A newsletter with 1,200 paying subscribers at 6 pounds a month grosses 86,400 pounds a year. After a 10 per cent platform fee and roughly 3 per cent in payment processing, that is about 75,200. Run as a sole trader, the operator’s income tax and Class 4 National Insurance on that come to around 21,000 pounds. Run through a limited company paying a modest salary and dividends, the total tax take is lower and the timing is more controllable, but the accounting cost roughly doubles. At around 60,000 pounds of profit the two structures cross over. Most independent publishers do not know where that line is. This site is written for the ones who need to.
Audience Building Roundtable covers the business of running an independent publication in the UK: newsletters, podcasts, membership sites and paid communities. It assumes you already have an audience and are past the how-to-grow stage. It gets to the operational detail: platform fee structures compared, VAT registration and the digital services rules, sole trader versus limited company at different profit levels, sponsorship contracts and what to strike out, revenue benchmarks from a reader survey, and the accounting that keeps the whole thing standing.
Tax and regulation are cited by section. A real quarterly roundtable brings a small group of publishers together to compare numbers.
The site is edited by Kate Lindqvist, who has run subscription publications for many years. Audience Building Roundtable is an independent UK publication and does not give advice on any specific business.