Helping London’s much-loved institution reach a new global audience
Our challenge was to engage and involve the widest possible audience and monetise the Museum’s content, without compromising its values.
The Natural History Museum in London is a world-class visitor attraction and leading science research centre. Its experts care for more than 80 million objects spanning billions of years, and last year it broke records when 7.1m visitors made it the UK’s most popular visitor attraction.
As Earth faces a planetary emergency, with climate change and biodiversity loss threatening our own future, the Natural History Museum’s strategy to 2031 set out the role it will play as a global scientific and cultural leader. Its unique collections and unrivalled expertise are being used to tackle the biggest challenges facing the world today.
However, as a London-based institution, communicating on a limited number of owned channels and with member benefits largely focused around visiting the Museum in person, the brand sought to reach and engage a global audience as well as to seek innovative new revenue streams.
Our task was to identify strategic content distribution opportunities that could meet both goals: engage and involve the widest possible audience and find new ways to monetise.
We have been creating stand-out content for the Natural History Museum supporters magazine since 2019. We use our expertise in the natural world, history and science to turn in-depth research and complex ideas into universally appealing content, not just for Museum members, but for anyone interested in natural history.
As one of the world’s leading content discovery platforms, with an estimated 35 million subscribers, Apple News+ offered the potential for transformative scaling. Bringing together the Museum’s charter to be recognised as a global force in the application of natural sciences and the fight against climate change, plus the need to monetise the print magazine, we introduced Apple News+ as the solution.
“You achieve such a brilliant balance between communicating our commercial message and inspiring intellectual curiosity and a passion for the planet. I don’t think we should underestimate how hard a balance that is to strike.”
Natural History Museum
CMO, London Museums
We’ve been working with Apple News since 2022 to bring our brands to the platform and, in 2024, launched the Natural History Museum, making it the first-ever non-profit brand to go live on the platform.
Our agile strategy adapts existing successful content into platform-native versions specific for Apple News but also reacts and iterates according to how the audience responds in real-time as content is published. We increase income by testing, learning and bringing a newsroom mentality to the process.
NHM’s stories were extremely well received by global audiences on this platform. We now have large audiences in the US, Australia and Canada – people who would not have been exposed to the Natural History Museum’s content or their mission, had they not been on Apple News.
We launched in late 2024 and, so far in 2026, we've seen a 72% year-on-year increase in reach. As a result there are a number of new initiatives in the pipeline for 2026 and 2027, which will see a significant growth in the volume of content published and subsequent reach and income.
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