GB News has (mostly) confounded its critics. What now?
The upstart GB News has made more of an impact than its critics expected but its finances are in shakier health. What's next?
GB News may have occasionally surpassed Sky News in viewership lately but, like its star presenter Nigel Farage, it has not been without controversy – or the occasional issue with its bank account.
When GB News blinked into life on television screens in 2021 it did so with £60m behind it, much of it from the hedge fund billionaire Paul Marshall and the Legatum Institute via a parent company, and plenty of scepticism from the rest of the media commentariat.
By May 2023, it had a loyal and growing audience – but just £496,000 in the bank.
Accounts published last week reveal losses widened by 38 per cent in 2023 to £42.4m. Revenue from TV and online rose by £3m on the year before but costs far outpaced this, growing by £16m.
GB News has a ballooning wage bill that nearly doubled to £21.2m in 2023, much of it spent on sizeable salaries for the ‘talent’.
More alarming perhaps is its mounting debt pile of £87m, almost double last year’s debt, with a significant portion owed to its parent company.
With costs nearing £50m, the channel must significantly increase its audience share to break even. It would need to reach the scale of around a quarter the size of UKTV or a fifth the size of Channel 5 in terms of their TV ad revenue, according to industry analyst Richard Broughton of Ampere.
To add to its financial woes, GB News has been found to have broken broadcasting impartiality rules on several occasions and has about a dozen open Ofcom investigations into it.
Bare coffers and controversies aside though, GB News is gaining muscle in the British TV market.
The channel that features presenters including Farage, Jacob Rees-Mogg and the now-Reform MP Lee Anderson – as well as safer staples of daytime TV including Eamonn Holmes – reached an average of 2.7m people each month last year, up from 2.3m in 2022, according to figures from industry ratings body Barb.
Last Thursday, the channel drew in more viewers than BBC News and Sky News channels on average across the day. It topped Sky News’ viewing figures for four days running.
And it has just booted its main competitor off the telly, with Rupert Murdoch’s TalkTV failing to present a real challenge to GB News. TalkTV’s audience averaged just 11,100 in January, according to Barb, compared to more than 58,000 for GB News.
Ambition is certainly not GB News’ problem. It wants to become the UK’s largest news channel by 2028, which would be no mean feat when up against sizeable incumbents and, of course, a licence fee-funded behemoth in the BBC.
GB News’ advertising bet is showing promising signs. Although down on expectations, TV ad revenue was £4.2m, up 44 per cent from £2.9m the year before.
Digital revenue is now £2.1m, up almost four fold, with almost a third of GB News’ revenue from social media, YouTube and website visits.
Some £1.3m of the company’s revenue has come from outside the UK, which will be an important figure to watch as the channel develops their GB News America offering.
And last year the channel launched an online paywall and membership scheme aiming to shore up revenues.
Whether or not GB News can turn its growing audience into a sustainable business is kind of beside the point.
If Marshall likes the idea of keeping GB News as a place for ‘all perspectives’ – the name of the channel’s holding company – he may keep pumping money into it. His name has been in and out of the running for the Telegraph in recent months.
One thing is clear. As the country nears an election and a large subset of our political classes and voting public turns to GB News, there won’t be any ignoring the upstart.
