Politico Tops HuffPo Revenue Numbers and Books a Profit
By Don | January 5, 2010
The newspaper business has taken a severe beating in the last few years as they watched readers defect to the internet but Politico showed that a combining print and online news can be profitable.
From PaidContent.org
The juggernaut called Politico keeps on rolling, nevermind the recession, thank you. And some changes in company structure may hint at what could come next for it. The site and print paper, started in January 2007 by Allbritton Communications (ACC), has in two years grown to be a $20 million operation, according to paidContent figures, and finish calendar 2009 with operating profits of about a million or more. Even though Allbritton is a family-owned company and private, its debt structure and large number of shareholders means it has to file quarterly and annually with SEC, but this is the first—and last—time (reason explained below) it has broken out Politico numbers separately. The complete numbers below on its revenues and operating profits/losses from the late 2009 10-K SEC filing by Allbritton (with lots of extra calculations to deduce other numbers):
So if you were to map out revenues for full calendar year 2009, it will cross $20 million, which makes it higher than the estimated/reported HuffingtonPost revenues for 2009 of $15-17 million plus. And they owe a lot to its print edition for that—as the numbers below in the chart show that well over a majority comes from it—as well as the turbulent and eventful political year where health care and other issues dominated, and hence increased issue-oriented advertising demand. The dip in Politico’s operating profit in its fiscal Q409 is explained by lack of political advertising in the quarter, compared to the prior year when Presidential elections were on.
In the past newspapers would have scoffed at an operation that netted only a million dollars but at a time when most papers are losing money Politico may serve as a model of what newspapers and journalism wiill need to emulate in order to survive.
Post #2532
1 Comment | Post a Comment
January 6 at 1:03 pm | #1 | Link
The article fails to point out that the democrat funded Huffington Post’s revenue is mostly from politically friendly democrats donating money in exchange for friendly, biased coverage and for guarantee’s of smears, lies, and attacks on targeted republicans.
The Huffington Post is nothing more than a democrat funded rag and haven for liberal Yellow Journalism while Politico is actually journalism with professional, neutral reporting.