Weekly Digest: Axios Sale, Czech Dennik N Hitting Profitability

Axios has announced its sale to Cox Enterprises for $525 million (€514 million). The US digital media company, which was founded five years ago by former Politico journalists, has gained prominence thanks to its focus on a quality audience, including policymakers and business leaders.

Cox Enterprises was created in the late 19th century as a media company, now best known for its cable and broadband business. The company has previously been Axios’ major investor. Axios’ co-founders Jim VandeHei, Roy Schwartz and Mike Allen will keep their leadership roles.

As The New York Times notes, “the deal offers a rare flicker of hope for the digital publishing sector, which has been fraught with difficulty for investors and operators over the last decade”. Many other companies in the industry have had financial struggles “as investors have cooled on digital advertising, a market dominated by tech giants like Google, Meta and Amazon”,

As Vox’s Peter Kafka writes, part of Axios’ success owes to the fact that it reaches an influential audience, which tech giants are interested in reaching, thus spending generously on ads. Also, Axios has built a strong business model for local news; the acquisition by Cox Enterprises will most likely help the publisher expand its network of local newsletters. 

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News Corp, a media and publishing giant owned by the Murdoch family, has almost doubled its profits. For the 2021/22 financial year, the company’s profits reached $760 million (€744 million), a record number.

The revenue increased by 11% to $10.4 billion (€10.18 billion) year-over-year. The company has attributed the success to its digital transformation and recent acquisitions. Both digital advertising revenue and news subscriptions grew in the past year. 

“The strong performance in fiscal 2022 was a marked contrast to 2020, when the company booked a $1bn loss in three months to March due to a collapse in advertising revenue and pay-television subscriptions”, Financial Times notes.

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Denník N, one of the biggest digital news publishers in Central Europe, announced its Czech version Deník N reached profitability in the first part of 2022 for the first time since its launch in 2018.

Denník N was founded in 2014 an independent Slovak daily newspaper, focusing particularly on long-form journalism and betting on reader revenue. It has since added a Czech publication and recently launched a Hungarian one.

“Deník N achieved an accounting profit of almost one million [Czech] crowns [€40,800] in the first half of the year”, the outlet’s publisher Ján Simkani? announced.

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