The Daily Wire, For The First Time, Reveals The Size Of Its Paid Subscriber Base

With close to 600,000 subscribers paying for one of its three membership tiers, you could argue that the conservative media. That part of the name implies the firehose of information obtained from a newswire.

A mix of quick-hit takes plus original reporting is still the center of The Daily Wire. The company has matured to the point that its commercial ambitions feel more aligned with a publisher like The New.

Broadly speaking, that means the company has built up a robust subscription business and a healthy advertising revenue. Also part of the mix? Over time, subscriber-exclusive and news-adjacent benefits will serve to wed The Daily Wire and its paying customers into a tighter relationship. The plan is at any rate.

Along the same lines, Boreing takes a dim view of the approach taken by his peers in conservative media. The chief executive of The Daily Wire believes that relying too much on the kindness of strangers is a bad idea.

In an interview, Boreing stressed to me that they want to be a media company in the traditional sense. The Daily Wire is a news website that has turned it into one of the top publishers on Facebook. The company's ambitions are much larger.

While other conservative news and media companies are known mostly for sites built around voice-y takes on the day's news, The Daily Wire has also started debuting original movies. It's even now selling direct-to-consumer goods, like razors and razor kits, which, at first, might seem to make as much sense as The Washington Post running a TikTok account or The New York Times buying a viral word game.

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The company is trying to bring a viable commercial model to a profession that is also grounded in a modern conservative worldview. One example is the razors. When Harry's Razors pulled its ads from The Daily Wire over the site's content and political bent, Boreing essentially said "okay, we'll start selling an alternative product."

Jeremy's Razors had sold 50,000 razor kits and subscriptions in its first 10 days after launch. Only 30 percent of the razor subscriptions were to Daily Wire subscribers.

Conservatives often take a gloomy view of the future. We have to come up with alternatives. That is what we do. We believe we can be a part of building the future.

I believe that it would appeal to a young conservative audience who are tired of losing and feel like all that is left to us is to continue losing. They weren't here for the good old days. They haven't given up. They still have to live in this world and they want to be a part of it.

The Daily Wire, by the numbers

At the moment, the company co-founded by Boreing, Robinson and Shapiro looks like it will be a conservative company.

• The Daily Wire now has a run rate approaching $150 million, annualized.

• It’s closing in on 200 full-time employees

• The company also produces 250 pieces of content (including several dozen written articles) a day. And now, for the first time, The Daily Wire has disclosed the size of its paid subscriber base (the 600,000 figure above), which generates money that the company is increasingly investing into content that has nothing to do with news.

The Daily Wire has a book publishing imprint, which includes its slate of podcasts, as well as Apple's platform. The first movie it released was called Run Hide Fight and was described by The Hollywood Reporter as "slick and compulsively watchable".

A Gina Carano-led western is coming this summer.

The films are not about politics, according to Boreing. We want to make content that people want to see. They don't want to see content that they don't want to see.

Fighting “woke media companies”

The Daily Wire will invest a minimum of $100 million over the next three years into a line of live-action and animated children's entertainment.

Disney's General Entertainment content president said that the company intends to produce content with many, many LGBTQIA characters.

The Daily Wire was going to go down this road. The announcement of Disney's plans didn't accelerate his company's plans.

He told me that they believe that the left has taken over most corporations in the US.

We are not going to challenge our audience at all with our kids content. We are going to be a very safe place. A conservative parent can be very confident sitting their child down in front of our kids entertainment offering without having to worry about the content being shown first.

Two Daily Wire kids shows already in the works

Two kids shows have been green-lit by the company, and there are six scripts in one of them. The other important thing to note is that boredom acknowledges that entertainment content is hard. The big upfront spend is required, as well as the Roulette wheel nature of whether something turns into a hit or not.

The Daily Wire has at least one thing going for it. The company knows how to convince a critical mass of their audience to pay for a product that they want. When we win, the Daily Wire makes money.