The Daily Wire’s paying subscribers fell by about a third in 2025, to roughly 850,000 people, according to investor documents reviewed by the news site Semafor and reported on 23 June 2026. It was the company’s first full year after Donald Trump’s 2024 election win.
The Daily Wire is a conservative media company founded in 2015 by Ben Shapiro, a podcaster and commentator, and Jeremy Boreing, who ran it as chief executive until the company parted ways with him in 2025. It sells paid memberships that give access to podcasts, commentary shows and films.
Paid subscriptions make up about three quarters of the company’s revenue, the documents show. Advertising, about a fifth of revenue, has fallen every year since 2022.
Semafor also reported that the company was in talks with Highmount Capital, an investment firm founded by two former employees of Koch Industries, the industrial conglomerate, to lead a funding round of at least $100mn at a $750mn valuation. The company told investors it made $48mn in adjusted EBITDA in 2025, a measure of profit before certain costs, on revenue above $200mn.
The documents cannot settle why the subscribers left. Did they go because the political moment changed, with the party the Daily Wire opposes out of power in Washington, or because of choices the company made?
The investor memo prepared by Highmount puts some of the blame on a company choice: the Pendragon Cycle, a seven-episode Arthurian fantasy series. The memo says the series did not fully land with the Daily Wire’s core audience and “consumed the majority of the 2025 content budget, leaving fewer resources for new programming that could drive subscriber acquisition and marketing.” The company spent $50mn on it, the memo said.
Nieman Lab, a journalism site at Harvard, quoted Dylan Byers of Puck, a subscription news site, as reporting that Boreing began work on the series in 2023 with an eight-figure budget and ended up spending nearly three times what had been approved.
Max Tani, Semafor’s media editor, wrote that the audience decline “could be a blip attributed more to a reduction in content and paid marketing dollars.”
The other reading rests on timing. The New York Times reported in July that the conservative media world around Trump was starting to splinter, and that experts pointed to a number of reasons, including the difficulty of stoking political outrage while Republicans control Washington and a quieter midterm season. Shapiro lost about 60,000 YouTube subscribers between April and June, the paper said, citing Chaotic Era, a newsletter about online influence. The Times said his weekly YouTube views had fallen to about 4mn from 27mn in 2024.
Semafor’s own report said the split between Shapiro and others on the online right could put off part of the audience. It noted that Shapiro had clashed with Candace Owens, a former Daily Wire employee, and with the media personalities Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon.
A.J. Bauer, assistant professor of journalism and creative media at the University of Alabama, said in an email that he had no data on whether a conservative outlet’s pull depends on being in opposition. He said he saw no reason to suspect that audiences are more or less interested when their party is out of power, though he imagined it might be one of many factors in how outlets on the right decide what to cover.
He also said the question ran together two separate problems, falling subscribers and pressure on profitability. “I don’t think Pendragon would cause a drop in subscribers or audiences, since it’s not out yet,” he said. The Highmount memo, for its part, says the series did not fully win over the core Daily Wire audience. Bauer said the production costs weighed on the company’s profitability and fed into this year’s layoffs.
“I think declining audiences/subscribers is overdetermined,” Bauer said. He listed changes to Facebook’s algorithm, which he said hit the Daily Wire and Shapiro harder than rivals because they had relied more on Facebook for distribution. He listed a shift in public opinion on US support for Israel, which he called a core issue for Shapiro, and said Carlson had played to that shift while Shapiro would not because of his ideological commitments. His third factor was crowding. He said “the right-wing media market is more over-saturated than ever”, leaving outlets struggling to hold audiences who have a seemingly unending supply of alternatives if a commentator bores them.
Reece Peck, associate professor at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, and author of Fox Populism, said in an email that two things matter most when comparing the Daily Wire’s position with that of Fox News, the cable channel: the age of its audience and the platform it depends on.
“Fox’s core audience is older, hardcore Republican partisans, mostly from the Boomer generation. They’re less likely to change their media diets or their political views, whether a Republican is in power or not,” Peck said. “The Daily Wire’s audience skews much younger.”
Fox has the fees cable operators pay to carry the channel and corporate advertising behind it, he said. Every internet media operation, whatever its politics, has to piece together a more complex and precarious revenue model, Peck said. “That’s nothing like the steady income cable provides.”
On who the enemy is now, Peck said that was the Daily Wire’s problem. “The enemy that built the company isn’t hitting the way it used to,” he said. Baby boomers tend to stick with Trump, he said, while younger conservatives are more willing to criticise him and the younger podcast world has started openly opposing him.
Shapiro made his name debating young progressives on college campuses, and the company branded itself as the home of free speech and anti-wokeness, Peck said. He said the playbook worked in a more comfortable economy and a time of relative peace, and lands less well now that AI, war and economic anxiety weigh on people.
While subscriptions were falling, the company tried a one-time product. On 29 October 2025 it announced a DailyWire+ Lifetime Membership, capped at 10,000 buyers, with no renewals. The announcement described the company’s first 10 years as “a decade of fighting the Left at every turn”. Buyers receive a Forward Flag Pin “accented in 14k gold and reserved only for our DW lifers” and a signed copy of Shapiro’s book Lions & Scavengers.
Bauer said asking audiences to pay years of fees up front might reflect anxiety about whether they would keep renewing each year, but could also simply be about building a more stable revenue stream. He compared it with public radio’s open-ended sustaining memberships and said the Daily Wire version “seems more about stabilizing the budget than anything else.”
The company has also cut staff. On 1 May 2026 it confirmed layoffs across several teams, largely concentrated at its Nashville production office, TheWrap reported. Owens wrote on X, the social media platform, that she had heard more than 50 per cent of staff were cut. Brent Scher, the Daily Wire’s editor-in-chief, wrote on X that it was “nowhere near 50% of the company”.
In July the company said it was selling Jeremy’s Razors and Jeremy’s Chocolates to Boreing’s new company, Boreing Media, for an undisclosed sum, Semafor reported. The razor brand had at one point made up 10 per cent of the Daily Wire’s annual revenue, the company said.
The Highmount memo says the company plans to raise its editorial budget to $6.4mn a year from $2.4mn and its editorial headcount to 67 from 22. The documents say the company’s bankers believe a $2bn initial public offering could be achievable “within approximately 18 months.”
Sources
- Daily Wire, under pressure, seeks strategic investors, targets IPO. Semafor, 23 Jun 2026
- A Decade Down, Forever To Go: Introducing DailyWire+ Lifetime Membership. The Daily Wire, 29 Oct 2025
- Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire Hit With Layoffs Across a 'Number of Teams,' Largely From Nashville HQ. TheWrap, 1 May 2026
- One reason for The Daily Wire's decline? Burning too much money on a right-wing "Game of Thrones". Nieman Lab (quoting Puck), 11 May 2026
- The Daily Wire sells Jeremy's Razors to media company's former CEO. Semafor, 8 Jul 2026
- The MAGA Media Machine Is Fracturing. The New York Times, 31 Jul 2026
