London Centric hits 5,500 paid subscribers on a three-person team

Jim Waterson's London Centric has grown to 5,500 paid subscribers and more than 42,000 free subscribers since launching in September 2024, making it the UK's biggest paid-for local newsletter on Substack and roughly £300,000 to £400,000 a year in revenue depending on the discount mix. The former Guardian media editor runs a three-person team with no marketing spend, funded almost entirely by subscriptions at around £6 a month or £60 a year. "It turns out that if you delight people with big investigations and scoops that tell them something they didn't know about the city they live in, they're willing to pay, and they're not willing to pay for generic empty coverage where they can feel that effort wasn't put into it," Waterson told Press Gazette. He credits a Harry Potter gift-shop tax investigation that drew Treasury ministers and prompted raids, and a WhatsApp tip line that yields "20 or 30 tips a day that could be national stories". Around 95% of revenue is subscriptions, with no advertising currently on the product, though Waterson says "nothing's off the table".

The crux

A single local newsletter run by three people is proving that direct-to-reader subscription revenue can fund real investigative journalism, the exact economics the national press has been dismantling, and the model carries almost none of the ad-supply-path cost the rest of the industry is fighting.

Sell-side read

London Centric's margin profile, no programmatic stack, no intermediaries, near-pure reader revenue, is the clearest demonstration this week that the highest-yield inventory a publisher can own is a direct subscription, and that scale is a distribution cost, not a prerequisite for profit.

Watch

whether Waterson holds the line on advertising as he moves toward "an actual plan" after two years of word-of-mouth growth, and whether the local-subscription model spreads to other UK cities.