2024 (and Q4) in review

Looks like 2024 turned out to be the turnaround some publishers were hoping for after a year of doom and gloom in 2023.

In fourth-quarter earnings calls over the past few weeks, executives at publishers like IAC, Gannett and The New York Times said digital advertising revenue had increased from full-year 2023 to 2024, ranging from increases of 3.8% to 12.8%.

Subscriptions were another bright spot. Total digital subscriptions and subscription revenue grew for Dow Jones, Gannett and The New York Times year over year, too. 

But it wasn’t good news for everyone. Publishers like BuzzFeed and Gannett saw overall revenue decrease from 2023 to 2024 (and comparing Q4 2023 to the same quarter in 2024), due to company restructurings and reorganizations. In Gannett’s case, the company sold off and shut down some assets last year – the newspaper publisher sold four New Mexico newspapers in May, and in November shuttered its product reviews site and closed a printing facility. BuzzFeed cut its sales team to focus on programmatic ads and affiliate commerce. 

By the numbers (rounded up to nearest decimal):

• BuzzFeed’s total revenue in 2024 was $189.9 million, down 18% year over year. 
• Dotdash Meredith’s total 2024 revenue was $1.8 billion, up 4.9% year over year.
• Total revenue at News Corp’s Dow Jones business was $600 million in its fiscal year from Q2 (Dow Jones’ second quarter of its fiscal year runs October 1 – December 31), up 3% year over year.
• Gannett’s total revenue for the year was $2.5 billion, down 6% year over year.
• The New York Times Company’s total revenue last year was $2.6 billion, up 6.6% year over year.
• Ziff Davis’ total revenue was $1.4 billion in 2024, up 2.8%.

Direct-sold and programmatic ads improve in 2024 

A few publishers saw more digital advertising revenue in 2024 compared to 2023, thanks to increases in direct-sold and programmatic ads, and more traffic – due to coverage areas like sports and the presidential election.

Total digital advertising revenue grew from Q4 2023 to Q4 2024 for Dotdash Meredith, Gannett and The New York Times. It was flat at Dow Jones and down at BuzzFeed.

Dotdash Meredith’s advertising revenue – which primarily consists of display advertising sold both directly and via programmatic exchanges – grew 3% from Q4 2023 to Q4 2024. This was driven by higher premium advertising revenue mostly from the technology and health and pharmaceuticals categories. The growth was also thanks to more programmatic ad revenue at higher rates, as well as a 3% growth in “core sessions,” or a subset of total unique visitors to Dotdash Meredith’s top sites, according to the company.

“We reversed the traffic declines. They’re up. I think traffic is up about 8%,” said Barry Diller, chairman and senior executive of IAC (which owns Dotdash Meredith), in an earnings call on February 12.

At Gannett, digital advertising increased 1.7% in Q4, due to “audience pageview growth,” according to Doug Horne, Gannett’s CFO. In the earnings call on Jan. 17, chief content officer Kristin Roberts chalked this up to USA Today Network’s sports coverage. During the college football and NFL season, the network generated over 390 million pageviews, an increase of 33% compared to last season, she said. CEO Mike Reed added that the company had 200 million average monthly unique visitors in Q3 and Q4, up 7% compared to Q4 2023.

Meanwhile, The New York Times attributes its digital advertising growth (up 9.5% in Q4 and 7.7% in 2024, year over year, respectively) to more revenue from direct-sold display and programmatic ads. 

The New York Times Company’s CEO Meredith Kopit Levien said in an earnings call on Feb. 5 that ad supply also went up, especially in the Times’ Games offering and its sports site The Athletic. And Levien also attributed the growth to improved ad products and targeting, especially from its AI-powered, contextual ad targeting tool BrandMatch. She also noted that CPMs “have been consistently strong,” without providing specific details. The New York Times’ ad business is mostly directly sold ads, Levien noted. 

At Ziff Davis, digital advertising and performance marketing revenue (which the company combines into one metric in their earnings report) grew 4.1% year over year in 2024. Compared to 2023, most of that growth came from 9.5% year over year revenue growth in Ziff Davis’ technology and shopping category, which includes the titles CNET, PCMag, RetailMeNot and Spiceworks. Ziff Davis bought CNET in August 2024.

At Dow Jones, digital advertising revenue was flat, and accounted for 64% of total advertising revenues in the quarter – compared to 62% the prior year.

But BuzzFeed fared the worst of the five publishers. Ad revenue declined 17% from 2023 to 2024, and 19% from Q4 2023 to Q4 2024.

BuzzFeed CFO Matt Omer said in an earnings call on March 13 that the company’s restructuring last year “significantly reduced” BuzzFeed’s sales team, which led to a $6.3 million decline in direct-sold advertising year over year. Omer said this decision was part of the company’s “pivot toward programmatic advertising and affiliated commerce.” However, programmatic advertising remained relatively flat year over year at $18 million in Q4, according to Omer. 

Digital subscriptions keep growing

Publishers saw success from raising the prices of their digital subscriptions in 2024, and pushed subscribers towards bundles.

Dow Jones’ total digital subscription revenue grew 5% to $461 million in 2024. Total subscriptions to The Wall Street Journal grew 4% compared to the prior year, to over 4.2 million average subscriptions in the quarter. Digital-only subscriptions to The Wall Street Journal (90% of the Journal’s total subscriptions) grew 7% to nearly 3.8 million average subscriptions in the quarter.

“We have started to benefit from the conversion to high pricing from our digital subscriptions added in the past year via introductory promotional offers,” said News Corp CFO Lavanya Chandrashekar. Bundling subscriptions for the quarter improved by 45% year over year to over 950,000, she said.

However, it wasn’t all daisies and roses.

“Digital-only subscriptions improved by 13% year over year and by 27,000 sequentially, negatively impacted by the phasing of marketing promotions and seasonality, particularly related to students and some industry headwinds on search algorithms,” Chandrashekar said. But, the company expects “stronger volumes” in the next quarter, she said.

When asked why Dow Jones anticipated this improvement, News Corp CEO Robert Thomson said the company was seeing “higher sales” and that “the dynamic pricing system adopted by the team is starting to bring us benefit.” He said phasing subscribers from discounted entry-level offers to more standard pricing was “proceeding well.”

Gannett subscription revenue grew 21.3% to $188.8 million in 2024. Gannett had 2.06 million digital-only subscribers in Q4 2024, about the same as the previous quarter – but up 3% year over year.

“We expect digital-only subscription revenue to be a meaningful contributor to the expected overall digital revenue growth in the near- and long term,” said Mike Reed, Gannett’s CEO. 

The New York Times grew subscription revenue by 12% to $1.3 million in 2024. The publisher had 10.8 million digital-only subscribers, up from 10.47 million the previous quarter. Digital subscription revenue grew 14% in 2024.

The Times added about 350,000 net digital-only subscribers compared with the end of the third quarter of 2024, bringing the total number of subscribers to 11.43 million. Total digital-only average revenue per user (ARPU) increased 4.4% year-over-year to $9.65, mostly because of subscribers transitioning from promotional to higher prices and price increases on “tenured non-bundled subscribers,” said New York Times CFO William Bardeen.

“Our bundle continued to be a major engine of subscriber additions,” Kopit Levien said

All in all in 2024, The Times added over 1.1 million digital subscribers. The Times’ goal is to reach 15 million total subscribers by the end of 2027.

AI is starting to bring in some money

Some signs of revenue opportunities from artificial intelligence technology came up during publishers’ earnings calls.

IAC said Dotdash Meredith’s licensing and other revenue increased 19% due primarily to the company’s partnership with AI tech company OpenAI, which began in May 2024. 

News Corp’s Thomson said digital advertising grew by 13% at the New York Post, “where profitability was also assisted by our OpenAI deal.”

The company was “pleased” with its OpenAI partnership, and encouraged other companies to follow suit, he added.

But fists are up when it comes to Perplexity, another AI tech company.

“Our legal action against the perplexing Perplexity is underway and we look forward with relish to document discovery. We firmly believe that this discovery process will be an important phase, not just for us, but for all who cherish the sanctity of IP,” Thomson said.

And for those worried about a recession? Thomson said News Corp was seeing signs of the opposite.

“One rather general generic post-election observation – we are seeing a tangible increase in business confidence here in the U.S. since the election, the temporary turmoil of transactional tariffs aside. There is a confluence of economic optimism and a cultural awakening with the yoke of woke having been lifted,” he said.

What we’ve heard

“It looks like our universe got smaller. And we basically lost visibility on keywords that we don’t get a lot of volume from.”

– A publishing exec on discovering that their global search visibility (the percentage of clicks their websites get from keyword search results rankings) had reduced by 5% since Google introduced AI Overviews.

Numbers to know

£5: The monthly subscription fee people have to pay to access the Guardian’s website if they do not agree to being tracked by third-party cookies.

20%: The percentage of Chicago Sun-Times employees leaving after a buyout offer, most of them from the newsroom.

$24 million: The lawsuit against The Los Angeles Times for allegedly failing to pay rent at its printing plant.

72%: The year-over-year percentage growth of YouTube views on The New York Times’ Cooking account in 2024.

What we’ve covered

Why keyword data is more telling than CTRs for publishers trying to measure Google’s AI Overviews’ impact

• Measuring the impact of Google’s AI Overviews on publishers’ search referral traffic hasn’t been straightforward via click-through data — but keyword data can help.
• Nearly 19 million keywords now feature AI Overviews — that’s up 91% from six months ago, according to Semrush data. 

Read more about how publishers and analytics companies are using keywords to measure the impact of Google’s AI Overviews here.

Publishers are “sort of” prioritizing experimenting with Google’s Privacy Sandbox

• Some publishing execs say that Privacy Sandbox developments have decelerated in the past 12 months given Google’s shifts in priorities.
• Many are awaiting clarification from Google over its “third-party cookie consent box” before they invest further.

Learn more about Google’s latest Privacy Sandbox report here.

BuzzFeed is investing $10 million in BF Island, but how does that compare with other social platforms’ launch costs? 

• BuzzFeed’s CEO said the company will invest $10 million of resources into BF Island, a social platform BuzzFeed is building.
• To put that $10 million into context, let’s look at what it cost to launch other social platforms like Bluesky and Instagram.

Read more about BuzzFeed’s social media ambitions here.

Creators are using Substack’s live video co-hosting features to grow their audiences and subscribers

• A month since Substack enabled video posts, creators are happy with what they’re seeing so far.
• 82% of Substack’s 250 highest-earning creators had published audio and video to their Substacks.

Read more about how creators are boosting their Substack businesses with videos here.

What we’re reading

The Independent debuts AI-created news briefings with Google

The Independent has launched a news service that uses AI to create summarized versions of articles, using Google’s AI model Gemini. The platform, called Bulletin, will publish bullet point briefings for readers but reviewed and checked by journalists.

Italian newspaper creates first AI-generated issue

Italian newspaper Il Foglio says it has created the world’s first issue generated entirely using AI, Gizmodo reported. Journalists asked questions to a chatbot and read the answers before inserting them, as part of a test to see how AI could work in a newsroom, the paper’s editor said.

How Business Insider’s new EIC Jamie Heller is working to grow subscriptions

Heller, who comes from The Wall Street Journal, has her sights set on growing the publication’s subscriber base, Status reported. Heller has pushed the newsroom to focus on more original reporting, business and tech stories and a more serious tone.

Alden newspapers challenge tech companies’ request to legally train their AI models on public data

Several newspapers owned by Alden Global Capital ran online editorials pushing back against OpenAI and Google asking the government to let them legally train their AI models on publicly available data, Axios reported. Alden and The New York Times are some of the few news media companies that have chosen to sue AI companies for copyright infringement.

Journalists push back on Outside magazine’s new direction

Longtime contributors and former employees at Outside magazine are protesting the company’s new direction, Denver Business Journal reported. A letter to Outside’s CEO signed by 34 people who asked to have their names removed from the masthead in protest of layoffs and being told to avoid political and investigative journalism.