Demand from members. The success of our Subscriptions Benchmark Service, which has attracted 70+ media companies, has also spurred organic demand for a broader range of benchmarks. This service was prioritised by our Board of Directors.
We are aiming to collect data from areas such as profit & loss, assets & liabilities, operations, audience, advertising, and subscriptions. We are identifying about 100 data points inside of these areas.
We recognise the challenge of data definitions company to company, country to country, and region to region. In preparation for this benchmark service, we have interviewed CEOs and CFOs at member media companies around the world and are ready to move forward with carefully crafted global standards. We will look at revenue, costs, earnings, capitalized expenses, depreciation, channel revenue, spending by function, employees, content, subscriptions, advertising, and more.
Online news publishers who publish at least one online news site can join the INMA Financial Benchmarking Service by applying via this Web site. Individuals, and companies that are not news media companies are not eligible to participate in this service.
The applicants will be approved by INMA to ensure, among others, comparability of businesses based on their target markets, and size and maturity of their online subscription business.
INMA collects from each participating publisher about 100 data points about finance and business volume, and delivers back the distribution of 200+ indices and ratios grouped in sections:
The data is collected and updated twice a year.
INMA releases the benchmarks and insights on the market trends only in the de-identified form, with KPIs of multiple companies recalculated into indices and aggregated, and indices for KPIs of individual companies anonymised.
INMA will not release any individual member’s KPIs in the form that identifies the member without the prior written consent.
INMA maintains physical, technical, and administrative safeguards to protect the members’ KPIs, benchmarks and insights against unauthorized access, use or disclosure.
The benchmarking service is provided by INMA and the terms and conditions will be regulated by an agreement between the member company and INMA.
Any INMA contractor will be bound by individual service and confidentiality agreements with INMA.
These are consistent policies and procedures across all INMA benchmark services.
INMA worked closely with key executives at member news media companies around the world to develop this financial and business performance benchmarking service. This is a member-driven service. INMA’s Board of Directors prioritised this service.
In addition to our interviews with 15+ CEOs and CFOs at INMA corporate members in preparation for this service, INMA has conducted a subscription benchmark service for 4+ years.
The service is sold as an annual subscription.
The price for 2025 is US$5,000 per media company for INMA members and US$13,995 for non-members.
The price for the service is competitive, as INMA does not tie the participating publishers with hardware or software purchase, nor consulting agreement, and the project is lean.
Publishers interested in applying may do so by clicking here. This is a two-minute application.
We will grant you access to the online report (dashboard), recordings of our meet-ups and presentations after you sign a contract and contribute the first batch of data for benchmarking.
You can join and cancel anytime.