In graphic detail: Publishers’ full year 2022 earnings

Publishers’ high hopes for 2022 were brought down to earth about halfway through the year.

The first revenue stream that felt the impact of the economic downturn was advertising, but by the end of the year, subscriptions began to slow and some publishers reported dips in consumer revenue streams, like affiliate commerce.

Below are some insights we’ve gathered from six public publishers’ most recent earnings reports, most of which for the full year 2023 (News Corp’s Dow Jones/WSJ reports on its fiscal year, which runs July 1 – June 30).

Revenue comparisons

As stated, 2022 wasn’t a boon for most publishers, especially when comparing pro forma revenues for those players that participated in the M&A race in 2021.

The publishers that experienced decreases in total revenue year over year — BuzzFeed, Dotdash Meredith and Gannett — range between 8.2% and 17.9%. This is pretty much the mirror experience to the three publishers that reported year over year growth in their total revenue — Dow Jones, The Arena Group and The New York Times — with a range was between 8.1% to 17.7%. In fact, if you take the median year over year change in these six publishers’ total revenue, the industry nets out relatively flat — up 0.05% from last year’s total revenue.

This could likely be attributed to both cutting costs measures that came in the form of layoffs or selling off real estate, as well as sales teams bending over backwards to keep advertisers happy during yet another economic downturn — tactics learned during the early months of the pandemic.

!function(e,i,n,s){var t=”InfogramEmbeds”,d=e.getElementsByTagName(“script”)[0];if(window[t]&&window[t].initialized)window[t].process&&window[t].process();else if(!e.getElementById(n)){var o=e.createElement(“script”);o.async=1,o.id=n,o.src=”https://e.infogram.com/js/dist/embed-loader-min.js”,d.parentNode.insertBefore(o,d)}}(document,0,”infogram-async”);

Piece of the pie

Comparing to the revenue break downs in 2021, advertising became a slightly smaller portion of publishers’ pies.

The New York Times’ advertising business lost 2% worth of share, which was absorbed by subscriptions. BuzzFeed’s display and pre-roll advertising business became less than half of its business last year, while its branded content and custom business increased its share by about 5% — not surprising given how average programmatic CPMs decreased steadily in 2022. Dotdash Meredith saw a continued shift toward digital revenue, but print still makes up the lion’s share of the publishers’ revenue in 2022.

Gannett, however, saw a slight increase in advertising revenue in 2022, while subscriptions dropped slightly. The Arena Group saw its digital advertising business increase by 74%, due primarily to a …read more

Source:: Digiday