News Corporation reported strong Q2 results, with revenue up 6% to $2.4B and adjusted EPS of $0.40. Growth was driven by Dow Jones and Digital Real Estate, and management touted the value of its premium content for AI licensing, expecting significant payouts from Anthropic and other partnerships. Realtor.com is gaining audience share and expanding its lead over competitors. Revenue grew 6% to $2.4B led by Dow Jones (+8%) and Digital Real Estate (+8%), with total segment EBITDA up 9%.
News Corporation reported strong Q2 results, with revenue up 6% to $2.4B and adjusted EPS of $0.40. Growth was driven by Dow Jones and Digital Real Estate, and management touted the value of its premium content for AI licensing, expecting significant payouts from Anthropic and other partnerships. Realtor.com is gaining audience share and expanding its lead over competitors. Revenue grew 6% to $2.4B led by Dow Jones (+8%) and Digital Real Estate (+8%), with total segment EBITDA up 9%.
Management emphasized that AI models need real-time, premium content and that News Corp's proprietary content is valuable, with Anthropic already set to pay $1.5 billion for pirated books and new AI partnerships (e.g., expanded Bloomberg deal) expected to generate additional…
Management expressed strong optimism about business momentum, AI monetization, and future growth, repeatedly citing 'auspicious' prospects and 'patently positive' signs for the second half.
Dow Jones B2B revenue grows 12%, with risk & compliance up 20%. Management expressed strong optimism about business momentum, AI monetization, and future growth, repeatedly citing 'auspicious' prospects and 'patently positive' signs for the second half.
Realtor.com grew 10% and gained audience share, with engagement metrics over 3x homes.com and 2x Redfin.
Management emphasized that AI models need real-time, premium content and that News Corp's proprietary content is valuable, with Anthropic already set to pay $1.5 billion for pirated books and new AI partnerships (e.g., expanded Bloomberg deal) expected to generate additional revenues. They believe the market misunderstands AI's impact on their business, viewing it as a moat-protected opportunity r
Dow Jones B2B revenue grows 12%, with risk & compliance up 20%. Management expressed strong optimism about business momentum, AI monetization, and future growth, repeatedly citing 'auspicious' prospects and 'patently positive' signs for the second half.
Total capex is expected to be up moderately this year, while Dow Jones capex specifically will be modestly down. Despite higher investment, the company expects strong free cash flow growth.
Management expressed strong optimism about business momentum, AI monetization, and future growth, repeatedly citing 'auspicious' prospects and 'patently positive' signs for the second half.
“Anthropic has already agreed to pay $1.5 billion for using pirated books. We and our authors at HarperCollins naturally expect to receive our fair share of that payout starting later this calendar year.”
“We are establishing new AI partnerships, which we expect to generate additional revenues, including an expanded deal with Bloomberg for AI rights for our peerless Dow Jones content.”
“We have gained audience share now up to 29%. And when you look at our visits, we have three times the number of visits as homes.com, two times the number of visits as Redfin.”
“AI is retrospective and synthesizes generic content, sometimes imperfectly, but is past tense, often past imperfect. We have contemporary creative proprietary content, which is only accessed if AI companies pay us.”
Partnership to bring Polymarket data to WSJ and other Dow Jones publications. The ticker may be incorrect but this is the best available match for Polymarket.
“We recently announced a partnership with Polymarket that will selectively bring data to users across the Wall Street Journal, Barron's, MarketWatch and Investors Business Daily.”
… against a backdrop replete with uncertainty and volatility. On the consumer side, digital volumes increased 12% to over 6 million subscriptions, led by our continued push into enterprise partnerships, embedding our content in corporate work streams, while the Dow Jones team is intensely focused on increasing yield and conscious of the responsibility to deliver reliable news at a moment when much journalism is mere activism. We recently announced a partnership with Polymarket that will selectively bring data to users across the Wall Street Journal, Barron's, MarketWatch and Investors Business Daily. Fresh investment in the Wall Street Journal's influential opinion pages saw the launch of Free Expression, an expansion of the vertical that introduced fresh writers to the editorial board's august audience. We are establishing new AI partnerships, which we expect to generate additional revenues, including an expanded deal with Bloomberg for AI rights for our peerless Dow Jones content. We also bolstered Factiva's GenAI capabilities with expanded licensing rights from more than 8,000 premium news and business information sources. To highlight the vast potential of Dow Jones, we will be …
Anthropic has settled for $1.5B; News Corp expects a substantial payout, signaling a new licensing revenue stream for content holders.
… We also note that Moody's, which only recently upgraded our rating, has put our outlook on positive, reflecting the sturdiness of our balance sheet and our strong operating performance. Speaking of the future, it is clear that expectations of AI's impact are evolving and that the more perceptive players have come to realise that provenance is paramount and that our proprietary content is valuable. Let us be clear. Anthropic has already agreed to pay $1.5 billion for using pirated books. We and our authors at HarperCollins naturally expect to receive our fair share of that payout starting later this calendar year. What is the point of acquiring cutting-edge semiconductors if they are being deployed to repurpose gormless, factless, feckless content sets? What is the point of spending billions on energy generation when that energy is powering the prosaic, not the profound? We do believe an increasing number of insightful AI creators understand this content contradiction and will indeed pay a premium for our premium content. AI companies must provide meaningful services with reliable, relevant, contemporary information, not biased bilge or retrospective rubbish. Ignoring the obvious …
Deepening partnership with the NAR to launch new products, strengthening Realtor.com's position. NAR is an industry association, not a public company.
“The new platform, which leverages our partnership with the National Association of Realtors and the MLSs, enhances the home search experience...”
Deepening partnership with OpenAI mutually enhances products, validating the value of News Corp's content.
“we have a partnership with OpenAI whose expertise will enhance our editorial, business and real estate products, while our editorial will enhance OpenAI products.”
Hey, thank you. Robert, I think we've seen this week the market react to AI or the perception of AI and what that is going to mean for companies that operate in the business services or data spaces. And it'd be great to kind of get your expanded thoughts on this reaction and what you view as reasonable to worry about versus maybe what the market is potentially overweighing or maybe missing here. Thank you.
David, a very salient question. There is a fundamental misconception about the impact of AI on news corporation. AI is retrospective and synthesizes generic content, sometimes imperfectly, but is past tense, often past imperfect. We have contemporary creative proprietary content, which is only accessed if AI companies pay us our woo or sue strategy. And we've been consciously building a moat. And it is a moat with saltwater crocodiles, with sharks and an even more dangerous species, lawyers. More importantly, the moat separates commodity content from our premium prescient IP. Now, let's be clear, Anthropic is already set to pay out $1.5 billion for inappropriate use of pirated books, and we and our authors will get a large chunk of that money later this year. And we have a partnership with OpenAI whose expertise will enhance our editorial, business and real estate products, while our editorial will enhance OpenAI products. Now, we're not complacent. We're certainly not naive or digital dilettantes. But we are absolutely confident about our ability to create compelling premium content and experiences in an age in which many AI companies will be recycling rubbish. I mean, it is worth remembering that AI models need data. Otherwise, they are just lines of inert code. They need real time, real world data. And that's what we produce every single minute of every single day. Without compelling content, these AI operators are not omnipotent. They are not unique. They are eunuchs.
Management downplays homes.com as a competitive threat, suggesting CoStar's heavy investment is not yielding expected results.
Realtor.com's audience share has increased to 29% of all portal visits, triple that of homes.com and double that of Redfin, as its engagement metrics continue to improve. — Even as CoStar pours money into homes.com, Realtor.com is gaining share and engagement, suggesting CoStar's strategy is not benefiting its competitive position.
… double-digit gains. The quarter also benefited from gains in audience share and continued expansion across realtor.com's adjacencies. We firmly established our position as the leading publisher of residential real estate news and are striving to expand unique features that support sellers, buyers and realtors. Realtor.com's share of visits among the real estate portals continued to grow in the second quarter based on ComSchool, while unique visits per user for the same period continued to surpass the industry at 4.8 times, almost double that of homes.com and far superior to Zillow. In Australia, revenue growth at REA of 7% benefited from continued double-digit yield growth and an improvement in listing volumes in Sydney and Melbourne, coupled with strong growth in financial services. Competition is bringing out the best in REA, which posted record audience numbers in November with unique users of over 13 million, an increase of 9% versus prior year. The team in Australia is savvily adopting AI applications that enhance the service for our customers and prove that AI is certainly more friend than foe. No one wants housing hallucinations. HarperCollins revenues grew a healthy 6%, …
Realtor.com's audience share has increased to 29% of all portal visits, triple that of homes.com and double that of Redfin, as its engagement metrics continue to improve. — Even as CoStar pours money into homes.com, Realtor.com is gaining share and engagement, suggesting CoStar's strategy is not benefiting its competitive position.
Great. Thank you. Robert, just a two-part question for you. I always like to ask you, has anything changed in your mind about investors' thoughts and wishes that you guys would help simplify your company here? You seem like you're doing a lot better fundamentally across the businesses here, but Anything change in your mind to help simplify the company any further here? And my added question I wanted to ask you was on homes.com out there out in the marketplace versus realtor.com, you're doing quite well here recently with the revenue growth. At realtor.com, roughly 10% type growth on the revenues there. Is homes.com in the marketplace concerning you all, given all the amount of money that…
Yeah, if I could just add to that, maybe some details on that. I mean, as Robert said in his remarks, I mean, we're really pleased with the engagement that we have seen on Realtor.com. We have the highest engagement across all of the portals with five visits per unique user. We have gained audience share now up to 29%. And when you look at Our visits, we have three times the number of visits as homes.com, two times the number of visits as Redfin. And we've had the fastest revenue growth here in this last couple of quarters that we've seen in the last four years. And that's without the property market being meaningfully better. And we do know that the property market will recover. And so there's a very long, successful runway here for realtors.