Government to Cancel Media Subscriptions: How Bad Is It?

High-priced B2B subscription businesses woke up to a rude awakening this week: people can’t understand why a single seat subscription costs over $10,000 per year.

Will Sommer, a media reporter at the Washington Post, broke down the chain of events that took place. Because of the finding that the U.S. government was spending millions on Politico Pro subscriptions, many right-wing, chronically online people are in an absolute uproar thinking there’s a conspiracy between the government and mainstream media. And now media companies are about to see their revenues shrink, though not by too much.

According to Axios:

The White House has directed the General Services Administration to terminate “every single media contract” expensed by the agency, according to an email obtained by Axios.

What they’re saying: “GSA team, please do two things,” a Trump administration official wrote:

“Pull all contracts for Politico, BBC, E&E (Politico sub) and Bloomberg”

“Pull all media contracts for just GSA – cancel every single media contract today for GSA only.”

As can be expected, media companies are reacting. Politico’s CEO and editor in chief issued a statement to its audience explaining the difference between Politico and Politico Pro. The New York Times was indifferent, suggesting the government accounts for less than 1/1000th of its total revenue.

But who are the ones that will suffer the most and who might skate by? We dug into that.

The biggest recipient of money is Bloomberg. Since it’s named in the GSA email, should we expect all of this money to disappear? Unlikely considering a solid chunk of that is tied to the terminal, which most departments will want to keep. But even then, this shows how little money media companies generate from the government. Bloomberg makes over $10 billion in revenue. Losing under $40 million sucks, but it’s at most 0.4% of revenue.

It’s worse for Politico, which could be generating around $150 million from its Pro product. Losing $8.4 million will sting. If we factor in ad revenue on the core Politico product, this might be a few percentage points of lost revenue.

Whatever the case, let’s assume some of the money does leave Bloomberg and Politico. Where’s it going to go? There are other legislative tracker tools out there. For example, Quorum Analytics generated $1.3 million in fiscal 2024. Could it capture some of this lost spend? LexisNexis generated over $40 million in 2024. It doesn’t have a known media entity, so will the rage transfer over there? I’ve included S&P Global in the above table, which provides in-depth financial data. Same question: no media, no risk?

Dow Jones is an interesting one because it generated less than $1 million in 2024 despite owning the Wall Street Journal, but also owns Factiva which is broken out separately. That product has received no money in Fiscal 2025, but this could be a way for agencies to get their news. Factiva aggregates other news sources, so we may see more spend here over the years, especially if Trump’s plan to ban all subscriptions extends to the above named entities.

Whatever the case, for many of these companies, the lost revenue hurts, but it’s not life-threatening.

One thing that hasn’t been discussed is event attendance and sponsorship. Various agencies have strict rules on how much they can spend. For example, in June 2016, the Deputy Chief Management Officer of the Department of Defense issued a conference guidance memo. Page 6 has all sorts of rules. For example:

(1) For conferences estimated to cost $3,000 or more per attendee or $600 or more per day per civilian employee or military member, approval is delegated to officials who are at the grade of O-5, GS-14, or equivalent, and at least one level above the supervisors with normal TDY/TAD approval authority for such employees or military members, consistent with organizational guidelines.

(2) For conferences estimated to cost less than $3,000 per attendee and less than $600 per day per civilian employee or military member, and for no-cost conferences, approval authority is delegated to supervisors with normal TDY/TAD approval authority, consistent with organizational guidelines.

For purposes of determining the costs per day, all costs, including travel costs, must be averaged over every day on which a substantive portion of the conference occurs. A “day” does not include days on which only travel occurs and/or the only conference activities are nonsubstantive, such as welcome receptions and social activities.

And that’s just the DOD talking about a specific type of attendance. Could we see these rules get stricter under DOGE? Could conference attendance be eliminated entirely?

I’m not suggesting that we should all expect to do no business with the U.S. Government, but there is no denying that there’s an angry eye on the media industry. For publishers who have benefited from attendance or sponsorship from the government, it’d be a good idea to understand the potential downside if those budgets get cut.

Whatever the case, there are going to be winners and losers in this quest to cut all subscriptions, but I don’t see it putting any of these publications out of business. In the case of Politico, maybe they can spin it: things are so chaotic in the United States government that more people in the private sector might pay for Politico Pro to make sure they don’t come under the ire of Elon Musk and DOGE. Perhaps it’s optimistic, but could this be a marketing opportunity? Chaos breeds opportunity.