Imagine you opened a shop. In the first year it lost money, which is normal and nothing to panic about. In the second year it lost more. By the fifth year your shop had lost one hundred and thirty one million pounds. Every time the till ran dry a man quietly put more in.
At what point would you stop calling it a shop?
The numbers, as filed
GB News Limited files accounts at Companies House like everybody else. For the year to May 2025 it reported a loss of a little over £22 million. The year before that, £32.7 million. Since launching in 2021 the channel has lost around £131 million.
It is not that nobody is watching, either, which is the bit people usually assume. Revenue grew by roughly two thirds, to just over £26 million. The audience is real and it is growing.
The channel still lost twenty two million pounds.
A losing business and a failing one are different things
This is the distinction that matters and almost nobody draws it. A failing business is one that wants to make money and cannot. It closes, usually with a sad note in the window and a half-price rail by the door.
A business that loses money for five straight years while its owners keep topping it up is not failing at anything. It is succeeding at something you have not been told the name of. GB News is majority backed by Sir Paul Marshall, a hedge fund manager whose fortune has been reported at north of £800 million. Its parent company has repeatedly injected further funding to keep the lights on.
Nobody accidentally spends a hundred and thirty one million pounds. That is a decision, renewed annually, by people who are extremely good at knowing what things are worth.
So what does it buy
Not profit, evidently. What it buys is the thing that sits upstream of profit, which is what the country is arguing about on any given Tuesday morning.
A channel does not have to be watched by you to work on you. It only has to be watched by enough people that the newspapers cover what was said on it, that the clips travel, that a phrase which would have sounded mad in 2019 sounds merely spicy by lunchtime. That is the product. The advertising was never the product.
Umberto Eco called the last of his fourteen warning signs Newspeak: the vocabulary shrinks until complicated thoughts become hard to say and then hard to have. He was describing the 1930s. We put the whole list up separately, because it reads uncomfortably well.
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The regulator and the reaction to it
Ofcom has ruled against the channel repeatedly. In May 2024 it found a breach of due impartiality over a programme called People's Forum: The Prime Minister, which was an hour of the sitting Prime Minister answering questions with no opposition voice in the room.
The response from the channel's side was not to argue the facts of the ruling. It was to argue that Ofcom is picking on them to keep left-wing activists happy.
Which is feature seven, if you are keeping score. There is always a plot and it is always somebody else's.
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The thing worth remembering
You are not being sold a television channel. You are watching one being bought for you, by somebody who can afford to lose twenty two million pounds a year and consider it money well spent.
So the next time somebody tells you GB News is just giving ordinary people a voice at last, you do not need to have the argument. Ask them who pays for it and what they think that person is getting back.
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