Magazine publishing nowadays is generally either a story of decline or one of pedalling ever faster to stand still.
With revenue flat year on year, UK consumer magazines giant Immediate Media could be said to fall in the latter camp.
But CEO Sean Cornwell points to growing profitability as new higher higher-margin digital income streams replace lost print revenue.
Advertising revenue going to UK magazine brands (in print and online) fell 7% in 2024. And printed magazine sale are falling across the industry at around 10% year on year in the UK.
But Immediate Media has grown its adjusted profit figure from £28.4m since 2022 to around £36m last year helped by new revenue streams like podcasts, Apple News/Readly and digital subscriptions.
Cornwell, who has been in post for just over four years, told Press Gazette why he feels the business is well placed to survive and even ride the current wave of AI disruption hitting publishers.
Immediate’s biggest magazine brands, Good Food and Radio Times, are both in Press Gazette’s top-50 ranking of UK websites driven by journalistic content with a monthly UK audience of 12.6 million and 7.5 million respectively according to Ipsos iris.
Traffic to those sites is currently stable, if not slightly up year on year. But what does Cornwell make of industry fears that AI-enhanced search could reduce clicks to publisher websites from Google to zero in the next few years?
“Over the last year we have asked what would be the impact, and what would we do if we lost 50% of Google traffic tomorrow. If you’re not doing those kinds of exercises and thinking it through, you’re not really doing your job.”
Has Google AI Overviews already impacted Immediate Media traffic?
“Yes. We’re no different to everyone else – in certain verticals and particularly with evergreen content.”
But Cornwell is not one to complain or blame when it comes to digital disruption.
He said: “The lesson of the last 20 years is you’ve got to engage and lean in with this stuff and these challenges. You can’t sit on the side, moan and hope it goes away, because that’s the path of failure…
“An AI engine can’t be sat in different places, picking up on news as it happens. That creation needs to be rewarded and funded. So it will change and a new equilibrium will be formed, but it’s going to be disruptive.”
The growth of digital subscriptions at Immediate Media, which overtook print last year and now account for 745,000 out of a total of 1.3 million subscribers, leave the business better placed to weather digital disruption.
Cornwell said: “Four years ago, we made a very deliberate pivot towards digital subscriptions. We effectively transformed from a business which was very print heavy with very large online audiences, monetised through advertising, mostly data commerce, to a business which is digital subscriptions first.”
The digital subs total is all individual subscribers and excludes those accessing magazines via all-you-can-read subscriptions to services like Apple News and Readly (which represent a separate seven-figure income stream). It includes subscriptions to the Radio Times and Good Food apps, Nutracheck [the nutrition and calorie tracking app bought by Immediate in November 2022] and around 7,000 podcast subscriptions.
Biggest brand Radio Times in long-term print decline but ‘still very significant’
With print circulation of 330,000 (and a further 11,000 digital edition sales) Radio Times remains the biggest revenue driver for Immediate Media. But with circulation falling 10% year on year (print sales have halved over the last ten years) and so many other ways to access the sort of information it provides, won’t it be obsolete soon?
“Traditionally, with Immediate Media, Radio Times was always the huge thing, and everything else was still meaningful and quite significant, but not near the scale of the Radio Times. We now have a more balanced portfolio.
“So Radio Times is still our largest business, but our second and third largest businesses are Good Food and Nutracheck. They’re both heavily digital.
“Radio Times is still majority print in terms of its profitability, but we have a dotcom business which does reasonably well, and last year we launched the Radio Times app. It’s still in early stages but we’ve got about 25,000 subscribers.
“We are a more balanced business than we were a few years ago, but the Radio Times is still very important and very significant, and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.
“I think if we have this conversation in ten years, Radio Times will still be big and significant,” he added noting that the Christmas print edition still gets nearly one million sales.
Has all this AI stuff been a bit overblown?
The propensity for LLMs to hallucinate is a fundamental flaw that has limited the usefulness of the technology when it comes to a businesses like journalism with a low tolerance for inaccuracy. Does Cornwell think there is a chance the technology has been overblown?
“If anything, I worry about the reverse, that actually in two, three years, the capabilities of these models is far beyond anything that we are kind of thinking about and can really appreciate and comprehend.”
Cornwell has made more widespread AI adoption amongst staff a key target for the business, with 80% now saying they are happy and confident using AI tools. Internally this has been pushed through training programmes and hackathons (where new products and tools are developed).
Explaining how AI has been adopted in editorial workflows and content creation, he said: “We’ve developed this tool internally, which is continuously evolving, but essentially what it does is in a walled garden environment, using the whole archive of content that we own and have created over the years, our writers and editors can get first drafts of new pieces, and then they can also get looks for house style and those kinds of things as well.
“So it’s accelerating the content creation and actually cutting several hours spent researching a piece.” But he emphasises that the final stage of content creation “where the magic happens” remains in the hands of human journalists.
From digital-first to ‘platform agnostic’
Cornwell said Youtube’s advertising revenue split with publishers is “not enough on its own” but added: “When you hit scale on Youtube, it unlocks new revenue tiers, new partnership tiers and your ability to monetise it yourself and through Google.”
Native advertising (or content partnerships) has been a growing revenue segment for Immediate and when these editorially-led marketing campaigns are run on platforms like Youtube, publishers keep all the revenue because they are directly sold to brands.
Overall, Immediate actually grew digital advertising revenue by 5% in 2024 (versus a 5% digital advertising decline across the UK magazines sector). Like Dotdash Meredith in the US, Immediate Media offers advertisers cookie-less targeting of online adverts based on reader interests, helped by the fact the subjects it covers such as food, TV, cars and gardens help inform audience buying decisions.
Cornwell said: “The real thing about video is increasing audiences. Audiences, particularly the younger you go, that’s how they want their content served to them…
“So we no longer think about content creators as they’re writing an article, and this person over here is going to do a podcast, and this person over there is going to create a video. More often than not, now we try and start with video, and actually then it’s one piece. It could be an interview with a chef, or a series on a particular plant [for Gardeners’ World Magazine] and how to grow it. You shoot the video in different ways. A podcast comes out of it, an article comes out of it for the web and for print….
“It all starts with the premise that you’ve got to give your audiences and your users what they want, when they want it, how they want it, where they want it. So you’ve got to be totally platform agnostic.”
‘Talent is the big thing’
This all requires multi-skilled journalists and content creators who can do far more than just write an article or shoot a video. And for Cornwell, nurturing in-house human talent is the company’s best defence against AI.
“Talent is the big thing, because AI can’t replicate talent. So whether that’s internal personalities or whether that’s partnering with external talent. In the last year, we’ve gone very hard on that, and it’s a big strategic priority for us, because audiences increasingly follow individual talent, particularly the younger demographics, as opposed to brands…
“We want to be renowned as a great place for up and coming talent to come and work and build their brand and build their reputation.”
This even extends to Goalhanger-style revenue share models on podcasts with the likes of high-profile chefs Clare Thompson and John Torode: “This is a model that we believe is the future for a lot of our content.”
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