Athletic, Axios talking merger?

The Athletic has more than a million subscribers who have opened their wallets for their subscriptions.

The Times is very eager to grow its digital subscribers across its products.

Those million + subscribers -- who were willing to pay something -- have value.

There aren't too many online ventures that have been able to get that many people to actually fork over money for their product.

The Athletic might be a very good fit for the Times, which would love the paying subscribers on the path of its current strategy. The Times might have ideas about how it could bundle or cross promote a sports news product with other specialized products. And depending on what they are seeing, they might think they can bring economies of scale with their operations that could squeeze some costs out.

I'm sure the sticking point is valuation. The Athletic's last capital raise was at a very high valuation that it is going to be hard to even match, let alone get significantly more the way it was being reported when they hired LionTree to find a buyer.

The Athletic probably isn't worth anything near what they are trying to get. But the people on here acting like it is worthless or hasn't accomplished something notable by growing to that many paying subscribers are clueless. At a more modest price, there would be people lined up to buy what they have built.

 

For sure. I'm skeptical too. Have been all along. And by all accounts they aren't bringing in enough revenue to create profitability. Which is probably why we've had more conversations on this thread about how some of us think their editorial has dropped off in spots... they seem to be trying to figure out what to concentrate on, what to save money on. Including tightening up on salaries relative to what they were paying to poach talent at first according to that story someone linked to.

But even with that, that is a lot of people paying something to subscribe. If you are one of the big media companies, which are always looking at acquisitions, there aren't too many possible targets that bring that to the table. So then the questions become: 1) Can we make it profitable, and 2) Can we get it at a more reasonable price. The bubble that brought the Athletic's valuation so high on its last capital raise may be popping in slow motion right now. So they may have missed their window of opportunity to get the kind of payday they are talking about. The time was probably a year ago. But what they have built does have value.

 

Yeah, everything about this conversation is moot if they don't really have the number of subscribers we all have been working with or their renewal rates aren't good.