Time chief executive Jessica Sibley has revealed how a shift away from reader revenue towards direct-to-business sales has paid off for the iconic US brand.
She was among several media leaders who delivered upbeat business updates at the Press Gazette Media Network USA conference in New York last month.
At the same event a year earlier, publishers voiced alarm over plunging online ad revenue and falling referral traffic from key partners like Google. But this year representatives from publishers including Dow Jones, Forbes, New York Post and Dotdash Meredith reported growing advertising and subscription revenues and buoyant website traffic.
Sibley, who has been CEO of Time for two years, said: “We have the largest global audience in our 101-year history. We’ve seen record results in engagement and traffic, especially over the last few weeks, and we have had some of the biggest gets in terms of the leaders that we cover.”
She cited Youtuber Mr Beast, Puerto Rican pop star Bad Bunny and Taylor Swift as some of the high-profile interviews Time has obtained. Bad Bunny has only given one other interview in the last two years (to Billboard) and Time is the only publication to interview Taylor Swift in the last four years (to coincide with her Person of the Year win in 2023).
Rapper Megan Thee Stallion first featured in the Time 100 Next List for future leaders in 2019 before graduating to the main Time 100 list in 2020. Her ongoing relationship with the brand helped Time Studios secure access for a documentary about her life which was released at the end of October and has just been sold to Amazon for “a very big number”.
Talking about the business performance, Sibley said: “We are in the strongest cash position in Q4 in the company’s history since Marc and Lynne [Benioff] have owned it in the last six years.”
She said: “We’ve gone through a pretty significant transformation of our business, and the whole goal is we need to be commercially viable. We need to be cash flow positive. We need to be a healthy, profitable company.”
Dropping the paywall and switch to B2B sales
Sibley said the first thing she did after becoming CEO two years ago was to pivot towards business (rather than consumer) revenue with the end of Time’s online paywall in June 2023.
“We decided we are going direct to the biggest brands with the biggest budgets and doing high touch integrated programs with them.
“We are dealing with CMOs, CEOs, heads of comms, chiefs of staff and we are bringing our audience and bringing our platforms and all our products to them directly.
“The B2C model that meant doing business with individual consumers that were going to pay for our content, especially our content on Time.com, just wasn’t working. It wasn’t a big enough business.”
Business highlights
She reported that B2B advertising revenue was up 18% year on year.
Print advertising revenue is now 29% of the total, compared with 50% two years ago.
Events revenue is now 28% of the total, up from 14% two years ago, and events revenue margins are up 50%.
Sibley said: “We’ve gone from seven events to over 30. We had the first profitable Time 100 Summit and gala in our company’s history this year.”
Time has expanded its rankings beyond the established Time 100 and Person of the Year brands into new areas like Most Influential Companies, World’s Greatest Places, Women of the Year, Next Generation Leaders and Time 100 Climate. These offer commercial partners a mixture of engagement across web, print, social media and in-person events as well as association with the high profile people who feature on the lists.
Time deal with OpenAI
Explaining how the deal came about, Sibley said: “I think it was the day ChatGPT launched, I get a text from my boss [Marc Benioff] introducing me to [OpenAI CEO] Sam Altman, and we get on the phone and start talking about what is this and what does this mean for our business?
“We knew right away there were three paths: negotiate, litigate or do nothing.
“I’m not a do-nothing person, and we were not going to take this 100-year iconic brand, which is Time, and just let it fade away, not be part of the new disruption, the new changes.
“We were also not going to litigate. That was just not something that we wanted to pursue for a variety of reasons. So we just went all in.”
She said Time sees opportunities in AI via a share of licensing and advertising revenue from the tech platforms and by using the technology to have a more productive newsroom.
Brand safety concerns saw Taylor Swift interview blocked
Asked for her views on the ongoing campaign to stop marketers blocking advertising against news due to ill-founded brand safety fears, Sibley said: “Brand safety is a really, really serious issue. We were told that the Taylor Swift interview was not brand safe,” suggesting it was because her album was called The Tortured Poets Department.
“We had an innovator of the year, which was the James Webb Telescope, and we were told that that was not brand safe because we talked about stars dying – like stars in the sky.
“So we are doing everything that we can to debunk that. The challenge is we can’t monetise that content. So the defunding of journalism is terrible.”
Business looking up for 2025
Looking forward Sibley said the business prospects for Time are good, particularly around events.
She said: “I am seeing a lot more positivity in terms of the business side, especially as we head into Q1, things are improving.
“When I talk about the growth of our events business, it’s not just that we’re at like pre-Covid levels. We’re at historic levels. Why is that?
“Because we’re humans, we like the communication and the interactivity…
“With all this technology, everyone’s having record turnout of being in person and being together. So I think that, for me, is so inspiring. I’m really excited about that. Don’t sit at home, don’t sit behind your desk, get out, listen, learn, be together. We can figure this out.”
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