Editor’s Note: Here’s What We Made and How We Spent in 2025

The Rover’s 2025 Transparency Report is here!

This report is destined for you, our community, the stakeholders in this project. Every year, the release of this report is our opportunity to reaffirm our commitment to transparency with our audience, to show you how our money comes in and where it goes out. It also gives you an idea of who we work with, the impact of our reporting, how much traffic we get on the website, and what our priorities are for the next calendar year.

Read the 2025 Transparency Report

Chris and I often say that a donation to The Rover will produce more journalism than a donation to any legacy media outlet. We operate with very low overhead, and we are experts at stretching every dollar to deliver high-quality investigations on a tight budget. When comparing the 2024 and 2025 Transparency Reports, I think it’s clear that we’re getting even better at it as we go. 

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The expenses

From 2024 to 2025, our expenses increased by just $1,616, yet the number of articles we released jumped from 81 in 2024 to 133 in 2025. A small portion of that can be attributed to an increased commitment to translating articles into French, our personal contribution to breaking down the two solitudes, but it’s mostly proof that the machine now runs more swiftly and can handle a larger output. And that’s not even mentioning that we put out our first-ever documentary in 2025, a major step forward in bringing our investigative journalism to a new medium and embracing the video format. 

The amount we paid to freelancers more than doubled, from roughly $31,400 in 2024 to over $76,500 in 2025, which also corresponds to an increase in the number of freelancers we worked with, from 27 contributors in 2024 to 42 in 2025. Put differently, more of the money we make is going to more freelancers, helping provide work opportunities for a growing number of journalists, photographers, videographers, graphic artists, and student interns.

This was made possible by Chris taking a $19,000 pay cut from 2024 to 2025. He took the cut so that we would have more money in our freelancing budget, to continue growing this project into a team effort that doesn’t rely so much on him for producing new content. 

That’s why the amount we paid in payroll decreased from 2024 to 2025, from $63,075 to $49,702. In 2024, Chris was the only “employee” (we weren’t actually organized enough yet to have actual employees, but you get what I mean) while I was still classified as a freelancer. I remained a freelancer for much of 2025 until we properly set up the structure and both officially became employees (and part owners!). In total, the money I brought home from The Rover in 2025, first as a freelancer then as an employee, was $28,802. Chris’ portion of that payroll expense line was $44,000.

Our operating costs also decreased from 2024 to 2025, mostly because Chris moved into a house offered to him by a Rover reader, meaning he no longer has to pay rent. That reader, who has asked that we keep their identity private, offered the home in NDG to The Rover’s operations with the request that it be put to use in service of the community. It is now the location of our office (Rover HQ!), where we meet with our freelancers, host workshops with student journalists, and record our YouTube show, The Week Is Rover. 

Operating costs for 2025 include equipment, software tools, research and reporting expenses, work meals, hotel stays for field reporting, attending the Canadian Association of Journalists conference, car insurance, gas, and my and Chris’ phone bills for the latter part of the year. 

We closed out 2025 with a surplus of $27,005.39, which remained in The Rover coffers for 2026. No profit being made here!

The income 

The part of the transparency report that concerns me is the slight decrease in subscriptions and donations processed through Stripe, from $119,010 in 2024 to $99,134 in 2025. The impact of this was offset by large donations made by two private individuals, whose identities we are not revealing because, as we explain in the transparency report, they are not active in politics, labour or community organizing, or lobbying in any form. These donations were not solicited by us, and the two individuals had and continue to have no input in editorial decision-making whatsoever. 

The result is that our income grew by roughly $6,000 from 2024 to 2025, but the dip in subscriptions and memberships processed through Stripe shows that, while our audience continues to grow as evidenced by the jump in our website stats and social media following, the number of people who support us financially declined. 

This is unfortunate, but not surprising, given the cost-of-living crisis we’re going through right now. We also decided early on in this project that none of our news content would be behind a paywall — a commitment we made for ethical reasons, but one that is perhaps not wise from a business standpoint. We encourage those who can to donate and take a paid subscription, because quality information is costly to produce, but the “What’s in it for me?” aspect of contributing financially is less direct than when a paid subscription grants access to exclusive content. 

I don’t know that there’s an easy solution to this dilemma we’re in. With the YouTube show up and running, we’ve been talking about starting a Patreon, a space where the audience could pay for access to behind-the-scenes content mostly consisting of conversations between our journalists and co-hosts, so that original news content remains freely accessible. But there are concerns as to how that would work if we one day become a Registered Journalism Organization (RJO), a charity status given by the Canada Revenue Agency which would allow our paid subscribers to claim the digital news subscription tax credit, but not if the donations are processed through Patreon — at least, that’s my understanding. À voir!

As time passes, it becomes ever more clear to us that diversifying our revenue streams is necessary to ensure our financial sustainability. 2026 marks the year that we’ve gotten more serious about advertising as a source of revenue, but now that we’ve got the funding for 2025 all accounted for, I’m realizing that some work is needed to assure the sustainability of our existing funding streams, too, namely our audience funding. Maybe we don’t spend enough time explaining to our audience just how vital their financial contributions are to our operations — that’s one of the reasons for putting together a transparency report every year, to illustrate just how much we rely on funding from our audience to run this project. 

2025 was a good example of that: we applied for several grants, but were only awarded one for the whole year, totalling $10,800. Institutional funding has never been lucrative for us; we truly are powered by people. 

I hope this report gives our audience confidence in our operations, and maybe even convinces some of you to donate to our work. Special thanks to Celia Poncet, our marketing intern, who helped me put the report together. And special thanks to you, our audience, who make The Rover possible.

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