CNBC’s Entry-Level Price Streaming Service Brings in New Subscribers

CNBC’s flagship digital subscription product, Pro, costs $299.99 a year or $34.99 a month. That’s a hefty price, but one that comes with bells and whistles like a portfolio monitor and a stock screener. While it may be worthwhile for hardcore retail investors, it’s not a great way to capture more casual viewers, and especially those who may never have had cable television.

So, after much brainstorming, the financial news channel decided to offer CNBC+, a streaming-only option for $14.99 a month, starting last quarter.

With no marketing and only two places on the website to find the option to subscribe to that product, CNBC+ is bringing in the same number of subscribers everyday as CNBC Pro and the Investing Club (ie, all things Jim Cramer)—those last two can be found being strongly marketed in multiple places, from TV commercials with QR codes to email campaigns.

“That was like, Oh, wow, no marketing, we’re not pushing this—this is true, loyal users on the site finding this, this is what they want to do, they want to live stream,” Margaret de Luna, senior vice president and general manager of CNBC’s direct-to-consumer business, told AMO. “This is working, the price point is working.”

Expected revenue and subscribers numbers for CNBC+ in the first month of 2025 have already been surpassed thanks to the new subscription offering. Marketing for the product won’t begin until they have made significant inroads into OTT platforms like Apple TV and Roku, which should launch mid-year.

Another interesting tidbit from CNBC+ is that many of the subscribers are brand new; they’re not previous subscribers of the more expensive offering that quit because of the price, though there are those, too. The channel plans to survey CNBC+ subscribers in the next month or so to get a better sense of what their demographics are, OTT platform preferences and more. CNBC+ includes global streams, ranging from Singapore to London to New York, and should attract a broad audience.

“These are actually brand new subscribers to the whole ecosystem for us, which meant the entire subscription business was growing. It meant it gave us an opportunity to build that direct relationship and nurture those new subscribers into a way that we could upsell them to Pro or we could upsell them to Investing Club,” de Luna said.

CNBC doesn’t give out subscriber numbers, but said its subscription portfolio was up 10% year over year in 2024. The CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer continues to hit records and had its fourth consecutive record month in December.

CNBC, which is part of an ongoing spinoff of Comcast’s cable network channels, is pushing forward and away from linear television, which, though it continues to be the largest source of revenue for the company, is not the future for media. CNBC President KC Sullivan has been calling for the network to figure out how to best get in front of viewers in a fragmented market.

“How do we serve our markets, be that an event, be that digital, be that audio, be that streaming? We’re not tied anymore to any one platform,” de Luna said. “We’re really just trying to make sure that we’re out there and planting seeds.”

In December, CNBC did a brief marketing push for CNBC+, which streams sending out an email offering the product for an annual price of $99. That’s a huge discount from 12 times the monthly fee, which would total $179.88, but it was a strategy to get more people to move into annual subscriptions, which tend to see fewer cancellations than monthly.

The $14.99 was an initial price that could have been lowered if subscribers hadn’t responded. But they did. Once the product builds up more scale, a more formal price test will be implemented.

“We’ve been happy with the $14.99 price point, we’re seeing very good renewal rates,” de Luna said. “If it was $14.99 and then we were losing half of the people for that first renewal, that would have told me maybe the price point wasn’t right, or they were just giving it a try, and they don’t really like it.”

Update: Fifth paragraph updated to reflect that the expectations surpassed were specifically for CNBC+.