Fox Corp’s Recipe For Life After Lamestream Media Has It On A Rally For the Ages
The media industry has been foretelling its own death, eulogizing the “mainstream media” amid industry-wide layoffs, “cratering” ad revenues, and an increasingly worrying dearth of local media coverage. Simple explanations fault the pandemic or the monopolistic tech class, but there’s a simpler explanation — people don’t want to listen to the lamestream media. And while media giants stood by their authenticity and reliability, one of the world’s largest media companies took note.
No lames allowed: While Warner Bros. Discovery’s CNN and Comcast’s MSNBC have been registering significant declines in TV viewership, Fox Corp has managed to buck the trend with a wide array of political, sports, and streaming programming. In its latest quarterly report, revenues were up more than 20% year-over-year — while profits increased an even more astounding 242%. And in the coming quarter, it has a chance to keep that winning streak going, whether there’s an election or not.
- In its latest report, Fox said its advertising earnings rose 21% thanks to “higher political advertising revenues,” stronger digital growth, and favorable sports and news ratings.
- The company could continue to see a boom in ad revenues as Fox sold more than $800M in advertising for the Super Bowl, which boasted a record 127M viewers this year.
Casual Fare
Although Fox boasts a cult following for its fiery political entertainment on Fox News, diversification has been a critical ingredient in Fox’s growth. The corporation’s more casual fare has helped it weather more volatile political advertising flows, carving out a future for itself — and appealing to advertisers.
- The company televises NFL, MLB, and college basketball and football on its various networks — viewership of all of these sports properties is up.
- In addition, Fox is expected to generate over $1B of its revenue in FY 2025 from its free ad-supported streaming platform, Tubi, which now has nearly 100M members.
Embracing the future: Whereas other media businesses have tried and failed, Fox’s various ventures and acquisitions have created a robust pipeline of opportunities for a world embracing entertainment and creators over publications and broadcast news. In 2019, ahead of other media firms, it embraced sports betting. By 2022, it launched an in-house TV studio, looking to add original content to its pipeline. And this past week, it acquired Red Seat Ventures, looking to diversify into podcasting. Their prescription for how legacy media can survive and thrive could provide clues to competitors — but for now, their secret sauce is investors’ gain. is up 83% over the past year and still feels cheap at 11x price-to-earnings.
