GB News, a British broadcaster, lost £30 million in its first year after bringing on board broadcasters such as Eamonn Holmes, Nigel Farage, and Laurence Fox.
The free-to-air station debuted in June 2021, becoming the United Kingdom’s first television news start-up in more than 30 years.
It was founded with the intention of transmitting “original news, opinion, and discussion,” and has been labelled as right-leaning on political topics.
Nevertheless, numbers from the news channel’s corporate records reveal that it has fallen further into a loss in the fiscal year ending in May 2022.
It had a pre-tax loss of £30.7 million on revenues of £3.6 million during the period.
Advertising provided the majority of its revenue (nearly £2.9 million).
Notwithstanding the losses, GB News stated its board were’satisfied’ with the year’s results and predicted development in the company’s future performance.
During the year, the broadcaster paid more than £11 million in pay and salaries to its employees, many of whom are Tory MPs who have been granted platforms to deliver their own programmes.
Lee Anderson is among them, as are Tory MPs Jacob Rees-Mogg, Esther McVey, and Philip Davies.
Nigel Farage, former UKIP and Brexit Party leader, was among the first to join the broadcaster, anchoring its prime-time Sunday morning show.
However, since its inception, GB News has experienced various problems, including an advertising boycott by several firms such as Ikea, Kopparberg, and Octopus Energy, which opted to withdraw their advertisements from the channel.
It has also been the subject of Ofcom investigations, the first of which occurred in November 2022, when it was discovered to have violated its broadcast licence by failing to read out the entire list of candidates in the Erdington by-election.
Throughout the first year of the channel’s existence, Ofcom was compelled to start five different investigations into its broadcasts.
More than 2,300 complaints concerning GB News programmes had been filed with Ofcom as of August 2022.
Only this week it was also found that an episode of the Mark Steyn show, who was a host until earlier this year, exceeded its broadcasting guidelines and was ‘possibly hurtful and substantially deceptive’.
Steyn was found to have made a “incorrect assertion” concerning health statistics showing a relationship between the Covid vaccination and greater rates of illness, hospitalisation, and death in the episode.
In the year to May, the GB News TV channel had an average monthly reach of 2.3 million viewers, while the radio station had 415,000 listeners in the third quarter of the year.
According to the corporation, this makes it the fastest-growing radio station in the UK market.
Last year, GB News received a new £60 million funding injection from its previous sponsors, Dubai-based investment company Legatum Ventures and Sir Paul Marshall, one of the UK’s most notable hedge fund managers.
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