Growing subscription revenue at News Corp’s Dow Jones business news division is offsetting falling advertising and circulation revenue from its tabloid news titles.
Overall, News Corp reported total revenue up 1% to $2.01bn in the three months to the end of March 2025 and profit (EBITDA) of $290m (up 12% year on year).
Dow Jones is News Corp’s highest-earning division with total revenue of $575m in the quarter, up 6% year on year.
Within Dow Jones, the Wall Street Journal grew its digital subscriptions by 5% to 3.9 million and total subscriptions for the title rose 3% to 4.3 million.
Barron’s Group grew digital subscriptions by 12% to 1.4 million.
Dow Jones now has total consumer digital subscriptions of 5.5 million with a further 600,000 print subscribers, meaning it crossed 6 million overall for the first time.
News Corp said a customer dispute had impacted revenue from its Factiva news database business (also part of Dow Jones).
PR services company Cision is involved in a bitter legal battle with News Corp over its bid to end a $173m eight-year deal to distribute Factiva content.
Times titles grow digital subscriptions
Growing Times and Sunday Times digital subscriber numbers were a rare bright spot in the News Media division, which also includes The Sun, New York Post and News Corp’s network of Australian newsbrands.
Digital subscribers for The Times, Sunday Times and Times Literary Supplement totalled 629,000 as of 31 March (up 8% year on year).
Digital subscribers at News Corp Australia grew 3% to 1,148,000.
But overall news media revenue fell 8% to $514m in the quarter hurt by falling advertising and print circulation revenue.
The report singled out falling digital advertising revenue at The Sun as an issue. The title has seen a collapse in website traffic from 126 million global monthly unique users in March 2024 to 74 million, the report said.
The New York Post has seen a similar level of decline from 125 million unique users a year earlier to 85 million in March 2025, News Corp said.
In the past year many free news websites have been particularly hit by Google algorithm changes including its core updates, helpful content update and site reputation abuse (relating to e-commerce and coupons pages) as well as Facebook’s deprioritisation of news link posts.
News Corp’s third quarter 2025 earnings release in full.
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