GB News losses balloon after spending spree on high-profile presenters
Channel plunges further into the red despite a jump in revenues
GB News’s losses have ballooned to £42.4m...
The outspoken news channel plunged further into the red in 2023 after losses widened from £30.7m in 2022.
Growth in viewing figures led to turnover almost doubling to £6.7m last year, but income remains only a fraction of the channel’s expenses.
Losses were fuelled by investment in salaries for high-profile presenters such as Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg, who joined in January 2023. GB News’s wage bill surged from £12.7m to £21.2m in 2023, newly filed accounts show.
The channel deepened its reliance on billionaire hedge fund investor Paul Marshall, who helped found GB News through a holding company called All Perspectives.
Filings on Companies House show that money owed to the parent company almost doubled from £42.8m to £83.8m in the last year alone.
Details of the company’s finances come after a turbulent year for the right-leading news channel, which has been repeatedly targeted by the media watchdog Ofcom.
- The most high-profile incident concerned misogynistic on-air comments made by Laurence Fox, who asked “Who would want to shag that?” about Ava Evans, a female journalist, during an episode of GB News’ Dan Wootton Tonight show last year.
Ofcom recently found that comments by Mr Fox, who was later sacked by GB News, breached Ofcom rules. In a ruling, the watchdog said Mr Fox’s comments “constituted a highly personal attack on Ms Evans and were potentially highly offensive to viewers”.
The broadcasting watchdog currently has 13 open investigations into GB News. They include two into Mr Rees-Mogg’s State of the Nation programme under Ofcom’s impartiality rules, and three into the morning programme hosted by married Tory MPs Esther McVey and Philip Davies.
Last month Ofcom launched an impartiality investigation after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak faced questions from an audience of undecided voters in a programme called The People’s Forum.
The channel’s repeated struggles with Ofcom compound GB News’s difficulties with advertisers. Companies launched an advertising boycott in 2021 amid concerns that the broadcaster would prove divisive and clash with corporate values.
Advertising revenue rose 44% last year from £2.9m to £4.2m as the channel made some progress in convincing companies to work with it.
GB News last year launched an online paywall to shore up revenues, including rolling out a membership scheme that offers exclusive commentary and analysis to subscribers.
The channel reached an average of 2.7m people each month last year, according to BARB figures quoted in the accounts, up from 2.3m in 2022.
The broadcaster has stated an ambition to become the UK’s largest news channel by 2028.
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