Doug Wilson’s Canon Press Offers to Buy Christianity Today for $10M

Canon Press has put in a bid to purchase Christianity Today International for $10M, according to a sales proposal unveiled by Megan Basham on X.

Basham asks the question:

@CTmagazine worth? Is $10 million a fair offer? This can be hard to pin down given that it’s a nonprofit media organization and the bulk of its funding has increasingly come from secular NGOs, not subscriptions. (For example, according to IRS filings, in 2020, only about 20% of CT’s revenues came from grants. Today, it’s more than half).

In 2023, CT’s net assets (assets minus liabilities) — were about $9.9 million. Given that it is a tarnished brand among much of its core audience (so much so it has gained popular nicknames like “Christianity Astray”), and it’s editorial reputation has taken a nosedive in recent years, $10 mil doesn’t seem like a bad opening offer.

CT Claims to have an “annual reach” of 35 million people and 6.5 million podcast listeners. This is done under multiple organizations that fall under the Christianity Today International brand, CTI. Sites include ChristianityToday.com, PreachingToday.com, BuildingChurchLeaders.com, SmallGroups.com, and EkstasisMagazine.com, among others. The magazine claims to have a print circulation of 110,000 and an online reach of 2.2M.

Their readership and lack of social online presence continues to be a mystery for an organization of their size, however. Joel Berry of Not The Bee points out:

According to Alexa rankings, CT is currently averaging 1.22M monthly viewers, far less than NTB.

That’s only on the website, though. On X, where they have 360k followers, the majority of their articles don’t get a single comment and they get under 3k ‘impressions’ per post.

Traffic is a bit brisker on Facebook, where Christianity Today has 565k followers. Most articles are shared between 2 and 10 times, and articles not about Charlie Kirk receive between 2 and 20 comments. (For comparison, Protestia’s FB page has less than 10% of their followers, yet in August alone received 1.7M visitors, 40k interactions, 12k comments, and 3400 shares)

When it comes to their sister site’s Facebook pages, however, Preaching Today has 12k subs but hasn’t posted anything since 2023. Building Church Leaders hasn’t posted anything in nearly a decade, Small Groups since 2022. The same applies to Ekstasis Magazine.com, which has 1.6 followers, hasn’t posted anything since March 2025, and appears to have only one lone commenter who writes every few months.

Christianity Today’s Bluesky is dead, with 3.8k total followers, and their last 10 posts only received a combined one comment and seven shares.

Their YouTube channel has 34.9k subscribers, but their last 36 videos have a combined 63k views, and 40k of those views came from two videos, leaving the rest to average under 850 views per video. As far as content, most of their videos comprise of Russell Moore’s podcast.

Perhaps they have the most success on Instagram, where they have 69.8k followers, and where most posts receive a couple of hundred “likes” and a dozen or so comments.

In any case, if they have any significant social media presence, we can’t find it.

So what does all this success cost to run? Christianity Today had more than $18.3M dollars in revenue in 2023, where they paid out more than $7.85M in salaries and wages.

In 2023, out of all their revenue, 52% came from grants, for which they received $9.6 million. These grants have proven to be a significant source of funding over the years. In 2025, Christianity Today received a grant of $5 million from Lilly Endowment Inc to support “Christianity Today’s Next Generation Storytelling Project. In 2022, they received a grant of $1M towards their sister site, preachingtoday.com. Similarly, CT received $200,000 from the Hewlett Foundation in both 2022 and 2023 to report on the elections. Etc.

Ultimately, it is unclear what they are worth in monetary terms. From a theological perspective, they’re not worth much, as can be seen in some of our articles about them below. Yet, given the current ethos and attitude of the once-storied paper, we imagine they’d sell to Canon Press over their dead bodies.

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