Sponsor The Mill: The opportunity to advertise in Greater Manchester's quality newspaper
The Mill is an award-winning digital newspaper. Our newsletter goes out to almost 50,000 readers in Greater Manchester every week and we have more than 3,000 paying subscribers as well as 30,000 followers on social media. Since being founded in June 2020, we have built a reputation for high-quality journalism that sets the agenda in the city like no other publication.
We have received coverage in newspapers like The New York Times, The Guardian, The Times and The Telegraph and have been featured several times on BBC Radio 4, whose Today programme described our readership as “influential” and said: “It includes the likes of council leaders and chief executives and it means the Mancunian movers and shakers pay attention to The Mill.”
Our investors include CNN chief executive and former BBC and New York Times boss Sir Mark Thompson and the leading Cambridge economist Dame Diane Coyle.
“The Mancunian movers and shakers pay attention to The Mill”
Radio 4, Today programme, January 2023
By partnering with us as a sponsor, you will be able to speak directly to our audience — readers who have a very strong connection with The Mill and our mission. You will also be associated with a brand that stands for quality, trust and deep commitment to this city. Your campaign with us will:
Drive a major uplift in awareness about your organisation or event across Greater Manchester.
Ensure that the leading decision-makers in business, politics and media know who you are and what value you bring to the region.
Our recent partners include The University of Manchester, The Hallé, Manchester Central, Brsk, Manchester Museum and The Sustainability Show.
To speak to us about our sponsorship opportunities, please email daniel@millmediaco.uk to start a conversation.
Our audience
We have one of the most engaged and involved audiences anywhere in UK media, as you can see from the way people tweet about us and the fact that we have 2,700+ paying members.
Here are some key stats about our newsletter:
53,000+ mailing list, 92% of whom live in Greater Manchester.
41% average open rate for our newsletters.
3,000+ paying members, who pay £8.90 a month or £89 a year.
Most of our readers are professionals or retired professionals in Greater Manchester — doctors, lawyers, civil servants, academics and business people — who love The Mill because we offer them a local version of the kind of reporting they read in The Times or The Economist. They also read it because they are the kind of people who do things in the city — going to exhibitions and plays and trying out new shops and restaurants. As well as longtime Mancunians, our audience includes thousands of people who have moved to this city in the past decade and who come to The Mill to find out about what the city has to offer.
We also have a weekly podcast, which reaches a growing audience across the city region, and tends to attract a younger demographic than our newsletter. We can include podcast sponsorships in any campaign. On top of that, if you are trying to reach the same kind of readers in Sheffield, Liverpool, or Birmingham we have sister newsletters in those cities doing exceptionally high quality journalism for very engaged audiences, and we can come up with a campaign that runs across the three cities.
And then there’s trust: when we asked our readers in a survey recently which media brands they most trust to tell them the truth, The Mill came top (selected by 67% of respondents), followed by The Guardian (49%), Channel 4 News (46%) and the BBC (42%).
To speak to us about our sponsorship opportunities, please email daniel@millemediaco.uk.
Testimonial: Tom Cheesewright
After his company Pomona Partners partnered with us, Tom Cheesewright wrote a post on LinkedIn explaining why he had chosen The Mill as his first place to spread the word. This is what he wrote.
This is the first hard cash we've spent on a marketing partnership of any kind. So why did we choose to spend money with these new, local titles? There are a few reasons. Some of them come down to instinct, some down to bias, and some down to hard business sense.
Let's start with instinct, because honestly, that was the most important sense at play here. I've been a reader of the Mill since someone recommended it to me. Lots of the people in my circle are readers and subscribers. And instinctively, I think that's the sort of people we need to reach. Professionals in the public and private sectors, with influence and access to budgets that they might be directing towards events and hence might come to us to book our brilliant speakers.
The bias piece is very straightforward: I wanted to spend my business's money supporting a product that I like. The Mill is one of the few things that I make time to read consistently, mostly because of its range. I like the fact that it might be covering a political scandal one day, and have a longform piece on the arts the next. It makes me feel more connected to my adopted city — particularly to how young people are experiencing the city now, as I did first over thirty years ago as a teenager, and then again in my twenties.
What about business sense? Well, The Mill's growth story is pretty incredible (kudos to Joshi Herrmann and team). As is its panel of investors, including some real media big hitters. It has what they call in start-up land, 'traction'. As a Northern business, founded and based in #Manchester, it makes solid business sense to me for us to be a (relatively) early business supporter, of both the Manchester title and its siblings.
So far, it feels like it is playing out well. In the 15 minutes between the Mill going out and me writing this we've had a spike in web traffic and three people subscribe to our mailing list.
Read Tom’s post and all the comments, and get in touch to speak to us about starting a partnership.
Case study: Manchester Lit and Phil
They might be one of the city’s oldest institutions, but the Manchester Lit and Phil felt that there are many people who don’t know about what they do — and should do. By partnering with us for a month, they got their message out to our audience and we got half a dozen emails and messages from readers saying how surprised they were that the Lit and Phil wasn’t on their radar until we ran this campaign. They sponsored our Monday Briefings for a month and also sponsored one of our weekly podcasts.
See below for how one of the sponsorships looked to readers — or click here to see it in the context of the newsletter:
Case study: Brsk
Recently, we partnered with Brsk, an independent broadband provider launching in Greater Manchester for the first time. Brsk sponsored a month of our Monday Briefings in order to spread the word about their super-fast fibre-optic service. Each week, we included a short, clear item about them in the Monday Briefing, written by our staff so that it felt organic to the newsletter and connected with readers.
The campaign was a huge success. More than a third of Mill readers who clicked through to Brsk’s website completed the signup form, many times higher than other forms of advertising they were using. “It’s a huge thumbs up from us,” said Brsk’s community manager Andy Hall.
To speak to us about our sponsorship opportunities, please email daniel@millmediaco.uk