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EL PAÍS exceeds 400,000 subscribers in just four and a half years

21-01-2025

  • The newspaper consolidates its undisputed lead among Spain’s news media and reaches the same daily circulation figure as in print before the 2008 crisis


EL PAÍS has surpassed 400,000 subscribers —a significant milestone for the newspaper. Reached just weeks ago, this achievement reaffirms its dominant position in the Spanish media landscape and serves as a powerful symbolic benchmark: 400,000 was the newspaper’s average daily print circulation before the 2008 crisis.

The achievement comes only four and a half years after the launch of the subscription model, in May 2020. According to December data, almost 392,000 are digital subscribers -more than double the number of the next most popular Spanish daily. Some of these are also among the  29,000 subscribers to the print edition and around 5,000 who pay for the PDF version of the print edition.

“In an era of hostility towards the media and efforts to discredit the press, surpassing 400,000 subscribers reaffirms our essential role as a pillar of societies that seek to understand the world around us in order to form opinions," said EL PAÍS Editor-in-Chief Pepa Bueno. "This milestone carries immense symbolic value, not just for us, but for the entire industry. Today, as many people place their trust in EL PAÍS as they did at the height of our print circulation in the analog era. And this comes despite the upheavals and crises the press has had to navigate in the early years of this century," she added. Bueno also underscored the balance between tradition and innovation: "Constantly exploring new technologies and adapting to how our readers want to be informed in 2025 is fully compatible with the core essence of journalism: to get out there,  to look, to listen, to ask, to verify, to question, to verify again—and to tell the story.

The speed at which the figure has been reached, in just over four and a half years and one year ahead of schedule, has exceeded the most optimistic estimates. In France, a more mature market when it comes to paying for digital journalism, the leader, Le Monde, took a decade to reach 465,000 subscribers and it closed last year with 600,000. EL PAÍS also has more than twice as many subscribers as its nearest Spanish rival.

The executive chairperson of PRISA Media and EL PAÍS, Carlos Núñez, points out that “in the past two years  EL PAÍS has set the gold standard in Europe for growth as well as the sheer number of subscribers”. Winning the trust and support of more than 400,000 audited subscribers within this timeframe, while adhering to the industry's best practices, he noted, “is the result of a solid strategy and the flawless execution of this strategy by an outstanding team. Thanks to them, by the first quarter of this year, we will have already reached the goal we had set in our strategic plan for the end of 2025."

As part of this strategy, a year ago EL PAÍS rolled out a Premium subscription which offers readers the contents of the Cinco Días business daily and, since October, full access to The New York Times (available in Spain and Latin America).

Among EL PAÍS's many launches in 2024, a standout is EL PAÍS US, the voice of Latinos in the United States. It joins a continent-wide network that began in 2013 with the creation of EL PAÍS América which has editions in Mexico, Colombia, Argentina and Chile, in addition to EL PAÍS in English.

EL PAÍS Exprés, which provides a daily news digest, has become a daily go-to for tens of thousands of readers. Meanwhile, the newspaper’s 50 newsletters, with a subscriber base of 800,000 users, remain a key driver of subscription growth.

EL PAÍS closed the year with the announcement of its AI-powered conversational assistant—currently in the testing phase—which answers questions based on the newspaper’s historical archives. In video, EL PAÍS has ventured into documentary production with works such as Los soldados del tanque 27, a frontline account of day-to-day life in Ukraine that was a finalist for the Gabo Awards, and Afganistán, el país donde Alá abandonó a las mujeres, which premiered last week. Meanwhile, EL PAÍS Audio recently released a new episode of the second season of Sin Control, the podcast on Javier Milei.

Among the stories that subscribers spent the most time reading last year were in-depth reports such as El gran bulo del 11-M: así se fabricó la teoría de la conspiración and Fentanilo, retrato de un asesino de masas, both in EL PAÍS Semanal (The Great 11-M Hoax: How the Conspiracy Theory Was Manufactured and Fentanyl: Portrait of a Mass Killer). Another standout was Los 10 pensadores más influyentes del mundo, with which the supplement Ideas celebrated its 500th issue. Readers also engaged with investigations into sexual abuse in the world of culture, the migrant crisis, the rise of the far right, and the annual The 50 Best Books of 2024.

To mark this milestone, EL PAÍS will bring together newspaper journalists and a group of subscribers in Madrid on Friday, the 24th. The event will be a fusion of words and music, featuring Chief Editor Pepa Bueno, Luz Sánchez-Mellado, Manuel Jabois, and Elvira Lindo, among others, with attendees from the worlds of culture, journalism and politics. The celebration will be streamed live on the newspaper’s website at 7:00 PM (Madrid time), offering an insider’s look at a newsroom that will celebrate its 50th anniversary next year.

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