is now for “high intensity work” on Tuesdays to Thursdays that means “the paper is becoming part of people’s commute again”.
He added: “Print has become an appointment to view. You’ve got this captive audience still in print… you’ve got high dwell time, advertisers recognise it’s a quality audience picking up print.
“And it’s totally different spend to Tiktok – it’s contextually fantastic, if that’s the audience you’re targeting. No one picks up City AM that isn’t interested in business and finance.”
Owen noted that Metro, DMG Media’s free print newspaper distributing around 950,000 copies a day in major UK towns and cities, is also doing well commercially.
[Read more: Free daily Metro now profitable after 2023 restructure]
He said: “It’s not a vinyl thing,” referring to the trend for physical products like magazines, books and vinyls as a lifestyle choice.
“It’s a tool that people are still using… it’s just an accepted medium that people want to engage with. And I include advertisers in that.”
In digital, Owen said the City AM app has had 250,000 downloads, up from 20,000 a year ago.
Owen attributed that “sharp rise” to the fact the app is free and “we’re probably the best UK free business news platform.
“Number two: frankly, City AM didn’t have an app until a year ago. So we’re simply serving readers who wanted that app… it should have existed five years ago. We’re just catching up. The audience was always there, we just didn’t have the product and now we’ve got the product.”
A live blog launched last week is already increasing dwell time, Owen added.
Owen also highlighted the potential of City AM’s explainer videos on Tiktok. He noted a video last week ahead of the London tube strike has received 1.6 million views. The account has 18,700 followers.
“City AM has always been partly serving an audience who live and breathe business and finance, but also it’s explaining the City, business and finance, to people who don’t live and breathe it. So what I love about these social mediums is the opportunity to do that.”
Owen noted there has been “a shift in the ecosystem on business news” this year, citing a pivot in focus at both The Sun and Daily Mail towards consumer finance, and the end of the long-running daily Sky News show Business Live.
“These are big media owners that are changing their emphasis on business reporting, and I think that is definitely helping us position ourselves as the UK’s foremost business and finance media owner,” Owen said.
He added that live events are a major focus for 2026. The Toast The City Awards for London’s hospitality industry which launched this year and City AM also runs the City AM Awards and Dragon business awards.
Owen said that with resources from THG behind them he has realised they have the “freedom to win in the places where we should win – Square Mile events, we should win.”
At the time of City AM’s launch in 2005, The Guardian described it as “a mixture of unsourced speculation and rehash” with a “flawed business model”.
But Owen, who worked in the commercial team at launch, described the review as “just the motivation we all needed”.
He said the brand’s longevity “wouldn’t have happened had some of the major media agencies not supported us”, naming GroupM (now WPP Media) and Omnicom.
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