USA TODAY Co. (NYSE: TDAY) reported fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 results on February 26, 2026, positioning 2025 as a milestone year that included a corporate rebrand from Gannett to USA TODAY Co. and a continued shift toward digital revenue mix.

For full-year 2025, the company reported $2.302B in total revenue and net income of $1.749M.

For subscription operators, the most relevant signals were in digital-only subscription monetization and the operating strategy management described on the earnings call.

Q4 digital and subscription highlights (company-reported):

• Total digital revenue: $277.5M, representing 47.4% of total revenue in Q4.

• Digital-only subscription revenue: $45.6M in Q4, with the company noting a second consecutive quarter of sequential growth.

• Digital-only ARPU: $9.81 in Q4 for total USA TODAY Co., up 23.7% year over year (KPI table).

Year-end subscriber base context:
USA TODAY Co. reported 1.512M total digital-only paid subscriptions as of December 31, 2025, down 26.7% year over year. The KPI table shows USA TODAY Media at 1.367M (down 30%) and Newsquest at 145K (up 31.8%).

On the earnings call, Kristin Roberts, President of USA TODAY Media, described the company’s early-2025 digital-only subscription pivot as a deliberate shift away from short-term volume in order to improve long-term subscriber value and predictability.

Roberts also tied audience strategy to subscription testing. She said the company took intentional steps to stabilize around more than 1 billion domestic page views per month to create room to test improvements across engagement, registration, offer take-up, and pay-up, including experimentation around “different subscriber thresholds.”

2026 outlook: The company said total digital revenues are expected to grow on a same-store basis and are expected to make up 50%+ of total revenues during 2026.

INSIDER TAKE

In a market where paid news growth is harder to manufacture through discounting alone, USA TODAY Co. is leaning into a different path: a deliberate shift toward subscriber value and predictability, with Q4 results showing ARPU expansion and sequential subscription revenue gains even as the year-end paid base is smaller.

• This is an ARPU-led subscription strategy reset, with management explicitly accepting subscriber-base contraction as part of the trade. The reported outcome in Q4 is straightforward: record ARPU alongside sequential digital-only subscription revenue growth, while year-end digital-only paid subscriptions are materially lower year over year.
• The operational nugget worth stealing is the “stabilize reach, then tune conversion” sequencing. Roberts’ comments connect a traffic floor (1B+ domestic page views/month) to structured testing across the funnel. For operators, that is a useful framing for avoiding whiplash: keep the top of funnel stable enough that experiments on gating, offers, registration, and lifecycle changes produce interpretable results.
• What we do not know yet is what is driving ARPU expansion under the hood. Management referenced being “smart” on pricing and attracting and retaining higher-value subscribers, but the release and transcript do not fully decompose how much of ARPU lift is coming from price and packaging versus mix shift (for example, fewer discounted cohorts). Keep your language in the story aligned with what they actually said: ARPU is up and the strategy is value-first, but the driver mix is not fully quantified.
• AI licensing  Management highlighted AI licensing agreements, including Meta, and also flagged that this revenue can be variable in timing and recognition.