Monetising journalism: Is true crime the prime niche for you?
In December, Mediahuis Ireland announced the rebranding of its weekend product, Sunday World, to Crime World, a subscription-based website and app offering exclusive crime journalism from €11.99 a month or €99 annually.
Crime World is a home for the journalism of the group’s award-winning crime reporter, Nicola Tallant. An expert in organised crime, she has hosted the eponymous podcast for the past five years, taking the award-winning series to a record listenership of more than 1 million listeners a month – and by last year, 36 million had tuned in for 2025 alone.
The launch of this standalone news brand marks a “significant evolution” in how owner Mediahuis covers crime, courts and the criminal underworld – and “a key milestone” in its digital transformation strategy.
“We have been looking at what our audience really wants from us and what unique journalism we can offer them. In Mediahuis, we call that signature journalism,” explains Cormac Bourke, editor in chief at Mediahuis Ireland.
“We had to consider what the signature journalism of the Sunday World is. It was launched as a newspaper in 1973 and relaunched as a website and app in 2020. Not long after that, the then Sunday World Investigations Editor Nicola Tallant began the Crime World podcast. Its huge success in audio made a clear case for in-depth digital crime journalism as the signature journalism of the Sunday World.
“We believe amplifying what sets us apart from others makes it clear to subscribers why they should value our work and pay to support it. As such, it was clear that we should further develop and amplify that work to our audience – and that the audience would pay for the journalism.”
Evergreen leaves and fresh shoots
Not all of it is paywalled though – some journalism is for free. The site launch has been a year in the making – and is one of a series of digital brand extensions, adds Bourke, referring to two new podcasts launched in 2025: Just Between Us, hosted by Jennifer Zamparelli, on sex and relationships; and Money Talks, which accompanies the new Indo Money vertical, also on the Irish Independent site.
The initial response has been positive, notes Bourke. “We are very pleased with the launch, and the number of subscribers is above the levels we expected. The exclusive podcast series on Christy Kinahan (alleged leader of Ireland’s notorious Kinahan Cartel, an organised crime group), has been the biggest draw for direct subscriptions since Crime World was launched. It has already given us an insight into our audience’s willingness to subscribe to exclusive audio.”
Commercialising digital content
The move by Mediahuis is part of a strategy to create a destination for crime enthusiasts by leveraging demand for in-depth, original crime reporting as a key driver for digital subscriptions.
The trend is shifting from general, ad-supported news toward “niche-ing” to build loyal, paying audiences, and several publishers have adopted similar niche subscription models, focusing on dedicated apps, websites, and premium content to monetise specific, high-interest topics.
The focus on the crime beat follows a steady trajectory: three years ago, Hearst Networks (formerly A+E Networks EMEA) launched a direct-to-consumer streaming service, Crime+Investigation Play, offering three different subscription packages.
And last year, both USA TODAY and The Daily Mail launched true crime online hubs.
USA TODAY’s WITNESS is a subscription-based digital platform ($4.99/month) dedicated specifically to investigative true-crime stories, cold cases, and in-depth investigations.
The Daily Mail’s Crime Desk launched in March 2025 as a member’s only podcast hub, and in October as a multi-platform hub featuring podcasts like The Trial – which garnered over 2 million global monthly podcast downloads – documentaries (on YouTube), and exclusive investigations, for £3.99 per month or £39.99 per year.
Considering pivoting to premium? Consider this
So, does crime pay? As a niche, standalone product? Countless crime authors, courtroom and procedural TV series and podcast producers – even existing print titles specialising in the genre – say yes. To wit: Crime Monthly, the UK’s leading monthly true crime magazine, launched in 2019 by Bauer Media, boasts over 1M subscriptions, and is available internationally through digital platforms like Readly and PressReader.
True crime is a lure for media consumption, ranking just below comedy and entertainment in listener popularity in the US, and just below sports in the UK. And, according to Pew Research Center, it is the most common topic among the top-ranked podcasts.
It’s fair to say that podcasting has rocketed true crime to the top – but globally, advertising spend is not reflecting strong returns.
And while generative AI has allowed for a relatively easy integration of audio into newsrooms, the cost and time required to effectively produce a quality product is prohibitive.
“It is very hard to do audio and video of a decent quality, and it needs to be funded and resourced if you really want to go in that direction. It can’t just be seen as an add-on that the newsroom can just spin up and maintain,’ cautions a UK-based news publisher who experimented with audio and visual crime and investigations products early in the digital revolution – and whose offering still features several award-winning podcasts.
“What we found hard was the sheer scale of the production and the talent you need to do something like these really, really well. Video takes an awful lot of time, from set up through to filming through to editing; it’s also labour intensive – so you have to strike a balance as to whether it provides enough impact for the investment.”
There are long-term gains to be had from paywalling niche content, confirms our publisher, who asked not to be named: “We saw big numbers in terms of conversion at launch, people were impressed by the quality we produced, and over time these continue to act as evergreen pieces of content with small numbers of people still subscribing via these many years later.”
The verdict
True crime clearly has the audience – the question is whether it can reliably translate that appetite into sustainable revenue.
For established publishers with the resources to invest in quality journalism and production, the early signals are encouraging: Crime World’s above-expectation subscriber numbers and the longevity of evergreen paywalled content both point in a promising direction.
But for smaller or independent newsrooms, the calculus is less clear. The costs of producing compelling audio and video at scale remain a significant barrier, and advertising revenue has yet to keep pace with audience growth.
The smartest operators, it seems, are the ones treating crime not as a one-off experiment but as the foundation of a long-term digital strategy – starting with what they do best, and building from there. As one source put it: “Will we go back to video? Never say never – especially with the advances in AI.”
