Times Radio costs £15 million a year to run. It makes maybe £3-5 million in sponsorship. On paper, it's a £10-12 million annual loss. And yet it might be one of News UK's smartest investments in years.
I spent weeks investigating this paradox — triangulating research across three AI models, cross-referencing RAJAR data, YouTube analytics, and subscription economics. What I found changes how I think about "loss-making" ventures.
The insight: Times Radio isn't a radio station. It's a subscription-retention programme that happens to sound like radio.
The Moat Model
Imagine you own a castle. The castle generates £76.8 million in annual revenue (that's 640,000 digital subscribers at £120/year). Now imagine someone offers to build you a moat for £15 million.
The moat doesn't generate revenue. It just sits there, looking expensive. But every year, invaders (competitors, churn, subscriber fatigue) try to breach your walls. The moat stops some of them.
The maths: If the moat prevents just 1% of your subscribers from leaving, that's 6,400 subscribers retained. At £120/year, that's £768,000 saved. Prevent 2% churn? £1.5 million. The moat pays for itself by doing nothing but existing.
Six Mental Models from Times Radio
1. The Moat Model
"Loss-making" on standalone P&L can be "strategically profitable" when protecting higher-value recurring revenue. A castle's moat costs a fortune but protects the treasury.
2. Talent is Rent, Format is Equity
When Matt Chorley left, the slot survived because the format was stronger than the star. Build systems, not dependencies.
3. Visualised Audio
"The dirty little secret about making video really well is... make a radio station and put cameras in it." Audio costs already paid; video is pure margin.
4. The Retention Inequality
Subscribers who read AND listen are significantly less likely to churn. Multi-modality = multiple daily habits = stickiness.
5. Politeness as Premium
"Shock jock" attracts volume but lower-value audiences. Civility attracts ABC1 willing to pay premium prices.
6. Time > Reach
8 hours/week with a small audience beats millions of drive-by visitors. Measure time-spent-with-brand, not page views.
What This Means For You
Times Radio's strategy isn't unique to media. Every subscription business, every SaaS company, every membership organisation faces the same challenge: retention is cheaper than acquisition.
SaaS Founders
Your moat: Calculate what 1% churn reduction is worth annually. That's your budget for "unprofitable" retention features.
Agency Owners
Your moat: "Visualised audio" — if you're already producing content, what's the marginal cost to repurpose it across channels?
Product Leaders
Your metric: Stop measuring reach. Measure stickiness — time spent with your product per user per week.
The Monday-Morning Checklist
- Calculate retention economics before audience size. Work backwards from LTV, not from CPM.
- Treat "loss-making" content as a marketing line item. Ask: what would equivalent reach cost externally?
- Hire experts, not presenters. Domain expertise + broadcast training > broadcasting skills alone.
- Build format equity, not star dependency. If a star leaves, does the show survive?
- Add video at near-zero marginal cost. If producing audio, the incremental investment in video captures new audience/revenue.
- Target demographic quality over quantity. 600k ABC1 may > 3M mixed demographic for conversion.
- Measure "stickiness" not just "reach." 8 hours/week predicts retention better than unique visitors.
- Recycle everything. Every live hour → podcast → YouTube clips → social → text. One input, many outputs.