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Fighting for journalism and profitable news media
Economist revenue growth as Rothschild stake up for sale
And we start tracking all the AI copyright legal judgments coming out and look inside a burgeoning sports news business
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Good morning from the team at Press Gazette on Wednesday, 3 December. Today’s newsletter is supported by PA Media - which has launched a new vertical video feed.
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🏅 Essentially Sports is a free news website which has grown from hobby to an $8m turnover business in the space of a decade.
The site has followed a similar trajectory of success to UK-based culture website Far Out.
Both have profited from super-serving fandom with relevant content.
Essentially Sports exploded in popularity at the same time that Google launched its Discover recommended content feed on smartphones in 2019.
Discover’s algorithm learns quickly what content areas users are interested in and serves them more of it, making it a great distribution platform for sites like Essentially Sports and Far Out which deeply mine their niches.
🪙 Today we also report on another great set of financial results for The Economist.
In a market where many newsbrands are pedalling incredibly hard just to stand still, the finance and politics title reported revenue up 7% year on year to £170m and profit before tax up 28% to £19.7m in the six months to 30 September.
The Economist has yet to strike any licensing deals with LLMs and, while active on social media, has a business model firmly based on readers subscribing and spending time with its own website, app and magazine.
The figures come as Lynn Forester de Rothschild puts her 27% stake in the business up for sale.
The Economist made record revenue of £369m in the year to 31 March, proving that in a world of increasingly shrill media voices there is good money to be made by focusing on quality writing, analysis and evidence-based reporting.
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⚖️ And as the various legal battles between publishers and AI companies start resulting in judgments, we’ve started a new page tracking the results.
So far the score is 2-1 to publishers with at least 17 legal actions in the works.
The latest case, brought by 14 major publishers against Cohere, looks set to proceed to trial after a US judge ruled there was a case to argue about unauthorised copying of work.
From our sponsor
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PA Media has launched a vertical video feed.