The 100k Club, AI licensing, and the edition app revenue hiding in plain sight

The 100k Club’s 2026 ranking

Press Gazette, Biggest subscription news websites 2026: Exclusive ranking

It’s that time of year again! Press Gazette recently updated its 100k Club list of English-language publishers with at least 100,000 digital subscribers. The list now includes 61 publishers, up from just 24 in 2020.

Germany’s willingness-to-pay problem

FT Strategies, Navigating German News: Topics, Formats and Willingness to Pay/Audiencers, In Germany, most readers do not pay for news — but this 2025 study shares strategies that could change that

Germany is Europe’s largest newspaper market and the fifth largest in the world, but they face difficulties in getting readers to pay even so.

These peices explore why most German readers still do not pay for news, drawing on an FT Strategies study conducted in 2025 to highlight practical strategies publishers can apply to shift that behavior.

A new UK collective licensing scheme opens a seat at the AI table for smaller publishers

Press Gazette, New AI liscensing scheme to help smaller publishers strike deals with platforms

Publishers’ Licensing Services (PLS) has launched a collective licensing initiative designed to let news outlets of all sizes — from global magazine groups to independent digital titles — monetise their content being used in AI training and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).

The scheme creates a shared content repository that AI companies can access via a fee, addressing a gap that has left smaller publishers shut out of the one-to-one deal-making happening between large media groups and the major AI platforms.

Newsroom open-source sharing has fallen more than 80% from its peak — a new site is trying to bring the habit back

Open Journalism, README

Scott Klein, a veteran newsroom technologist, has launched Open Journalism, a biweekly roundup of new public code released by news organisations on GitHub.

He and collaborator Ben Welsh analysed new GitHub repository creation from news organisations and found it has dropped more than 80% since its peak in the mid-2010s.

The launch is powered by the Open Journalism Bot, a bot built with Claude that monitors the GitHub accounts of roughly 350 news organisations and posts whenever one of them releases something publicly.

Edition apps are a largely untapped ad revenue stream

Twipe, How to Leverage Ads in Your Edition App

Digital advertising accounts for 17% of publisher revenue on average yet edition apps remain one of the most undermonetised surfaces in a publisher’s portfolio.

The core structural advantages are significant: edition apps are immune to the ad-blocking software now used by up to 42% of desktop browser users, they offer a scarcity of ad inventory that justifies premium pricing, and they provide a brand-safe editorial environment that increasingly commands a premium from advertisers who have grown wary of open-web display.

For product managers running edition or ePaper products, this is a useful commercial checklist: the inventory already exists, the advertiser demand is there, and the main barrier is awareness that the opportunity is real.