Semafor expects to have its second profitable year, thanks to a growing events, er, convening business, cofounders Justin Smith and Ben Smith announced.
The news company, which launched four years ago, had its first profitable year last year on $40 million in revenue. In a note published Sunday, Smith and Smith said they expect “revenue and profitability and reach” to be “substantially bigger” in 2026.
About half of the company’s revenue comes from live events, which Semafor refers to as “convenings.” A two-day convening in November, for example, will cover “Silicon Valley & The World.” The co-chairs include names like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
In their note, the cofounders wrote that “Semafor is starting to emerge clearly as the thing that we hoped it would become.”
“We launched with the insight that a leadership audience — CEOs and political leaders alike — was, paradoxically, the most desperate for efficient, fair, and sophisticated news,” they continued.
It’s a stretch to say CEOs and political leaders are “desperate” for news. Existing news consumers tend to be older, wealthier, more white collar, and more politically engaged than those who don’t consume news. The genuinely underserved news audiences are elsewhere. Journalism for “decision makers” is one of the most crowded markets in news. Outlets like Bloomberg, Politico Pro, Financial Times, Punchbowl News, Axios Pro, and The Information operate in a similar space.
But readers aren’t the primary financial supporters of Semafor’s business. That’d be the corporate sponsors paying for access to its audience through ads and events. Although the annual update says the company has 1.2 million subscriptions, those remain free subscriptions for now.
By building a profitable and growing news business, Semafor has done something exceedingly rare. (It now has journalists on the ground in 11 countries and plans to launch in Asia in 2027.) Editor-in-chief Ben Smith explained some of his thinking on an episode of Decoder this summer.
In my memory, we always thought at some point we’d do subscriptions, but in my experience you just cannot be ideological about revenue. It’s hard enough to build a business in news without getting all hung up on the values of the different revenue streams.
Advertising-based publishers will tell you that democracy can only survive in a world where there aren’t paywalls. Subscription publishers will tell you that advertising is corrupting. At some point you realize everyone’s just talking about their book and that sometimes they’re already in a tough business and they’re talking themselves out of incremental opportunities and really successful media companies.
It’s “impossible” for publishers to compete with Google and Meta in the scaled advertising business, Smith told Decoder. He described Semafor as “an anti-scale business.”
If you’re reaching people in a very focused way in various particular environments — in person, in email, in video — that’s a case you can really credibly make to advertisers. We’ve built a big advertising and related convening business that way, and that’s one answer. It’s not the only answer, but it is one.
The note is here.
