The Dispatch Buys SCOTUSblog in First of Several Planned Acquisitions
Dispatch Media said Wednesday it bought legal publication SCOTUSblog for an undisclosed sum, funded by the company’s cash flow. The site will continue as is providing free content, and Dispatch will build out premium paid products.
The new addition should help bring in just under $1 million in revenue over the next 12 months. The blog had been underinvesting in itself for years and Dispatch bought it as a forward valuation rather than a backwards one, Mike Rothman, president of Dispatch, told AMO.
[Read AMO’s Take below.]
SCOTUSblog cofounder Amy Howe joins The Dispatch team along with a few others. Her cofounder and husband Tom Goldstein, who according to Politico was indicted this year in a multimillion-dollar scheme to evade federal income taxes and use money from his law firm to cover gambling debts, resigned prior to the deal and is no longer associated with the brand.
As part of the acquisition, The Dispatch will invest in the brand, including hiring additional staff, to ensure that SCOTUSblog, which was founded in 2002, remains “the go-to authority on the Supreme Court.”
The five-year Dispatch already covers the Supreme Court with Sarah Isgur running the Advisory Opinions podcast. This deal gives The Dispatch access to SCOTUSblog’s existing professional audience of lawyers and law students. The acquisition allows The Dispatch to add expert legal commentary and create new revenue streams through specialized products targeting legal professionals.
Among the future products planned surrounding the acquisition are the leveraging of the blog’s decades of content; premium in-depth analysis around certain cases relevant to a professional audience; and having Isgur and Howe join the speaking circuit for organizations seeking more depth on topics. Scotusblog has “tens of thousands of subscribers,” and more than half a million followers each on TikTok and X.
“We’ll already be able to monetize this in the very, very short term, through advertising, sponsorship,” Rothman said. “There’s plenty of opportunities that are pretty significant, given that the audience that we’re reaching [are] serious people, executives at big law firms.”
The Dispatch will also build more professional products for law firms, like annual certification programs in all 50 states.
The Dispatch has added about 70,000 free subscribers in the past three weeks to reach 670,000 with 45,000 paying subscribers. AMO previously reported that The Dispatch expects to expand into four to five new verticals, such as conservationism and faith, with a focus on getting professionals to pay for their work. Revenue was $5 million in 2024 and is projected to reach $10 million for 2025, with 85% coming from memberships, 10% from sponsorships and the remainder from new membership products and licensing.
AMO’s Take
By: Jacob Cohen Donnelly
The chance to take over a well regarded brand like SCOTUSblog doesn’t come everyday, so taking advantage of an opportunity like this is just smart—especially when you consider that the brand is woefully undermonetized.
The year one projections of $1 million in revenue could very well be low considering the quality of the audience and the number of potential sponsors. Legal Geek created a map in 2023 of ~250 legal tech startups. Each of these could be potential advertisers based purely on the contextual nature of the content.
Then there’s the copyright. Up until this deal was closed, all SCOTUSblog content was published under a Creative Commons license. Amy Howe said in a blog post that, “That license remains in effect for past content, and those uses will continue to be honored. Going forward, however, all SCOTUSblog content falls under The Dispatch’s copyright. Any future use will require permission from The Dispatch.” With the quality of the reporting, I suspect there could be a legitimate content licensing business—especially since a lawyer is the last person that wants to be on the receiving end of a copyright infringement suit.
I think the big question is how it intends on monetizing this content outside of advertising. The Dispatch is very heavily dependent on membership revenue and the team is already talking about premium products targeting lawyers. However, with all the content remaining free, where does the subscription come from?
One possible idea could be building a proprietary LLM which uses all of SCOTUSblog’s content going back to early 2002 and giving folks the ability to chat based on that. If there are other public sources of legal information, perhaps this could become a “go-to” research tool. Or, this goes back to the licensing conversation where other legal-first LLMs will reach out to get access to the blog’s content.
Whatever the case, this deal could make a lot of sense. The brand is strong and the quality of the audience is there. The question is, ultimately, can it figure out a model that makes sense? $1 million in ad revenue is nice, but with 85% of the business tied to memberships, the inability to get a paid product going would be a disappointment.
