Dow Jones, Financial Times Build Out Lucrative B2B Businesses
By: Christiana Sciaudone
Dow Jones and the Financial Times plan to add to their stable of B2B publications in 2025 in an effort to keep readers—and their P&L—happy.
The owner of The Wall Street Journal closed five acquisitions over the past three years as part of its initiative to build verticals surrounding business news, wealth and investing, energy and risk and compliance. Last year, the Financial Times acquired a majority stake in Endpoints, a biopharmaceutical industry publication, adding a new industry to its FT Specialist division.
The idea of building out B2B and subscription-first businesses is becoming increasingly attractive as monetizing consumer media becomes more difficult amid a very competitive landscape. Publishers are moving more toward subscriptions for recurring revenue, and working to provide information and data that can’t be found anywhere else.
“I look for industries which are complex, they are competitive, ideally regulated, they’re in growing sectors, and also where they are prepared to pay for information,” Matt Fottrell, vice president of Financial Times US and managing director of FT Specialist, told AMO. His next target, he’s hoping, will be in the energy industry.
They may be competing against Dow Jones in seeking out an energy publication or data intelligence company.
The News Corp-owned company is looking to build out each vertical with news, data, analytics and events. With its recent acquisition of WorldECR, a provider of export control and trade sanctions news, Dow Jones’s risk and compliance segment has become the first of their four verticals with those four offerings. That leaves business news, wealth and investing and energy to add to.
For the most recently reported quarter, Dow Jones said growth for the division, which includes Barron’s and The Wall Street Journal, “continued to be underpinned by robust performance in its professional information business, where revenue increased 8%, driven by growth of 16% at Risk & Compliance and 11% at Dow Jones Energy.”
Proprietary Information at Dow Jones
For Dow Jones, its focus has been providing proprietary data and content that only it can offer.
“Are we developing insights that no one else has? Are we writing journalism that nobody else has? You know, all of that feeds value,” Emma O’Brian, senior vice president of strategy, told AMO.
Chief Executive Officer Almar Latour, who joined in 2020, has made B2B a priority for the company. Part of that is a reaction to shrinking ad revenue: in 2014, ads represented 38% of revenue—that was down to 15% for the most recently reported quarter.
“There’s a responsibility for us to, in order to support our core journalism and our really important coverage and investigative journalism, and to continue to have a robust presence … we have a responsibility to find other revenue streams,” O’Brian said. “Part of that strategy is increasing our recurring revenue, which is in subscriptions, which are growing.”
Dow Jones is looking for companies with strong financials as well as synergies to reduce costs and share services.
“When we’re looking at targets, we’re looking for, what do they have that’s proprietary, and how can we integrate that into our overall thesis?” said O’Brian, who moved into her current role in July. “As strategy continues to develop, and as my team continues to grow, we want to stick our necks out more in some areas… We have big growth ambitions.”
FT Specialist
The FT will continue investing in its 19 brands which cover 10 audience groups and more than 430,000 paying subscribers around the world, as well as adding new products and areas like energy. Current B2B areas covered include U.S. corporate boards, fund management professionals and sustainable finance professionals. Brands include AssetAllocator, BoardIQ and Ignites.
“That transition from carbon-based to renewables, it’s interesting, it’s really complex, it’s politically charged,” Fottrell said. “That’s fascinating for us, and I would really like to do something there.”
Fottrell admits the FT has become “quite fussy” with what it’s willing to buy after he personally worked on six of them. And the outlook is tough.
“Increasingly some of the moves in M&A, it is hyper competitive, and there’s a lot of PE money out there,” Fottrell said.
Before it bought Endpoints, the biopharma publication had been a predominantly ads and events-based business and some subscription growth. The FT bought in to accelerate that. Initially, subscriptions for individuals cost $220 and $1,000 for corporates—with companies with tens or tens of thousands of employees paying the exact same amount. With the FT at the helm, individual subscriptions jumped to $400 and corporates are now custom-curated depending on each company’s need.
After these changes, about 18 months after acquisition, subscriptions became the number one revenue source, where previously they had been third.
“It helps us build a good, sustainable business,” one that is also renewable, Fottrell said. “Our business is all about trust and specialist journalism is as much about trust, they are often taking big decisions, looking at policies based on our journalism, and it has to be that quality, too.”
While B2B and niche journalism isn’t always “sexy” for some journalists, for the FT it’s a place to build important connections, do important work and have a financially stable and secure business.
