At the beginning of 2023 we set ourselves the challenging target of gaining 200 new subscribers, which would’ve brought our overall total to 500. Based on our average subscription value—which when you combine individual subs with the businesses on our pro tiers is about £7 per subscriber—achieving our target would have increased our monthly revenue by around £1400 a month.

This would’ve pushed Pellicle into profitability, which in turn would have allowed us to build up a cash reserve enabling us to be more ambitious with the magazine and podcast: better rates for contributors, new merchandise, more podcast episodes, and bigger retainers for our editorial team, so they could spend more time working on our publication behind the scenes.

We actually got pretty close too, with 149 readers subscribing to Pellicle for the first time over the past 12 months. Unfortunately, times are tough, and churn (the unfortunate term we use to describe the subscriptions we lose each month) saw us say goodbye to 70 subscribers over the same period. This means we saw a net gain of 79 subscribers—an amazing achievement all things considered—giving us the equivalent of about £553 more to spend each month compared to this time last year.

However, with our previous rate increase kicking in properly around May 2022, this was our first full financial year with these increased outgoings. In addition to general costs such as hosting the site, our email addresses and the day-to-day running of a business have all increased. On average, each feature we published in 2023 cost us £670. This includes the fee paid to the writer, the visual contributor be they a photographer or illustrator (if this is the writer, they also receive this fee on top of what they were already paid), the retainer paid to the editor, and the general administration costs of the website itself.

Pellicle has been loss-making since it was founded in 2019. It will probably always be loss-making, because if we have more money, we will spend it on commissioning more stuff, and ensuring the people who create that stuff are properly supported by increasing the fees we pay them. In our most recent financial year we declared a loss of £1825, slightly up from just £680 the year before when we were being a bit tighter with our finances. This is even with the support of our new sponsors, Brewers Select, who graciously cover about 10% of our annual operating costs.

We have not arrived at panic station (although, sometimes I allow myself to feel a little bit of anxiety about it, as a treat) but the best way to think of it is as a slow drip; a tap that won’t stop leaking that isn’t really an issue until it’s left alone for long enough to become one. We are cash based. This means we have no debt other than to the people we have commissioned to work for us, and these commissions are awarded only if we have the funds to do so in our bank account. (This is why, unfortunately, I have had to disappoint several of our regular contributors by not being able to offer them commissions in recent months.)

For us, ensuring we have enough revenue so that we don’t have to worry about this leak means we can put our energy where it matters: into creating content for the magazine and podcast. This is why we need more people to subscribe, and why we feel that, if you read and enjoy Pellicle regularly, you should do so.

In 2023 we worked with 63 contributors across 60 features and 12 podcast episodes. This cost us almost £38,000. That’s hard cash in the pockets of 63 writers, photographers and illustrators trying to make a living in a very challenging and competitive industry. Many of those contributors went on to win awards for their work, including at the British and North American Guild of Beer Writers Awards, and Will Hawkes won drinks writer of the year at the Fortnum & Mason awards for the second time, on this occasion solely for work he produced for Pellicle.

These awards are nice, especially for the individuals that received them and what it potentially means for their careers. But what’s nicer is that our traffic has broken our own records this year. Over the past 12 months over 110,000 unique readers have visited our website, and we get around 15,000 unique readers a month—that’s a 20% year on year increase (and 2022 was already 16% up on the year previous to that.) November 2023 was our busiest month on record, and what made it stand out was not an individual, viral piece, but constant, steady traffic, day after day. Additionally our podcast has nearly hit 50,000 total downloads, and the most popular episodes have around 1500 listeners, making it one of the most popular food and drink podcasts in the UK.

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, we’re able to achieve this only due to the financial support we receive from our subscribers.

Drilling into those numbers, we reckon, while most of those people are occasional visitors, almost 6000 people visit the site at least once a month. Dwell times are several minutes, so we know they’re having a good old read. 374 of those people (as I write this) pay for all of the people included in the numbers above to read our website and listen to our podcast for free.

Pellicle will always be free to read. This is a moral choice, and we’re centring this as our brand message next year as we give ourselves a little refresh. Think of it like this: not everyone can afford to pay for a subscription, those that do keep it free for everyone else. For the price of a pint a month (or whatever you can afford) you are funding a publication that is dedicated to paying its contributors as well as it can. As soon as we can afford to, we’ll be increasing our rates, and we already have merch and print (!) projects underway for 2024.

We use the Patreon platform because it’s convenient and keeps our bookkeeping simple, but if you’d prefer to make a one off donation via bank transfer, or other means, do contact me directly on matthew@pelliclemag.com.

Team Pellicle L-R: Katie Mather, Jonny Hamilton, Lily Waite, Matt Curtis. (*Note: Jonny is on hiatus as of Oct 2023)*

If you are an individual — please consider supporting us with a monthly subscription. These are our bread and butter and the more of these we get, the better. 500 monthly subscribers is still our target if we want to achieve profitability, which we do. I know there are various tiers with limited benefits, but the real (in fact the only true) benefit we offer is the existence of the magazine itself. But really, that’s the point, and exactly why, if you’re here, reading this, you should subscribe right now.

If you are reading this from the United States — did you know that you have the lowest reader to subscriber ratio of all visiting nations that account for more than 1% of traffic? Our US readership grew in 2023 to over 27% of total site traffic! And yet, we have more subscribers in Ireland, Canada and Australia individually, which together account for less than 6% of the site's traffic. Our request to you is this: please open your hearts, and your wallets, and get subscribing. Many of our contributors are freelancers based in the US, and while we are a UK company, your subscriptions are benefitting them too.

If you are a business — please take a look at one of our pro tiers. It’s an unconventional model, asking businesses for support in exchange for limited sponsorship opportunities (but we’re working on these, such as mentions for press releases in our weekly newsletter which we started doing recently.) Mostly though, there just isn’t a lot of consumer beer media in the UK, because there isn’t the money being invested in it. In fact there are just four national magazines, ourselves included, covering beer on a consumer basis. We ask businesses to support us because we feel the UK deserves a publication that truly gets the heart of beer and pub culture, and we need your money to do that. There are two tiers, theoretically based on company size, but honestly we don’t mind which of them you opt for, just that you join us in helping to make Pellicle be all that it can be.

You also get 10% off if you take out an annual subscription, which means any business can support us on the lower pro tier for just £432 + VAT per year. Some of those that do (and have done for years) are tiny, and we love them for it. If you’ve read the above, you’ll also know that this amount doesn’t even cover a whole feature, but we know times are tight, so don’t plan on increasing the cost of our tiers anytime soon. If you understand the importance of your customers being more actively engaged in what they’re drinking, and realise how positive this is for the industry as a whole—which I am certain you do—then it’s time to get subscribing.

I believe, with all of my heart, that 2024 will be another landmark year for Pellicle. We’ll be celebrating our 5th birthday in style, here in our home city of Manchester (keep the 4th of May free!) The best way for us to celebrate would be with enough money in our bank account so we don’t have to worry where the funding for the next few months of commissions is coming from, and can plan ahead, in turn giving our small team the creative freedom and financial resources to do even more for the magazine.

Reader supported, proudly free to read is our new strapline, and one we will be shouting from the rooftops, often and repeatedly. If you want to support our independent drinks publication, focussed on beer, cider, wine, pubs and much more, then join us as a subscriber now, and then you can feel smug as we flourish, because you contributed directly to that.

Click here to head to our Patreon page and subscribe today. We promise every penny you give us will be spent on making our magazine and podcast as good as it can possibly be. Here’s to a fantastic, panic free 2024, filled with lots of great content about beer, cider, pubs, and anything else that gets us excited. We hope you’ll join us in every step along the way.

Matt, Katie and Lily x