1,500 paying subscribers in a month, in a market written off for reader revenue
What it takes to launch a paywall where some people might donate to journalism but don't subscribe to it.
For close to a year and a half now, I’ve been working with Isabela Pop on HotNews’s push to introduce a reader-funded membership product, something no digital news publisher in Romania had done before. HotNews Premium launched on 18 May, and one month in it has passed 1,500 subscribers.
This work happened through MDIF’s Amplify Europe programme, which is also how Isa and I came to work together, and it sits alongside an investment Pluralis (an MDIF managed fund) has since made in HotNews’s parent company ZYX Publishing. That being said, neither HotNews nor MDIF sponsored this edition, it’s our own editorial production.
I asked Isa to write up the experience because I think it’s useful to understand what it took to get there in a market that keeps insisting reader revenue won’t work.
Four weeks before the launch of HotNews Premium, I was in Perugia at an aperitivo, talking with a few Romanian media people about audience revenue and publisher sustainability. I was building the audience revenue programme for HotNews, a large horizontal news publisher in Romania. While I was explaining the project, someone running a newsroom looked at me and said: “This will never work back home.”
It wasn’t the first time I had heard that. Over the year I spent building the project, that sentence was the first argument I had to overcome in both internal and external conversations. I understood where it came from.
The subscription culture that exists in parts of Western and Central Europe or the US does not have the same foundation here. Before HotNews Premium, no large generalist news publisher in Romania had built a digital subscription product around its journalism. There was no obvious local precedent to point to and say: this is what success looks like.
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Audience revenue does exist, but in a very specific form. Romania has a 3.5% fiscal facility, which allows taxpayers to redirect part of their income tax to an NGO of their choosing. The outlet that has mastered this is Recorder, the investigative publication where I started my career. Tens of thousands of people fill out forms each year to redirect taxes toward their journalism. In 2024, that mechanism helped them raise over 1.1 million euros, plus another 290k through the corporate profit tax donation. That is nearly 60% of their total revenue for the year.
Those numbers are impressive, but they are not the norm. The system creates a winner-takes-all dynamic, with a few strong players capturing most of the money and the rest left with small amounts. It also creates a particular kind of support habit. People who care about journalism are used to helping by redirecting money that would otherwise go to the state, not necessarily by taking out their card and paying from their own pocket every month. It is a form of voluntary support, but it is not the same as a subscription habit.
Outside that mechanism, the donation market is thin and in the for-profit part of the sector, audience revenue is even thinner.
At the same time, advertising is still a real business in Romania. Television captures around 50% of all advertising spend, but digital advertising remains vibrant, and some of the money that historically went to television is still moving online. For a publisher like HotNews, advertising is not a declining legacy revenue stream kept alive out of nostalgia, it still pays the bills.
In 2025, HotNews recorded total revenues of 3.5 million euros, with 94% coming from advertising, 4% from copyright licensing, and 2% from grants. We were operating at a 17% EBITDA margin.
That also changes the incentives. If there is still meaningful money to be made from digital advertising, the case for audience revenue becomes more complicated. A membership or subscription product can introduce questions about reach, product friction, advertising inventory, editorial priorities, and how commercial partners will react. When advertising is collapsing, experimenting with reader revenue is easier to justify. When advertising is still generating significant income, the internal question becomes: why risk disturbing something that works?
So the scepticism was rational.
What made HotNews’s case different, and unusual in a global context, was that we weren’t doing this under pressure. It was an intentional management decision to explore audience revenue before it became existential. That gave us room to think, to test, and to be wrong in controlled ways. But it also raised the stakes: in a crisis, experimentation is easy to defend because doing nothing is obviously worse. In our case, there was something to lose. That meant the project had to be ambitious enough to matter, but careful enough not to damage a business that was already working.
I came to HotNews as Head of Data and Research after a master’s at The London School of Economics, where I focused on the impact of audience revenue programmes on the journalism that publishers produce. The subscription project became mine to build.
We started with an audience survey, mapping the habits and spending behaviour of HotNews’s most loyal users. At the same time, we started to think about the necessary tech and after months of vendor evaluation, we landed on Piano for paywall and related infrastructure. We launched author-driven newsletters, grew them, and planned to gradually move them behind the paywall.
The HotNews Premium we landed on is a freemium model where, in addition to exclusive content, subscribers get access to all newsletter editions, priority in the comments section, a 40% discount for books purchased from our partner, and, for annual subscribers, access to The New York Times.
A little bit about the NYT deal:
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