Stat’s 10-Year History Coupling Quality Reportage With Paid Subs

Stat launched 10 years ago out of Boston Globe Media to cover health, medicine and the life sciences with an unabashed focus on generating revenue directly from its readers, aka, subscriptions.

That led to steady growth of paying readers, but even Stat with its subscription-first mindset fell victim to a boom in Covid advertising from 2020 to 2021 that was followed by a deep contraction in healthcare and biotech ad and communications spending. 

“The one thing we did know was, in spite of the contraction on the advertising side, one: events stayed stable… two: subscriptions kept growing, and in some instances we were either closing new enterprise subscription deals or growing existing subscription deals from the same companies that were cutting their advertising,” Stat Chief Operating Officer Angus Macaulay told AMO. 

The company, following the election of Donald Trump to his second presidency, was nonetheless forced to lay off 11 employees in December because of that spending contraction. But as it turns out, Trump’s messy administration has meant a renewed bump in reader interest and ad dollars, with Stat expecting over 10% in revenue growth for 2025. Over the past two years, subscriptions have grown 30% annually, and are on pace to do the same for this year, with the publication hitting year-end target numbers for subscriber growth a month ago. 

Going forward, the company is more cautious about peaks and valleys in growth and readership.

“The impact of the last four months from the administration was not predictable. I suppose that you could say it was a little bit predictable, but not quite to the extent we’re seeing… But what we’ve also seen is that can slow down,” Macaulay said. The urgency and volume of news stories that have to be read will inevitably decelerate. It’s “a news cycle. This one happens to be a big one, but at some point it’ll slow down. So we have to just continue to model out and prepare for that.”

Today, Stat also has a diversified revenue stream with events, recognition programs and a brand studio that is offering ever more sophisticated sponsorship opportunities.

Quality Journalism

Boston Globe owner John Henry built Stat as a separate entity in 2015, bringing on both Macauley and Rick Berke, who spent almost three decades at The New York Times, as executive editor. Henry saw Boston as an epicenter of health and medicine that wasn’t being sufficiently covered. Today, the staff numbers about 80, including editorial, audience development, product design, engineering and ad sales and marketing. The idea to create a self-sustaining company and not rely on the Globe’s resources was that it would be more nimble to spin up the business quickly, as well as being more flexible to try new things. 

With an aim to do high-quality journalism, Stat hired experienced reporters from the likes of The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Reuters and Bloomberg. It worked. Early pieces on Watson Health and Purdue Pharma—pre-opioid crisis—helped put them on the map, even if initially hurting them financially. Stat lost millions of dollars in advertising for its tough stories, including from Purdue, which pulled sponsorship years ago, only to return because “they knew they had to,” Berke said.  

But they were also doing well with subscriptions, first priced at $299 annually. They weren’t sure what to expect in terms of renewals that first year, and were pleasantly surprised when 80% of readers reupped.    

“It then enabled us—with far more confidence—to model out our acquisition rate and the retention rate, what our revenue projection could be for the next three plus years, and go back to the owners and say, ‘It’s working,’” Macaulay said. 

Stat currently has about 50,000 subscribers, with a larger reach when considering non-paywalled stories, newsletters and events. Subscriptions cost $39 per month or $399 per year. That’s up from 30,000 in 2022, Adweek reported, when subscriptions were split evenly between individual subscriptions and corporate or institutional subscriptions, with 70% paying annually.

Stat’s traffic also tells the story. Leading up to 2019, Stat was seeing about 1.5 million monthly unique visitors. Covid drove that up to 23 million in April 2020. 

“We were getting referenced and linked to everywhere, but also obviously in search, we quickly created strong domain authority around it,” Macaulay said

That had settled at closer to 2 million, but post-Trump 2.0, they are seeing about 3 million uniques a month. They have also won several awards over the years, including the National Magazine Award for General Excellence, multiple Murrow Awards and recognition from the George W. Polk Awards and SABEW.

“We’ve got this incredible team, trusted, authoritative, and the brand obviously now has a 10-year track record covering what’s been going on in the administration and has become a flashpoint for us as a place where people in the industry, on Capitol Hill, in the FDA, finding out what’s going on in their own administration through Stat,” Macaulay said. The Trump administration has meant more aggressive reporting and more focus on policy and politics in DC than before.   

“Our lane is health and medicine, and we are overwhelmed. We could have 10 people covering HHS,” Berke said.

That said, they did take a minor hit with government agencies canceling their enterprise subscriptions after the White House in February directed the General Services Administration to terminate “every single media contract” expensed by the agency, Axios reported. Macaulay said it’s just “a few percentage points of our subscription revenue, so it’s not a material impact of the business.” 

Nonetheless, Stat implemented automated campaigns to go out to those previous government readers with special rates to get them back in as individuals or small groups—and some are indeed returning. 

“The importance of all the news coming out and the quality and the volume of which our team is producing has created the opposite effect overall in terms of we’re seeing phenomenal subscription growth this year, and well ahead of our budgeted projections,” Macaulay said. “We hit our year end number in terms of total subs a month ago.” 

Prosumer readers

Berke describes the publication as B2B-plus, trying to make it sophisticated enough for the professionals but also accessible enough for the layman.

“We didn’t want to come here and focus on just a narrow audience. We wanted to do important journalism that would be really impactful across the board. Our core audience… are people in the world of health and medicine who live and breathe and work in those worlds. Bill Gates has told our owners he reads Stat every day,” Berke said. “We have a really influential audience, people in the industry, and in the academic world and in related fields… but we also have a lot of our stories that break through to bigger audiences.” 

“In terms of overall leadership, including free users, we’re about 80/20 U.S./international. Our largest state since day one has been California in terms of readership,” Macaulay said. “When you get into the paid side, it’s more California, Massachusetts, New York and DC, which is basically where biopharma and the related ecosystems are centered.”

Readership breakdown:

• Pharma, Biotech, Med Device, Tech: 37%
• Academic: 16%
• Government:  11%
• Media: 8%
• Non-Profit/Advocacy: 9%
• Health Care Provider: 8%
• Investor, VC: 9%
• Service Providers: 2%

Recently, Stat implemented a dynamic paywall to test out different strategies, from getting 30 days free to three months for $30, then modeling that out the long term in terms of lifetime value and where it would put them a year or two down the road. 

“It became very clear that three months for $30 was the best acquisition lever to get the volume we need and the retention we need to hit revenue numbers a year or two out,” Macaulay said. 

The different tests on duration and price points have enabled Stat to accelerate reader acquisition and accelerate overall growth, taking advantage of the significant increase in overall traffic resulting from the Trump administration. Macaulay said:

“It also enabled us to layer in a registration wall before the paywall on the free story. So there are instances where we might have a big story, and we say, this is an important story, we want to make it free for whatever reason, but we’re going to then put the registration wall from the get go, or we’ll have the registration wall, static it after two stories, but it enables us to capture first party data, build out the marketing database, have it as a mechanism to get people on one of our free newsletters.”

Events, Recognition

Stat has a robust events business, which play an important role in revenue generation. It also runs recognition programs for younger scientists and physicians that are sponsored. Those have become fairly competitive and help to hook younger readers. Events are ticketed with prices ranging from $200 to $1,600 for the larger summit show, but the bulk of revenue comes from sponsorship.

Stat events:

• Big summit in October over two days and covering a broad mix of topics in health, medicine and life sciences. 
• Breakthrough East: one day in New York in March, focused on R&D
• Breakthrough West: one day in San Francisco in May, focused on AI
• Adjacent events: Three-hour gatherings held alongside events like the annual JP Morgan Healthcare Conferences and the ASCO (American Society of Clinical Oncology) annual meeting 

Recognition Program/Competition: 

• Stat Wunderkinds: A competition for universities and scientific institutions to propose people who are the next young change makers in science. 
• Stat Madness: A bracket-style tournament to find the best innovations in science and medicine from research institutions nationwide.  

STAT Madness and STAT Wunderkinds are sponsor-led programs that drive revenue and provide platforms for engagement with subscribers and non-subscribers.

While subscriptions represent a little more than half of the revenue mix, events represent a big chunk of the advertising and sponsorship piece. 

And Stat has been investing in its offerings for sponsors. For example, a sponsor paying for a fireside chat at an event can also get recorded clips ready for social media and produced by Stat’s team. Stat will also provide a brand studio on site at an event where sponsors can do their own interviews and create additional social assets. 

“They come out of it with multiple assets to push their message out. The people who weren’t necessarily in the room we’ll also write an article that will be a sponsored post about the fireside chat, and then have traffic drivers both in our newsletter website, pointing toward that article,” Macaulay said. “How much more can we give them to basically magnify that impact beyond just the number of people in the room or on the live stream, but really get a message out for a much broader audience.” 

It’s yet another example of revenue diversification that has worked for the publication, and generally more predictable than pure advertising.

”The cycle of advertising, month to month, quarter to quarter, can really change fast,” Macaulay said. “For better or for worse, with subscriptions, it’s an incredibly stable line that just grows.” 

“Now we can really model out how we scale this business, get its profitability, and then be able to make the case to continue to invest in it.”