Caixin Media’s paid readership exceeded 900,000 at the end of October, after the outlet became the world’s largest subscription-based media outside the U.K. and the U.S. earlier this year, Publisher Hu Shuli announced at the 13th Caixin Summit last week.
The International Federation of Periodical Publishers (FIPP) released its Global Digital Subscription Snapshot for the second quarter of 2022 in June, in which Caixin ranked ninth with 850,000 subscribers, up one spot from 2021, when it recorded 700,000 paid readers.
Media outlets from the U.S. dominated the top five on the 2022 list, with the New York Times’s 8.3 million net subscriber base giving it the top spot and the Wall Street Journal with 3 million paid readers claiming second place.
British newspapers Guardian and Financial Times ranked sixth and seventh, respectively, while Japanese media Nikkei.com, the only other non-U.K. or U.S. outlet among the top 10, ranked one place below Caixin with around 816,000 subscribers.
Caixin launched its paid subscription service at the end of 2017. Hu, also the founder of Caixin, said at the Caixin Summit that its paid services made it possible for the outlet “to stay at the forefront of news dissemination among global mainstream media,” adding that it also helps the outlet to build a “credible platform for telling China’s stories to the world.”
“Caixin Media adheres to originality and launched the paid online news (services) with an aim to aggregate rational and diligent readers instead of traffic flow, while increasing the communication value of news content that carries social responsibility,” said Hu. “This is also the model commonly adopted by global mainstream news media.”
Caixin was the first media outlet in China to put all of its online news behind a subscription paywall. In 2019, Caixin ranked 15th on the FIPP list with 300,000 paid subscribers and the only Chinese media to be shortlisted. In 2020, Caixin ranked 10th with 510,000 paid subscribers.
Contact reporter Kelly Wang (jingzhewang@caixin.com) and editor Jonathan Breen (jonathanbreen@caixin.com)
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