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This week’s Media Briefing recaps how five publicly traded publishers’ businesses performed in the third quarter of 2024.
In third quarter earnings calls, executives at publishers like Dotdash Meredith and News Corp blamed the lead-up to the U.S. presidential election for a pullback from some advertisers, which resulted in a softer ad market. But they seemed confident their companies would see more ad spend in Q4.
Overall, Q3 was a mixed bag for publishers. Of the five public media companies included in this earnings analysis, four reported increases in total revenue over Q3 2023. Three companies reported digital advertising revenue growth year over year. All three companies that report figures for their digital subscription businesses – Gannett, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal – gained more subscribers too.
Below is a look at how publishers’ businesses fared between July 1 and September 30.
By the numbers:
- BuzzFeed’s total revenue in Q3 was $64.3 million, growing 7% year over year. It was the first quarter of year-over-year revenue growth for BuzzFeed in over a year.
- Dotdash Meredith’s total Q3 revenue was $439.5 million, up 5% year over year.
- Dow Jones’ total revenue was $552 million during the company’s fiscal Q1 2025 (which runs July 1 – September 30), up 3% year over year.
- Gannett’s total revenue for the quarter was $612.4 million, down 6.2% year over year. But digital revenue increased 5.2% to $277.4 million.
- The New York Times Co’s total revenue in the quarter was $640 million, up 7% year over year.
Digital advertising
Dotdash Meredith, Gannett and The New York Times all reported year-over-year digital advertising revenue growth in the third quarter. BuzzFeed and Dow Jones didn’t fare as well.
- Dotdash Meredith advertising revenue (which primarily includes revenue from display ads) was up 26% year over year.
- Gannett’s digital advertising revenue in Q3 was up 4.9% year over year.
- The New York Times’ digital advertising revenue was up 9% year over year.
- BuzzFeed’s advertising revenue declined 3% year over year.
- Dow Jones’ digital advertising revenue declined 5%. (Dow Jones’ digital advertising was calculated based on the reported year-over-year increases in total ad revenue and share of digital advertising within that business line, since the company does not explicitly report out total revenue for the business subdivision.)
One bright spot for DDM and BuzzFeed was revenue derived from programmatic ads.
Christopher Halpin, CFO and COO of Dotdash Meredith owner IAC, said in an earnings call on Nov. 12 that programmatic ad rates were up “30%-plus in the quarter.” BuzzFeed’s programmatic ad revenue grew 9% year over year to $17.3 million.
However, that wasn’t the case for all. News Corp CFO Susan Panuccio said in an earnings call on Nov. 7 that lower programmatic sales hurt Dow Jones’ business in Q3.
Direct sales were also mixed for publishers. DDM’s Halpin said the company had strong direct ad sales, “perhaps even aided a little bit by advertisers pulling some spend forward into September ahead of the election.”
But BuzzFeed’s ad revenue decline was due to “ongoing pressures on our direct sales channel,” according to BuzzFeed CFO Matthew Omer in an earnings call on Nov. 12.
Lifestyle content categories helped grow the digital ad revenue businesses at The New York Times and DDM. IAC CEO Joey Levin wrote in his letter to shareholders that entertainment, food and health categories were “particularly strong,” and helped offset weakness in DDM’s home properties.
New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien said in an earnings call on Nov. 4 that adding more advertising opportunities in its Games app and its sports publication The Athletic has helped attract more marketers.
But home services was also a soft category for Gannett, according to Chris Cho, Gannett’s president of digital marketing solutions in the company’s earnings call on Oct. 31.
The presidential election last week also seemed to have put a damper on ad spend in Q3.
News Corp CEO Robert Thomson said in the earnings call: “During an election period, certain companies are a little bit apprehensive about advertising so we have seen some softness in finance and tech.”
DDM’s Halpin said “consumer distraction and advertiser caution” around the election “exceeded our expectations.” However, Dotdash Meredith does not sell digital inventory to political advertisers. “Good news for DDM was the election was rapidly decided, and things are shaping up to come in during November and December, with advertisers steadily returning,” Halpin added. Gannett’s Cho and News Corp’s Thomson also both said they are seeing digital ad spending improve this quarter.
Digital subscriptions
Gannett, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal said they attracted more subscribers year over year.
The New York Times added 260,000 net new digital subscribers in the quarter and now has over 11 million. More than 5 million of those now subscribe to the bundle or multiple products, Kopit Levien said, representing about 46% of The Times’ total subscriber base. Digital subscription revenue growth grew more than 14% year-on-year to $322 million.
The Wall Street Journal now counts 3.9 million subscribers, a 10% increase in digital-only subscriptions year over year. The Journal did not share revenue associated with its sub growth.
And Gannett now has 2.06 million subscribers, representing a 4.7% uptick. Digital-only subscription revenues were $50 million in the quarter, up 25% year over year.
AI deals
News Corp and Dotdash Meredith both have cut AI-focused deals with OpenAI, while Gannett has aligned with Microsoft. CEOs at all three companies addressed how those partnerships are going and their hopes that they will generate additional revenue.
DDM’s Levin said the integration of the company’s D/Cipher product with OpenAI is now complete and that the media company is working to extend the contextual targeting tool “to both the rest of DDM’s advertising offerings and third-party sites across the entire open web.” He added, “We believe this capability will generate additional revenue growth for us in 2025,” he wrote in his shareholder letter.
News Corp’s Thomson addressed the lawsuit from Dow Jones and The New York Post against AI search engine Perplexity, saying the company “would prefer to woo rather than sue artificial intelligence companies, hence the alliance with OpenAI, but we have reached a point where litigation is also essential.”
“We are diligently preparing for further action against other companies that have ingested our archives and are synthesizing our intellectual property. We hope that litigation will not be necessary, but we intend to defend vigorously our rights and our journalism,” Thomson added.
In Gannett’s earnings call, CEO Mike Reed said the “monetary value is modest” from the company’s deal with Microsoft – which uses Gannett’s content to summarize daily briefings in its AI assistant Copilot – but that he expects the revenue stream to “increase” in the future.
“It is a good example of the type of partnerships we’re looking to strike,” Reed said. “We have been working with a wide range of AI partners, large and small, and we do expect to continue to announce deals as we go forward.”
What we’ve heard
“It won’t surprise you to know that we’re not that excited by [those] rack rate deals. We’re obviously talking about something separate to those exact terms.”
– A publishing executive on deal negotiations with Perplexity and its publisher program
Numbers to know
5: The number of days The Washington Post’s CEO wants staff in the office by June 2, 2025.
7X: The publication’s daily subscription sign-up rate the day after the 2024 election, compared to a normal day on Wednesday.
$3.4 million: The amount former Business Insider top editor Nicholas Carlson has raised for his video-focused start-up company.
$7.5 million: The reported total value of lost traffic to Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Fortune and Time’s affiliate businesses due to a new Google policy.
What we’ve covered
News publishers didn’t sustain a traffic bump in the 2024 presidential election week like they did in 2020:
- Traffic to the top 50 news websites on Election Day 2024 was 6.8% higher compared to Election Day 2020, but traffic to those sites on the day after the 2024 presidential election was about 20% less than the day after Joe Biden’s win in 2020.
- Sources cited a quickly-decided presidential election this year – and growing trends of news avoidance and a move away from traditional news outlets and formats – as the reasons for this.
Read more about the impact of the 2024 presidential election on publishers’ traffic here.
News publishers’ YouTube channels also didn’t attract the same viewership this election:
- Of the top two dozen news publishers on YouTube (ranging from Fox News to Vox), total views to their channels on the platform were lower on both Election Day and the day after the election this year compared to the same election and post-election days in 2020.
- One reason for the dip from 2020 to 2024 may be the growth of individual creators on YouTube over the past eight years.
Read more about news publishers’ smaller “Trump bump” here.
What a second Donald Trump presidential term means for media and advertising:
- Trump’s volatile first presidency – and the resulting news cycle – fed surges of traffic to news outlets, but the cost was declining levels of trust and influence from institutional media companies.
- Trump is already pressuring regulators to scrutinize media mergers.
Read more about what Trump’s second time in office means for the media and ad industry here.
What we’re reading
Google tests removing EU news articles from search:
Google will remove news articles from EU-based publishers from search results, in order to test how it will affect traffic and the search experience, The Verge reported. It’s a small test, impacting 1% of users in nine EU countries.
The Guardian announced on Wednesday that it will no longer post on any official Guardian accounts on X (formerly Twitter), calling the social media platform “toxic” and citing owner Elon Musk’s role in this year’s U.S. presidential election.
Shailesh Prakash, the Google exec tasked with establishing relationships with publishers, resigned after two years at the tech company, The Wall Street Journal reported. He had previously spent over a decade at The Washington Post.
Business Insider founder is leaving:
Henry Blodget is leaving Business Insider after founding the company in 2007. He will step down from the company’s board but remain an advisor, according to a memo he wrote, which was published by Talking Biz News.
No deal for The New York Times’ tech union:
The New York Times’ Tech Guild, which includes more than 600 tech employees at the publisher, ended its weeklong strike without reaching a contract deal. The union is seeking pay increases and pay equity, among other demands.
