Media Briefing: What four publishers’ latest earnings reports say about the media industry’s recovery

This week’s Media Briefing looks at at the latest round of earnings reports from publishers to see what they signal about the media industry’s ability to rebound to pre-pandemic levels.

Road to recovery
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Road to recovery

Publishers’ latest quarterly earnings help to show to what extent the industry has recovered from the pandemic’s impact on their businesses.

A year after the economic bottom of the pandemic, some publishers have rebounded to the point of being in stronger shape than they were pre-pandemic, based on the most recent earnings reports released by News Corp., Gannett, Meredith and The New York Times.

The key hits:

Traditional print publishers continued their transition to running digital-led businesses.
Digital ad revenue and digital subscriptions, in particular, have picked up to surpass pre-pandemic levels.
Some publishers saw advertising revenue rebound stronger than subscription revenue; others saw the opposite.

Dow Jones

Dow Jones’ transition into becoming a primarily digital publisher has led to the News Corp. division securing its largest profit “since its acquisition in 2007,” according to the parent company’s latest earnings release. The division, which is home to The Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch and Barron’s, recorded $69 million in profit — earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, in financial jargon — compared to $60 million in 2020 and $53 million in 2019.

Dow Jones saw its revenue for the quarter increase by 18% and by 13% compared to the same period in 2019 to reach $449 million. Dow Jones’ digital business also grew to represent an even larger majority share of its overall business, accounting for 72% of revenue in the quarter, up from 71% in 2020 and 63% in 2019.

News Corp. doesn’t break out raw revenue figures for Dow Jones’ subscription and advertising businesses. The company did state that digital circulation revenue represented 65% of total circulation revenue for the quarter, up from 61% in 2020, and that digital advertising revenue represented 56% of total advertising revenue, up from 54% in 2020.

Dow Jones’ subscriber base reached 4.5 million subscriptions in Q2 2021, up 19% over Q2 2020 and 36% over Q2 2019. While News Corp. did not break out digital-only subscriptions across the division, it did disclose that The Wall Street Journal had more than 2.7 million digital-only subscribers in the quarter and that those subscribers accounted for 79% of the newspaper’s total subscriptions.

Gannett

Juxtaposing Gannett’s business in 2021 to what it was in 2019 is a little tricky. It’s literally a different company, having been acquired by New Media Investment Group in November 2019. Compared to 2019, Gannett’s overall, advertising and circulation revenues all roughly doubled. But again, it’s effectively twice the company in 2021.

Fortunately, the companies’ pre-merger quarterly filings are still available.

Adding the two together paints a less-than-rosy picture, with the revenues short of their 2019 combined marks across the board. The company’s overall revenue of $804.3 million was 24% shy of the combined 2019 figure. …read more

Source:: Digiday