Inside The Information's 13-Year Anti-Advertising Triumph

In 2013, Jessica Lessin left a reporting job at The Wall Street Journal and launched a technology news site that charged $399 a year. She had spent about eight years covering Silicon Valley and the media industry at the paper and wanted to publish a deeply reported story that insiders would pay to read. She financed the company with less than $1 million of her own money, kept full ownership through a firm she named Lessin Media Company, and hired her first reporter, Eric Newcomer, in 2014. 

The Information launched without conventional advertising, and subscriptions were the sole source of revenue in the early days. The bet ran against the consensus that online information had to be free. In its thirteenth year, the publication runs a newsroom of dozens across several cities and remains owned by the person who founded it.

Subscriptions Were the Core Business

From the first article, readers paid an annual fee that funded the reporting. The news articles carried no display or banner ads and no native ads. The company has added other revenue over time, including brand partnerships, event sponsorships, and sponsored programming on its video show, while keeping the reporting itself free of advertising. Most of its reporting was available only to paying subscribers, though the company also ran free newsletters, promotional offers, and 14-day trials on select newsletters. 

Lessin has described the business as aligned with subscribers, since the newsroom answers to the people who pay rather than to advertisers on its articles. She built an early advisory board that included John Doerr, Jim VandeHei, and Paul Steiger and kept the publication free of outside investment. Forbes reported in 2016 that The Information had broken news about deals worth more than $97 billion.

The Price Selected the Audience

A $399 subscription is far above what most people pay for online news. The Reuters Institute has found that fewer than one in five readers in wealthy markets pay for any online news at all. That price narrowed the audience to executives, investors, or operators whose work made the fee a business expense, and about a third of the readership works in financial services. 

The Information layered other plans over the years, from a $10,000 investor membership in 2016 to a $199 Young Professional plan and a $749 All-Access plan in 2017, and then to Pro, a data tier, at $999 in 2023. The current pages list a $225 Young Professional plan and a $749 Pro plan, with standard rates ranging from $399 to $499. Events run the same way, treated as a subscriber benefit that accepts corporate sponsorship and often sells out within an hour. Lessin also founded the WTF Summit, whose seventh annual edition in 2025 brought together roughly 300 women.

Subscriptions Paid for More Reporting

The Information runs a loop. Reporting brings in subscribers, subscriber money pays for more reporting, and the deeper reporting brings in more subscribers. The company states that quality stories breed quality subscribers. The staff grew from one reporter in 2014 to twenty-two by 2017. TechCrunch called it the second-largest team of tech reporters in Silicon Valley. 

Business Insider reported about 45,000 paying subscribers in 2022, citing people familiar with the company, and Vanity Fair put active readers, both paying and non-paying, at around 360,000 as of August 2022. The company has said subscription revenue continued to grow over that stretch and that it built a fast-growing sponsorship line alongside it. Lessin has said she wants to spend as much on journalism as The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times and to build the next Wall Street Journal over the next fifty years.

New Products Extended the Subscription Business

Each new product extended the subscription business. The Information ran a Bloomberg bundle in 2020, launched The Electric for electric-vehicle news as a separate subscription in 2021, and built a newsletter lineup written by the reporters who break the stories, including the flagship Briefing, AI Agenda, Dealmaker, and AI Infrastructure. It built proprietary databases and org charts for the Pro tier, launched TITV, a daily show, in July, 2025, and launched Deep Research, an AI tool grounded in more than a decade of its own reporting, org charts, and proprietary data.

Where The Information Stands Now

In 2026, the product leans heavily toward artificial intelligence, and TITV airs every weekday. The Information remains owned by Lessin, with no venture capital and no corporate parent. Separately, Lessin Media has taken stakes in Semafor and The Ankler. The subscription that once paid for a single reporter now funds a newsroom of dozens, a slate of newsletters, a daily show, a data business, and an AI product, with readers funding most of what it produces.

The Information’s growth came from a disciplined choice to serve a narrow professional audience with reporting valuable enough to justify a recurring fee. Subscription revenue funded deeper coverage, and each new product, from data and events to video and AI, added more value to the customer. The lesson is that a media company does not need a mass audience to build a substantial business. It needs a clearly defined reader, work that matters to that reader, and a consistent reason to renew.

If you liked this edition of Growth Curve, forward it to a founder or marketer who needs to stop renting their audience — and start owning it.