Mediapart transforms B2B from revenue niche to growth lever

Main image: Olivia Plécy (left) played a key role in working with the subscription marketing, design, and communications teams. Together with Cédric Lepecuchelle (centre, seated), they held regular meetings with journalists and management to explain their projects. To ensure the necessary tech development, Reginald Costa (standing) acted as a liaison with the IT and product departments and worked closely with Tiphaine Rigaud, the company’s B2B subscription expert.

Can professional and institutional audiences be targeted with the same engagement strategies as the general public? General interest news media include a B2B component in their subscription revenues and, at best, have a dedicated team focused on developing this target audience. By applying the Table Stakes methodology and tools, the French publisher Mediapart has developed new strategies to better attract and retain the B2B segment.


Mediapart is a prominent French digital-only publisher, best known for its investigative reporting and coverage of major political and financial scandals. Founded in 2008 and profitable since 2011, its business model is based on digital subscriptions. Known for its fiercely independent stance, Mediapart has no advertising, accepts no public subsidies and has no external shareholders: in 2018, the publisher was transformed into a non-profit foundation created to ensure its f inancial and editorial independence in perpetuity. The publisher has almost 230,000 digital subscribers. It has about 140 employees, of whom just over half work in editorial.


Mediapart is one of the leaders in digital subscriptions in France, boasting almost 230,000 subscribers and an excellent retention rate. This success is largely attributed to the public’s recognition of its journalism and investigative reporting. Behind the scenes, credit goes to its unwavering focus on digital platform performance and user and subscriber engagement. This year, Mediapart joined the Table Stakes programme to explore diversifying its revenue streams.

“Our revenue comes primarily from our B2C subscriptions (editor’s note: €12/month). We have rejected advertising from the outset, since Mediapart’s founding in 2008. The question that emerged during our discussions on diversifying our revenue was whether we could develop our B2B subscription income,” explains Cédric Lepecuchelle, Director of Subscriptions at Mediapart and a member of the TSE project team.

“While we already have subscriptions in this sector, making it a priority has allowed us to allocate resources, draw the attention of the entire organisation, and set ourselves the personal challenge of rapidly growing this revenue,” he says.

Unlike some traditional media companies, Mediapart operates without silos. Despite this transparent way of working, the project team faced several challenges. The geographic spread between Paris, Poitiers, and Montpellier required strong coordination, especially since some team members were not accustomed to working together, at least not this regularly.

The second challenge was finding a way to involve the editorial team without adding to their workload. The TSE team was made up of experts in editorial marketing, subscriptions, and product/IT. At the early stages of the project, they were careful not to overload the newsroom with additional tasks, such as creating new newsletters or forming mini-publisher teams. However, their support was crucial. After several discussions with reporters covering topics relevant to the target audiences, journalists began suggesting subjects, features, and investigations likely to resonate with these groups, particularly during subscriber acquisition campaigns or news alerts.

Starting and pivoting to seize opportunities

When the team joined the programme in January 2024, they had already identified around 40 B2B audiences to target. For their initial experiments, the focus was on increasing subscriptions from schools, due to Mediapart’s popularity among teachers and librarians. They also targeted law firms, capitalising on their interest in Mediapart’s in-depth coverage of major trials, financial crimes, and political corruption investigations.

Working with these two target audiences helped the team realise the importance of creating a dedicated database within their CRM to streamline B2B communication. Their goal was to enable news alerts or notifications when resources were published on specific topics (useful for schools). This approach maintains engagement between campaigns and prepares these audiences to receive future subscription offers.

Many of the strategies planned to drive engagement mirrored those typically used for standard subscribers. By applying them more consistently, the team identified an opportunity to strengthen interactions with B2B users.

Another potential opportunity was converting users who accessed Mediapart content in B2B environments into B2C subscribers (a B2B2C approach). Although no actions have been taken yet, this strategy could open new avenues, especially in settings like school libraries, where the aim would be to retain students after they graduate, as well as in companies and hotels.

‘Real world’ testing and strengthening best practices

Halfway through the project, the team identified account sharing (multiple users sharing an individual account) as a recurring issue that also affected B2B revenue and decided to address it as part of their challenge’s objectives. The elections and complete renewal of the French Parliament provided an opportunity to test solutions aimed at reducing this type of fraud.

According to the team’s analysis, many parlia mentarians were using individual subscriptions for themselves and their teams, instead of opting for more expensive multi-user accounts.

To combat fraudulent account sharing, Mediapart implemented a process that included email notifications and banners to alert readers and direct them to the appropriate subscription page. The specific process for dealing with account-sharing fraud within the French Parliament has now been adapted for other B2B audiences within their subscription funnel.

Mediapart’s team began offering tailored plans to new parliamentarians, encouraging them to request quotes. For those tempted to continue sharing accounts, a process was implemented, including email notifications and banners to alert them and redirect them to the appropriate subscription page.

This specific process for dealing with account-sharing fraud within the French Parliament has now been adapted for other B2B audiences within their subscription funnel. An internal dashboard detects anomalies in account sharing and guides further actions.

In less than 10 months, Mediapart’s team refined its approach to institutional and professional clients by adapting strategies from their work with individual subscribers.

“We also believe that some of the actions taken in the B2B segment in 2024 – along with new ideas we have for the future – could also be applied to B2C subscriptions,” says Cédric Lepecuchelle.

The team’s initial goal was to increase B2B revenue by 35 percent by the end of 2024, a target they successfully met.

Notably, efforts to combat account-sharing fraud alone resulted in a 200 percent increase in revenue. Looking ahead, their next challenge is even more ambitious: to double B2B revenue in 2025 and surpass the symbolic 1-million-euro mark by 2028.