In 2024, the year marking Le Monde‘s 80th anniversary, Le Monde Group experienced a landmark period in many respects. First, with new records for the number of subscribers to our editorial offerings, which propelled our paid circulation to unprecedented levels.
To put these results in the broader context of our evolution since our founding in December 1944, we presented the curve of our paid circulation in France and internationally at our most recent supervisory board meeting, certified monthly by independent bodies.
This annual average, now including our digital subscribers, has reached over 530,000 copies per day – well above the previous peak of 440,000 in 1978, during the legislative elections preceding the election of former French president François Mitterrand.
In the long term, three essential factors form the basis of our readers’ trust and loyalty. The independence of our journalism – committed to values but not partisan – toward all forms of power, starting with those held by political leaders; the particular focus devoted to covering major events, both international and French; and the determination to break our own stories through investigation and reporting.
The increasing attention paid over the years to our readers – their lives, interests and habits – has not only led us to continually expand our editorial offering but also to embrace digital platforms early on. These platforms now drive our success, enabling us to reach far beyond our borders to engage with more diverse and younger audiences.
All three of these factors were fully at play in 2024, enabling us to respond to an intense, often violent and always uncertain news cycle, while continuing to innovate and broaden the scope of our editorial coverage. Our visibility has attracted its share of criticism, but more importantly, it challenges the defeatist narrative that has long surrounded the print press. Far from being doomed to decline, print media can thrive when it strives to strengthen its newsroom and defend free journalism.
Individual and collective honors
This success was reflected in 2024 by several major awards from our profession. Le Monde was especially honored to see two of its journalists win the Albert Londres Prize: Lorraine de Foucher, for her reporting and investigations on the Mazan rape case, on migrant women who are victims of rape, on victims of the pornography industry, on young girls exploited for sex in the southern French city of Perpignan and on teenage hitmen; and Martin Untersinger, for his book Espionner, mentir, détruire (“To Spy, To Lie, To Destroy”).
These two awards recognize not only the talent of our journalists and their ability to explore new facets of reality, but also the transformation of Le Monde‘s newsroom, whose staff has nearly doubled in less than 15 years.
There were also collective awards. Le Monde‘s circulation performance was recognized with two stars awarded by the ACPM (Alliance pour les Chiffres de la Presse et des Médias, the independent body certifying French press circulation). The first reflects the largest increase in paid circulation in 2024 in the daily press sector; the second, especially meaningful to us, rewards sustained success – that is, a growth in sales, with an increase of 141,444 copies per day since 2020.
Another Groupe Le Monde publication, the weekly Courrier International, led by Claire Carrard and François-Xavier Devaux, also received two ACPM awards: one star for the highest growth in paid circulation among magazines, and another for sustained success between 2020 and 2024. Thanks to steady growth in paid circulation, the Courrier International now ranks as the top French magazine for its portfolio of digital subscribers.
The second spot in this ranking is now held by another of the group’s weeklies, Télérama, which in 2024 continued to revamp its editorial approach and significantly invest in coverage of streaming platforms, especially through its website and app. This strong digital transition, under the leadership of Valérie Hurier and Fleur Lavedan, positions Télérama for a future that reflects the loyalty shown by its subscribers for decades.
Finally, La Vie, the group’s third weekly, made a mark in summer 2024 with the publication of an investigation revealing accusations of sexual assault against Abbé Pierre.
A drive for diversification
In recent years, our group has gradually diversified its activities by creating or co-organizing events to reach new audiences, such as our student fairs or the “Nos Futurs” (“Our Futures”) event in Rennes, which features debates and workshops on major societal issues like climate and artificial intelligence. The year 2024 also saw the launch of the Le Goût de M festival, which in March brought together more than 5,000 people with the team from M Le magazine du Monde. Our magazine will celebrate its 15th anniversary in 2026 and will mark the occasion with another edition of this festival.
This drive to diversify our editorial production will also be illustrated in a few months by the publication of a book, then a graphic novel and finally a documentary in 2026 – all based on the series of articles by Philippe Broussard, deputy editor-in-chief of Le Monde, dedicated to the “unknown photographer of the Occupation,” published in summer 2024. This series was a tremendous success with our readers and now justifies, as we intend to do more often, presenting it in other formats to new audiences.
Faced with an advertising market paralyzed since the announcement of the dissolution of the Assemblée Nationale (lower house of France’s parliament) in June 2024, the group’s advertising division, M Publicité, managed to limit its decline to 3% by drawing on 7% growth in digital revenue and a 27% increase in special projects linked to the Olympic Games and our events. This advertising business, strictly governed by a charter that clearly distinguishes between advertising formats and editorial content, generates 20% of the group’s revenue and is a structural component of our business model, offering our readers and subscribers carefully selected advertising in both print and online. Despite the market share captured by digital players, this revenue remains essential for our sustainability.
Another highlight of the year came in March 2024, when Le Monde announced the signing of the first agreement between a French media outlet and OpenAI, the publisher of ChatGPT. A year on, Le Monde remains the only French media group to have signed such a deal and is among about 15 global groups with which OpenAI has entered into a multi-year partnership. The agreement governs OpenAI’s use of our content while strictly protecting the rights of publishers and copyright holders. In line with the charter we adopted in 2023 governing our use of AI, it guarantees fair visibility for our content on a platform widely used by younger generations, gives us direct access to a technology that is revolutionizing media habits and establishes fair compensation for training OpenAI’s model and using our content in responses provided to users.
On this last point, we ensured that this revenue stream would be treated as neighboring rights, thus entitling journalists to a share as provided by law. In 2024, we reached an agreement with trade unions setting the redistribution rate at 25% – a proportion now adopted by several other media groups, far exceeding what others had tried to impose. Most recently, another agreement with the company Perplexity, signed in mid-May, completed our initiatives in the field of artificial intelligence, in the same spirit and under the same conditions.
This collective momentum, the steady growth of our digital audience and these new AI partnerships all contributed to the group’s revenue growth and to our 2024 results. Le Monde Group’s accounts, approved by the supervisory board on May 13, showed revenue of €309.5 million for 2024, EBITDA (operating cash flow) of €26.2 million and net income before tax of €10.6 million.
Recapitalized in 2010 thanks to the joint investment of Pierre Bergé, Xavier Niel and Matthieu Pigasse, Le Monde Group has recorded a profitable operating result every year since 2015 and, since 2016, has consistently posted a positive net result. This profitability is the foundation of our independence. It has enabled sustained and ongoing investment in our newsrooms and in innovation.
Furthermore, in 2024, the group’s profit contributions from Le Monde (€7.5 million) and our magazine division (€8.4 million) converged, with comparable profitability thresholds and a more balanced distribution between the group’s two pillars. It is up to us, collectively, to continue along this path to strengthen the quality, independence and innovation standards of a rigorous editorial offering worthy of the trust you place in us.
