The Independent has paid out £5m to shareholders since reinstating its dividend and has recorded a sixth consecutive year of profit.
Independent Digital News and Media reported a pretax profit of £1.9m for the financial year to 2 October 2022, £3.6m lower than a year earlier, according to accounts filed at Companies House.
The company paid out a total of £5m to investors, in two payments made in November 2021 and April 2022, after reinstating its shareholder dividend.
The Independent, in which Evgeny Lebedev continues to own a substantial stake, said the 66% fall in profits came after it “invested significantly in the editorial teams in the UK and the US” during the year, as well as in live reporting from the war in Ukraine.
However, since the end of the financial year in question, the publisher has made about 30 of its staff roles redundant, including several of its UK political reporters, in an attempt to cut costs during a decline in the digital advertising market and a worsening economic environment.
The Independent, which owns the websites Independent.co.uk and indy100.com, said it was looking for alternative sources of revenue and had been cutting its spending in “lower yielding or slower growing parts of the business”. Turnover grew by 12% to £46.3m.
It added that the cost of living crisis and impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had had an impact on confidence and on advertising markets in the UK and US.
The Independent, which is edited by the former Daily Mail editor Geordie Greig, has been profitable every year since it closed its print edition in March 2016 and became a fully digital publisher.
It said it had suffered from a decline in online views of its articles in the year to last October. The Independent blamed the news cycle in the US and UK, and said it was due to comparisons with 2021 when stories about Donald Trump and Black Lives Matter protests, as well as coverage about Boris Johnson and Brexit had captured the attention of readers. Overall UK monthly views declined 4.4%.
Greig, who was appointed at the start of 2023, has been tasked with growing the Independent’s audience in the US at a time news websites are struggling with the decline in traffic from sites such as Facebook.
The Independent, in which a significant stake has been owned by a Saudi investor since 2017, has launched a series of overseas editions in recent years, including in Spanish, Arabic, Turkish, Farsi and Urdu.
