Why the Guardian Doesn't Need a Billionaire to Thrive

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From the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Channels with Peter Kafka. That's me. I'm also chief correspondent at Business Insider. And today we're talking about how you deliver news to a giant global audience. without making a profit. That's because I'm talking to Anna Bateson, the CEO of Garden Media Group, which is a nonprofit. We spend a lot of time on this show talking about media business models, the pros and cons.

The Guardian is one I know people think about a lot. Free, big scale, primarily reader supported. And as we discuss here, there's a lot you can learn from The Guardian's success. And there's also some things you probably can't replicate, like a $1.5 billion trust that ensures that if you want money for growth or if you need money because things aren't working, you have a real safety net.

Better to let you hear it directly from the source. So here's me talking to The Guardian's Anna Bateson. I'm here with Anna Bateson. She is the CEO of The Guardian. Welcome, Anna. Thank you for having me. Thank you for coming to New York to the studio. You're here because you want to sell ads. That's correct. Yes.

We'll talk about the business model of The Guardian, but let's remind people that you're in the business currently of taking money from advertisers to show people content. We are, although I would say that we are... We are properly diversified now, which is we do have advertising, and advertising is a very important revenue stream for us. But a much bigger revenue stream now is our reader revenue model. And increasingly, licensing is another third sort of.

Revenue stream. I've done a terrible podcasting job by jumping us into the middle of the conversation, but we'll get there. So for the few people listening to this podcast who don't have a good sense of The Guardian. Maybe they know it's English. Maybe they know it's kind of left to center slash progressive. Give us the billboard pitch for The Guardian today. We are 204 years old. We originally started in Manchester, in England, and then we moved to London, I think, in the...

70s, 60s. So yes, our roots are in England, but we are now a global news organisation. We are the fifth biggest news site in the world. We have audiences all around the world. We have three big offices in Australia, in the UK, and in America. Big global news organization, real reach, not-for-profit.

Not for profit. Not owned by a billionaire. Not owned by a billionaire. No, we have a very distinctive ownership structure, which is we are owned by the Scott Trust. So absolutely no billionaires, no shareholders. No one knows what the Scott Trust is.

And that's fine, by the way. I don't think anyone should know what the Scott Trust is. The Scott Trust's only existence, really, is to own and look after The Guardian and ensure that we can continue to do journalism. You have roughly about a billion and a half dollars in that trust? Yes.

And so that is that's sort of your baseline slash safety net. It's not supposed to fund the operations, but if you need to tap it, you've got it. So it's there to ensure that we can invest really in journalism for the long term. So it's not. meant to be a sort of trust fund that kind of pays for our operational costs, but it does allow us to think long term and it does allow us to be very clear about what our purpose is, which is to be, you know, a journalistic organization.

For the last decade or so, I've been talking to people about business models on this podcast. And a lot of the business models were owned by a billionaire or hope a billionaire buys us. And we've seen in the last few years the downside of billionaire ownership. So you guys kind of have the... billionaire ownership without the billionaire.

Correct. I mean, 10 years ago, we were in really quite a lot of trouble. We were, I mean, as everybody was at that point, I think searching for a new business model because advertising was in decline and print revenues were in decline. I'm fine. And we were losing a lot of money at that point. And over the last 10 years, we have essentially turned it around by sort of building out this reader revenue model really around the world. And so, yes, we now have the privilege, I guess, of having...

having a billion plus behind us, but without a quixotic or kind of, you know, interventionist billionaire owner. And yeah, it's not someone who's going to get married and change their perspective or decide that actually COVID was a hoax or... Correct. Whatever it is. And who is a Guardian reader in the U.S. versus the U.K.? Guardian readers in the U.S. are interested in global perspective. They're interested in independence. They're interested in the fact that we are able to have an open model.

broadly accessible. They are actually much more, I think, mixed in their sort of political affiliation and interests. Is that because they're finding you guys more often via search as opposed to coming directly to you? It's a mix, actually. I mean, they do find us in search because we are... open, but actually we have a sort of strong direct kind of traffic. I think it's that they are...

valuing this global kind of sometimes described by an outsider perspective. So I think we have a very different way of telling stories than if we were a sort of more legacy U.S. based news organization. I'll go back to the Englishness in a minute. So let's sit for a minute and talk about the business model. So again, we've got this billion and a half dollar backstop, but you don't want to tap into it. You want to run it as a sustainable business. We would like to be financially sustainable.

an operational level. And so you've got a mix of subscriptions. Subscriptions, yes, which we call support. Supports. You can call them subscriptions or donations, but it's explicitly we're a nonprofit. Help us sustain this business. You've got advertising. That's why you're here in studio with me today in New York. And then sort of a grab bag of licensing and other stuff. And roughly a third, a third, a third right now? No, actually, reader revenue is now 40%, I think.

is probably about 20%, and then the balance is kind of collection of print and licensing. So you've already eclipsed reader revenue. Reader revenue has already eclipsed advertising, which is, we saw the New York Times do this again about a decade ago. Was that sort of what you were aiming for? I mean, I'd love to say yes. I'd love to say that this was all brilliantly strategic. But actually, reader revenue came out of an interesting insight and moment.

Context was crisis, you know, the same as we were just talking, the same sort of industry-wide crisis. What we did understand was that we had built a very substantive and meaningful global audience, so we had scale. And that audience did have a very particular relationship with The Guardian, and not least because there is this sense of independence and sort of a freedom of thought and editorial independence.

And what we couldn't quite work out was how to convert that relationship with the audience into essentially revenue. And the way that we did it was we essentially experimented and we started experimenting with space at the bottom of the article. And because we had the scale to be able to have rapid iteration around what worked and what didn't work from a messaging point of view, a design point of view, a sort of call to action perspective.

Gradually over time, we unlocked this mechanism of really asking people for support but not forcing them to pay because we had a payroll. So we never really sort of— You didn't set out to say— we want to be an organization that's primarily funded by readers? No, we didn't.

I think we understood that we had a meaningful audience and we understood that if we could unlock the way of converting that into support, there would be something substantive on the other side. But we didn't sort of I don't think we had a kind of clear strategic idea about how to do it. So it's sort of been a process of discovery and really listening to, responding and sort of learning from the audience and what works and what's compelling for them when it comes to asking for their support.

Again, I keep thinking the New York Times just because they're an example. Well, they're very successful. They're the example that everyone thinks about when they're talking about this transition from advertising support to reader support. They're explicitly for profit. They're definitely a values-based company, but that's not the pitch.

The pitch is, we have stuff you want. Give us money, we'll give it to you. We have news, but also we have games, cooking, whatever it is. Can you apply that sort of bundle? idea to The Guardian with... Donation slash nonprofit? So I think there is a Guardian flavor of that model, yes. I think the New York Times are interesting because they very explicitly said they want to be a lifestyle brand. I don't think we would ever say that we want to be a lifestyle brand.

But I do think that if you reflect on the nature of a newspaper, you know, a newspaper was the original serendipitous bundle. And it was a collection of kind of broadly curated journalism that when combined with design. and sort of that sense of an editorial voice and perspective came together to be more than the sum of its parts. It also just had...

Stuff. That's another way of putting it. Maybe you didn't care about news at all, but you wanted sports or you wanted the classifieds, right? That was the main engine that kept newspapers going for a long time. And you shared it amongst your family and so different sections for different people. But I do think... that therefore, if you think about leaning into your strengths, what is it that makes us distinctive and what is it that really genuinely resonates with audiences? We resonate.

more broadly than news because that's our kind of heritage and our tradition so does that then allow you to create some version of the guardian bundle in a in a digital form that again sort of taps into the broadest possible audience because different people will respond to different things. Yes, I think it does. And when you've got an audience that is explicitly giving you money, they understand that your mission, that you're not owned by a billionaire, that you're a nonprofit.

Are the mechanics of acquiring and keeping those readers different than if it was a for-profit? Is churn different? Do you have to spend money differently to acquire those customers? Well, very good questions. I don't think the mechanics are at core different.

I think they're fundamentally the same. And in fact, we've recently brought into the business someone to lead reader revenue who came from a subscription kind of environment and background. And so I think she has an incredibly good understanding about the underlying mechanics. and data and sort of the analysis that you have to think through.

I do think that there is an underlying emotional kind of connection that drives different dynamics around cost of acquisition and I think then gives you quite resilient sort of retention. And so I think our churn mechanics probably are a bit different to a sort of...

very transactional subscription business. You think you've lowered churn than a Times or another for-profit? I don't know about the Times. But then a for-profit? Yes. And I also think we don't really discount because it's sort of if you don't...

have such a transactional kind of proposition, discounting is a different, it's a different sort of... So you're not bringing in people for a dollar a month and then going to 25. Exactly. And therefore, they're more likely to churn when they hit a kind of more expensive, you know, plan.

It's something very interesting at the moment because if you think about it, we are lapping a year of a very big sort of, you know, series of acquisition moments around the election and, you know, kind of the Washington Post deciding.

not to endorse, etc. So I mean, we're watching churn here in the US kind of very carefully. And so far, it's proving to be lower and it's proving to be very resilient. But it's an interesting dynamic. You know, once you bring people in, can you kind of keep... them because they care after the election last year there was a lot of prognostication about whether we'd see another trump bump

that the publication lots of publications saw in 2017 2018 and a lot of no they're not gonna do that people are sort of burnt out in fact they're burnt out on news in general how does your audience So we are not seeing that. It was very interesting in the run up to the election and in the immediate aftermath of the election that we saw incredible waves of acquisition, sort of this kind of emotional outpouring of the desire to support the journalism.

then there was definitely a lull and it felt as though people were exhausted by the cycle but really since then I mean you know look at the news agenda and look at the sort of you know kind of the what people are kind of reading and consuming and relating to. And we've seen, actually, we've seen waves of sort of support on the back of the response to what's happening in the world. And one of the things people talk about with the subscription... model is this idea of

customer audience capture, right? Where sort of you have an audience, they've come to you, they're giving you money because they expect something. And often if you're giving them something different ideologically than what they thought they were going to get, maybe they're going to be upset. So maybe you're creating stuff for them and you end up.

in this sort of loop. You guys, again, explicitly nonprofit, explicitly center left slash left. How do you think about, and you're not running the content, you're on the business side, but I mean, I'm sure that's a discussion you guys are constantly having. Yes, it is a discussion. And, you know, at the heart, there could be tension between explicitly campaigning messaging and the fact that editorial is independent and editorial kind of, you know, needs...

to be led by journalistic intent and integrity. And so I think that there could be tension between that. And we have to be thoughtful about that, of not compromising editorial, I think. the very clear sense that ultimately you'll be facts led and based and we're not going to ever compromise those values.

with the sort of fact that more explicitly sort of resistance-like or campaigning messaging might be more effective when it comes to acquisition. And we would always go be led by editorial values. So that's about how you acquire it, right? So we're not going to tell you that we're doctrinaire anti-Trump. The same would, I think, apply to this. If there was any sense of would we explicitly kind of lead our editorial because we think it's what our audience...

is looking for? And the answer is no. And that's, you know, very much the, it's a very important underlying, I think, principle for editorial. I think another way of thinking about it is... If you end up covering something in a way that is truthful and accurate, but is not what your readers want to believe, right? You could imagine it's about the environment or Gaza or anything. And again, we saw this a lot.

Again, focused on the Times. How dare you write the headline this way? Or why won't you say President Trump lied? You sort of find these euphemisms for it and they get whipped up about that. And that's not so much. I think that's sort of a long-term thing that doesn't go away. But I'm assuming you guys have the same thing. Yes. I mean, I think we definitely see, you know.

an outpouring or a response to certain articles or to certain sort of if you are not, you know, kind of delivering messages that I think readers are comfortable with. However, we haven't seen the same levels of sort of reader anger or disillusionment that perhaps some other people have seen. And I do think that probably comes back to while we are...

I would say, progressive, and I would use progressive in a sort of British way potentially more than an American way. Tell me what the British way means. I think it's gentler. Not an epithet? Yeah, exactly.

I think we are very, you know, we stand very firmly by both our independence from an editorial perspective, but also the fact that we are a pluralistic organization. So we will and have always believed that you should be able to kind of... of hold you know divergent viewpoints and and opinion pieces and that part of the ability part of your relationship with your audiences is you're trying to give them the kind of the tools and the information to navigate complicated issues and that requires

kind of creating space to have divergent and disagreeing perspectives. And you've kind of referenced this, but the campaign you guys are in, if you're in New York, I assume in other parts of the country, you've got to... In the U.S., you're trying to acquire readers and donors again. And it's explicitly not a fight back against Trump campaign.

No, global, independent and free. And they were very deliberately chosen. And the other thing, of course, about the campaign is it uses the line that came from an original Guardian advertising campaign in the 80s, which is the whole picture, which I think speaks to...

exactly this point which is it's about perspectives it's about plurality it's about only really being able to understand complicated issues if you have this sort of you know this variety of perspectives about them and that's a really important principle and piece of The Guardian. We'll be right back with The Guardian's Anna Bateson, but first, a word from a sponsor.

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There is still in lots of parts of this country real Anglophilia, and people really are impressed with an English accent. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm not so much, because my dad is British, so I've gotten over it. That is not part of the branding campaign either. We're from Britain. We see things differently or we're more sophisticated. I assume that is intentional as well. Very intentional. And in fact, it's very much part of the campaign, this global perspective.

But that's both borne out, I think, of editorial insight, of actually, you know, what we see that resonates and what has built over the last 20 years as we've built a kind of global audience, but also operation. But also, I think we've worked quite hard to... to sort of have roots which are, you know, we're very proud of where we come from and our history is very important. But at the same time, I think you have, there are certain stories where you tell them from a perspective that's...

that's sort of broader than a UK perspective. And I do think that that's what makes our editorial distinctive and different from sort of some others who are also reporting on a global level but do either come at it from a very, you know, UK perspective or... indeed from a very U.S. one. And you guys are building out your operations in the U.S. again, right? More reporters on the ground.

It's not the first time you guys have tried to sort of break into the U.S. It hasn't worked previously? We've had various waves, I think, of investing and then pulling back and investing again. The real thing that's changed, well, there are a few things that's changed. Why didn't it work? Again, terrible job of podcasting. You've CEO since 2022, but you've been in and out of The Guardian prior to this. Yes, since 2016. You've got long roots here. And I think, well, I think that...

The Guardian was less sure, I think, about its place in the US originally. I think it probably came in, and this is kind of 15 years ago, it came in trying to compete with very established US news organizations. Actually, it just turned out, as many Brits discover, you know, you're a very big country and you've got some very effective and, you know, sort of storied, you know, news kind of papers and organizations to kind of compete with. So I think it had left.

of a sense of why are we here? You know, what's the purpose of being here and what can we offer to audiences in the US? And, you know, originally we were very dependent on advertising. And, you know, as discussed, that already 15 years ago was a broken model and the digital advertising was never going to be sufficient. So the thing that's been transformational is the...

locking of this reader revenue model, which then sits alongside advertising, and suddenly you have a substantive enough business to maintain the kind of news operation that you need. And so tactically, are you doing... this differently than in the past? Do you hire a different kind of editorial?

Do you have a different focus? So I don't know about hiring a different sort of, but yes, I think we are doing it differently. Betsy Reed, who's the editor here, has a very clear view about the place and what the role of the person is. The Guardian is, which is very much to cover America for the world and to cover the world for America. And I think that...

that particular positioning and kind of confidence about the space that we're trying to serve here is new. And that then, you know, leads you to, I presume, higher sort of different people and profiles, but also... to tell stories in a different way. What percent of your revenues the U.S. make up right now? Well, it's around 75 million. So, God.

So not doing my mass very well. 25%. So meaningful. Yes. And you'd like it to get more meaningful. Yes. Again, while you're here. Yes. I think a lot of folks who have heard of The Guardian know of The Guardian probably...

discovered it 2014 when you guys were doing the Snowden work and the NSA stories that eventually got you a Pulitzer. It's so long ago, but... Barack Obama was running the U.S. It's a very different environment in the U.S. I think it's a different environment in the U.K. in terms of press freedom, political climate. If you had another story like that where you're taking on the equivalent of the US intelligence apparatus or the equivalent of that real institutional power.

Does that story play out differently? Does your ability to cover that story different now than it was a decade ago? I would say I think that's a question for our editorial teams. Well, some of it is about the business side saying we understand that there is real risk here financially beyond that and we are willing to back that up. Yeah.

OK, so, well, certainly the fact that we are backed by the Scott Trust and the fact that we are independent both in our ownership structure, but also obviously from an editorial perspective. First of all, the business side would never tell editorial.

to do, even if there was significant risk attached to it. And secondly, I think the Scott Trust would probably stand up and say, that's why we're here. And we're here to back the kind of, you know, rigorous, important journalism that perhaps others can't. We'll be right back, but first a word from a sponsor. Ever gone on vacation outside the country and felt like the food was just better?

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Normally, when I have someone running a publication in today, we start and end the conversation with AI. We're getting to it now. You guys have done some licensing deals? We have. So you're amenable to that. How do you think about the way that AI is going to bring you or not bring you readers in the future? Yeah, I mean, so I think we, I mean, I'm sure like everybody that you talk to, we...

I mean, we view AI as an opportunity, but also as a considerable challenge. I was about to ask you how much time you think you spend in a week talking or thinking or reading about AI, and it's too much. Considerable. We're also using it now on the regular. Well, you know, and I think that's important. So our view is that we've got to use it. We've got to understand it. We've then got to think very carefully about actually how we deploy it or utilize it internally.

But we've got to be using it in order to understand the changes it's going to make to the external environment. And clearly, it is going to make those changes. I mean, you can already see behaviours of how people find, how people consume, how people kind of relate and respond to journalism information.

that is going to change. It's already changing. And so that is, you know, it's a source of anxiety and angst. At the moment, we are not seeing the disruption to our audiences that I think some of So the people who were bringing you audience, whether it's Google, Meta, whomever, that's – Continues. You haven't seen a drop off. So Meta has been pretty irrelevant to us for a long time. We came off X last year. For ideological reasons? Yes. And Google is very stable.

Now, I'm not naive enough to think that that's necessarily kind of, you know, a sort of indicator of what's going to happen. And I think you'd have to be, you know, a sort of head in the sand kind of isolationist to believe that things are going to stay the same or that things that aren't going to be disrupted. But at the moment, we're proving audience levels and referral and direct traffic is proving to be very resilient.

And so how do you, but how do you think that will, so when you're projecting out, how are you, you're hoping that an open AI because you've got a licensing deal with them will continue to. provide links and send traffic that way? Or do you imagine that there's going to be a world where you just have a lot less of that distribution and have to make a go of it a different way? I think you have to plan. You have to plan for the world where there is going to be a lot less referral and distribution.

while you've got it, which is, you know, for now and for however long, what are all of the things that we need to put in place in order to sort of, you know, prove to be or, you know, de-risk that future and, you know, ensure that we have a resilience within it.

And so I think the most important thing at the moment is... being set up so that you can experiment and you can try things and you can rapidly view, are there things that we haven't done before that we now need to be doing that we've got to test out and see whether...

or not they work and they're effective. Because, yes, I think you've got to kind of anticipate a future where digital behaviors are really different. You mentioned you came off X. That means you don't have an account that's pushing out. your stories.

Is there a mandate or encouragement or discouragement for your journalists to use it to promote their own stuff? There's no mandate. So individual journalists can continue to use X. It's just as The Guardian, we no longer published into it. I was assuming it was not a mean. I mean, because Twitter, even pre-Elon, was not a meaningful source of traffic for anybody. But that is an ideological decision? Yes, it was principled.

And actually, it was interestingly an incredibly powerful message when it came to reader revenue, particularly in Europe. Not perhaps very surprising. So you said explicitly, we are not working with this. platform because of Elon Musk. We want you, the reader, to know that. And you ended up bringing in new revenue because of that. Yes. So it was a plus. Yeah.

It was very resonant for, as I say, particularly people in Europe. And again, actually, if you reflect on it, it's not a great surprise. You should maybe spell out why you think that it's more resonant in Europe. Because I think it was exactly the time when... Musk and Vance were lecturing Europeans about freedom of speech and the sort of enemy within. And I think the idea of this sort of the rampant kind of misinformation.

and kind of disinformation. And also that it was coming from America. Yeah. This is a way to sort of stand up. And you guys, and that does periodically guide some business decisions, right? You guys don't accept.

Energy, advertising, fossil fuel, gambling. Yes, correct. Again, when were those decisions made? Gambling, 2022, I think, maybe early 23. Fossil fuel advertising, end of 2019. And were those meaningful sources of revenue to begin with? They were quite meaningful.

Different by market, interestingly. So gambling, it was before kind of gambling, advertising was remotely meaningful in the US. It was pretty meaningful for our Australian business, actually. And growing, you know, I mean, it could have been in the UK. Yeah, people...

are getting a taste now of, of what it's like to live with legalized sports gambling in the U S but I don't think they fully realize what it's like in the UK and definitely in Australia. I think that's completely, you're at a different point of the curve. Yeah. So yes, they were, again, they were thoughtful decisions, but yes, they had an impact. But also, they were really about kind of laying out what are...

what our values are as an organization. And I hope, in a way, therefore showing that when we do embrace advertising, which we do, there's sort of substance to that, which is we stand by the brands that we work with. And so did you see a lift in reader revenue? You said we're no longer taking sports. So the more virtuous you are, and I'm kind of putting that in scare quotes, the more revenue you get from your readers. I mean, there is...

There is a kind of interesting relationship that when we stand up for things, that often is very kind of powerful as a motivator for support for the journalism. I think you have to be quite careful about how you push that. And I don't think we would want to be known only for the ads that we didn't take, rather than the ads that we proudly take. But yes, it is...

It is resonant with readers where you kind of demonstrate that you are willing to take a stand on certain things that's consistent with our editorial values and within our editorial kind of point of view. And again, I wonder if you worry about the idea that if we do things that we think...

Again, I'm just going to use scare quotes around virtue signaling to our readers that we get sort of the sugar high from that. But we end up sort of limiting our audience because we end up increasingly sort of doctrinaire in our behavior and practices. And so that's great for people.

love us and it ensures that lots of people will never find us yes i think that's something that you have to be very aware of and um i think it's it's you know it's the it's an important internal kind of tension and and i think um consciousness. In the end, I think you have to stand by your belief. I come back to that you have to stand by what you believe in, which is a plurality of views is important. Within that, there are points of disagreement.

And so many of the stories in the world at the moment are really complicated. They're not simplistic. And it's not possible, I think, to write about them or kind of help people to understand them by being overly simplistic.

Over the years, I've heard multiple people running publications talk about, we want to be the guardian for the US. And what they're talking about is free, primarily reader-supported, at scale. Can't really think of any ones that have really worked sustainably. What is more difficult about pulling us off than people understand, in addition to not having a billion and a half dollar backstop? I mean, so the first thing is I think you have to have scale.

So the fact that we'd built this global audience over 15 years before we really started to sort of kind of try and unlock it, that's important. Then you... You have to have, you know, you genuinely have to be able to point to an independence, you know, and no one's getting rich on the back of the support that readers give us for our journalism. That's really important. You know, people care about that. They care. You can see it that they were.

often the only time they ever actually do kind of understand what the Scott Trust is or who the Scott Trust is, is when they go to a page about the Scott Trust because it's a kind of validating point about our independence. You know, you don't want to...

So, you know, when you land on a Guardian page that says, help us, you know, keep this free, it doesn't say, by the way, we've got a billion and a half dollars. You don't advertise that. But people find it on their own. They do. And what they are... What they are willing to do is they go and research. They want to be reassured that they're giving money to an organization that's...

that's deserving of it and that will put it to good use. And so the Scott Trust is one of those validating points. But I think it's relevant when there were other news organizations. I mean, I think BuzzFeed for a while tried. My colleagues at Vox. a difficult ask if fundamentally you are for all of the kind of editorial independence and qualities of you know kind of both of those news organizations and I mean I really do mean that they were also commercially you know they had

They were for-profit businesses. And you think the audience, even if they don't spend their time thinking about business media models, which is most people, they either intuit that or can sense that or the ones for whom it's important. go and Google and find out for their own shows. I mean, I think it's the...

The greatest mistake you can ever make is to kind of patronize or not believe in your audience. And of course they understand that. And some of them will actually go to kind of, you know, do their research on it and make sure that they are kind of validating it. And I think others...

are responding to kind of cues that you give them around independence and sort of the other piece is just that we did very much make a commitment that we wanted to be open and there is another very powerful kind of motivator for support is I will kind of support you and I will give you money so that those people who can't afford to can also kind of have access to quality news. I'm explicitly doing this so other people can read what I'm reading.

Five years from now, you come back. You probably come back before that. What does the business look like? Is it 70% supported by readers? So does advertising sort of wither away? You probably don't want to say that as you're pitching advertisers. I don't believe advertising withers away, actually, because I genuinely believe that a quality environment where you have a genuine relationship with your audience will continue to be valuable to advertisers. We are never going to have the same scale.

as kind of the platforms and the tech organizations, but we offer something that's very real to an episode. So I don't think it's going to wither away. I do think it will be a substantive and important revenue stream, but it will be... We will be more reliant on our readers than we are on our advertisers. Presumably more people will know about you in the U.S. We would like that very much. Hannah Bateson, CEO of The Guardian, thank you for coming. Thank you for having me.

Thanks again to Anna Bateson. Thanks to our sponsors. We are a for-profit operation here at Channels and we appreciate our sponsors very much. Speaking of people, I appreciate thanks to you folks for listening. If you are in LA and you are listening to this on Wednesday or Thursday, and you're going to be at Lucas Shaw's excellent screen time event, come say hi. I will be there too. And for everyone else, see you next week.