The aim of this post is to convince you to become one of our subscribers. If you’re already keen to join us then click here to subscribe via Patreon, and then relax, safe in the knowledge that you're supporting independent, grassroots drinks writing. If you’re still on the fence, however, or merely interested in some of the inner workings at Pellicle, then read on, and hopefully you’ll be ready to support us by the end of it.

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This year Pellicle celebrated turning five years old. We did so by throwing a huge party across four brewery taprooms in the heart of Manchester, at which we held talks, tastings, poured three especially-brewed birthday beers, served up wonderful birthday pizza and then disco-danced into the small hours until our hearts were full and our feet were sore. Hat tip to our pals at Balance Brewing and Blending for having the wherewithal to apply for a late license and enabling the latter.

More than this, 2024 genuinely feels like our breakout year. When Jonny and I established the magazine we set some arbitrary goals to keep us focussed. These included reader and paid subscriber numbers, clicks per article, the kind of utterly boring thing we no longer consider to be a healthy standard by which to measure ourselves. At the very least, though, it gave us something to aim for that helped us figure out if the mag was heading in the right direction.

We hoped to hit those numbers after a year or two in operation, but in reality we found that breaking outside of our little bubble was harder than we had optimistically expected. But we realised it was more important to invest in that bubble—our core readers—rather than go fishing for new readers from the worlds of wine or food, which was our original plan. Eventually we figured out the important thing was to put out good content, and hoped that people from those fringes would eventually find their way to us.

In 2024 it almost certainly looks like they did. Our traffic saw significant growth, finally smashing through those initial projections. We feel this is genuine evidence we’re now pulling in readers from a wider demographic, including those outside of the typical beer readership. For us, this is why investing in our kind of storytelling is important.

Perhaps the biggest signifier of this was our nomination for Best Food Publication from the Guild of Food Writers. The award went to National Geographic, quite understandably so. But after celebrating our birthday a few weeks before the ceremony, it felt to me like we’d arrived, in a sense—as though we finally had a strong wind in our sails.

I’m a sucker for drilling into numbers and trying to make sense of them. For a long time it felt like there was no rhyme or reason to our traffic, but this year the data began to correlate. This is important, because every time we commission a feature we commit a not insignificant amount of money towards its production. We increased our rates for the second time in our lifespan this year, which also stretched that financial commitment. Every day I get emails from freelance writers, photographers and illustrators looking for work, and I have to be careful how our money is spent. Our data—along with the support of my team: Katie Mather and Lily Waite, and a healthy dose of gut instinct—helps inform those decisions.

But what do those numbers actually look like? While it probably isn’t sensible to be as revealing about our statistics and finances as I’m about to be, I’m also a firm believer in the power of transparency. I also want you to give me money in return for creating content, and I believe in being honest about how that money is spent, so in an effort to do so, here goes nothing…

In 2024 Pellicle published 84 pieces of original content, which is 10 more than we’ve managed in previous years. This consisted of 65 written features, and 19 podcast episodes. To do this we worked with 59 freelance contributors, each of whom produced either original writing, illustrations or photography. Adding together their fees, along with the retainer we pay our editors and the general administrative costs of running the magazine, each written feature cost us, on average, about £700 to produce.

In total—and this is my favourite number of the whole lot—we paid freelancers more than £40,000 over the course of 2024. That’s hard cash in freelancers pockets, directly as a result of the support of subscribers and sponsors. This is the impact our reader-supported subscription model is having in real terms.

This funding was generated by us surpassing 500 paid subscribers in 2024. As I write this our total of paid up subscribers stands at a record 516, with each sub contributing an average of £6.06 per month. Our annual revenue was boosted by about 9% thanks to our continuing sponsorship agreement with Loughran Brewers Select for which we are immensely thankful. We wouldn’t be able to do this without any of you.

One interesting, but not unexpected statistic is that as we’ve grown to have more subscribers, our average value per subscriber has decreased. Early adopters were far more likely to go for the higher tiers, whereas newer subs generally pick a lower amount. Next year we’re going to start pushing to hit 1000 total subscribers (!) but instead of doubling our revenue, we project this will increase it by about 50%. We don’t expect to hit this next year, but we aren’t going to let that stop us from attempting to achieve it. Come on, join us.

In terms of our written content, this year was the best ever year for traffic, which saw a 21%* increase year on year. (*A couple of weeks ago it was 25% but for some reason we had a really strong December last year and it's just knocked that average down a touch.) That increase was generated by over 141,000 unique readers over the calendar year, generating 227,000 pageviews between them.

Looking at our podcast, while it feels silly to say that over 9500 streams from our 19 episodes produced this year is a negative, in truth it’s 40% down year on year, and nearly two-thirds down on our lockdown peak. It seems that beer podcasts aren’t as popular as they used to be, which might explain why so many have folded this year. However, the podcast takes 0% of our revenue, as it's a personal project of mine, but does drive about 10% of subscriptions, so it has value and we’ll keep making it. (I also really enjoy putting it together, which is perhaps the most important thing.) There’s now a healthy archive of 65 episodes, and if you want my advice it’s best to start with the latest and work backwards. Find them all here.

This year we also invested in merchandise seriously for the first time, spending several thousand pounds on something we hoped would grow our revenue beyond that from our subscriptions and sponsorships. It was a touch speculative, and has kind of bitten us in the arse a bit as it’s not sold as well as we’d hoped. Despite this, we have sold 103 pieces of merch, which has contributed about an extra 3 weeks worth of operating costs (or, in real terms, three features) to the magazine.

If we’d sold all of it, we’d have generated enough extra funds for two months worth of additional content and enough money for future merch purchases. We will continue to invest in fun merch next year because we like it, but we will be very careful in how we manage it. Unexpectedly slow sales in November and December saw us close commissioning earlier than expected in 2024 so that we didn’t burn through our reserves. As a result all of our paid subscribers will have access to 20% off during the first three weeks of January, or until stocks are depleted. Find our online shop here.

Overall, once you’ve taken into account our operating costs (and not just what we pay our contributors) this means in 2024 Pellicle has operated at about a 5.6% loss. This would make it our fifth consecutive year operating at a loss, and while it might sound dramatic there’s still a chance we could make a small operating profit before the end of our financial year on March 31st, 2025. January and February is when the majority of our annual pro-tier subscriptions are due for renewal, and assuming the majority of those subscribers chose to remain with us it should (fingers crossed) give us a significant financial boost when we need it most.

In general, we have about 3-4 weeks of operating costs in the bank at any one time, which is why we’re constantly pushing for new subscribers, and looking for better ways of retaining existing ones. A hope of ours is to increase that to two or three months worth of funds, which would mean we’d always have the capacity to take on a killer pitch when it lands in our inbox. A mag can dream, right?

Why is ending the year with a small profit important to us, you ask? Well, we’ve deliberated a lot internally on where we want to take Pellicle. My own goals are to increase the financial support we offer our small team (including myself) and then look for a bricks and mortar office in Manchester to better establish ourselves.

On that last point, however, Katie and Lily have insisted that, should we have enough money to splash on an office we should, instead, use that to launch Pellicle into print media. So in 2025 that is what we are going to look to do at last. In production right now are not one, but two zines (one by Katie, and one by myself) that in addition to being fun personal projects are litmus tests, of sorts. Their production will help us better understand production costs, paper quality, demand—all that important stuff—so that before we’re ready to step into bigger print projects the fundamentals become second nature to us.

The first of these zines, a beautiful collection of short stories from Katie about drinking in liminal spaces called A PLACE TO BE will be available for pre-order imminently. Why pre-order? Every penny we presently have is already allocated to our online content. Pre-sales will determine the size of our print run. Watch the skies for updates on this very soon.

This is an exciting time for us. Once we figure this stuff out the sky’s the limit in terms of what we can publish. Zines? A magazine? A Beano-style almanac? What about cool book ideas that other publishers just don’t have the guts to publish? We promise you they’re all on the list.

It comes to you then, our readers, to decide how far we can go. Of the thousands of people who’ve visited Pellicle this year, 516 have deemed it as having enough value to be worth paying for. If just a fraction more of those decide that the content we produce is worth a small donation each month, or each year, then there’s no stopping us in terms of how far we can go. You have the power, join us now via Patreon, and watch and enjoy as your favourite little drinks publication continues to thrive. As ever, we’re only interested in growing slowly and organically, one reader at a time.

Matthew Curtis, December 2024