Wednesday 10th February: Bloomberg targets $100 million in subs with niche verticals

February 10, 2021

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According to an internal memo from CEO Justin Smith, Bloomberg Media is expecting to bring in at least $100 million in consumer subscription revenues in 2021.

Forecasting 400,000 consumer subscriptions for 2021 compared with 250,000 last year, Bloomberg's growth strategy hinges on the launch of niche verticals. Bloomberg Wealth, a personal finance vertical launched last September has been cited as an important driver. Other verticals focus on health care, cars, climate, cities and the business of entertainment.

Three years ago, Bloomberg had no consumer revenues to speak of, making its money (lots of money) from $20,000 enterprise subscriptions to data and content services on the Bloomberg Terminals. But following the launch of its consumer business in 2017 and a 135% revenue increase in 2020, the company sees, "a clear path toward making subscriptions a nine-figure business in 2021". It's a narrow, some might say niche, path.

Mirror editor-in-chief Alison Phillips is missing the newsroom, but she's pretty happy at the recent online success the paper has enjoyed; web traffic was up by over one billion page views in 2020. Her descriptions of a fragmented news team are genuinely sad, but the image of her fist-pumping the publication of the 'Dominic Cummings drives to Barnard-Castle' scoop with the Guardian is delicious.

From Vice President Kamala Harris’ Vogue photos to former first lady Melania Trump’s invisibility, the impact of magazine covers remains significant. Mr Magazine is writing here on Poynter about why covers still matter and giving real-world examples of covers designed for the newsstand, for subscribers and more recently, for social media.

Not sure if we're late to this, early, or if in three months everyone will be saying 'what was Clubhouse again?' But this piece from The Guardian is a good primer on what's been going on with the audio-only social platform. As podcasters, we'll look at it (honest) but we might wait for the VC hype to die down before we join in with the in-crowd. I have a couple of invites though if anyone's interested.

This week's podcast:

This week Zach Seward, CEO of Quartz, explains why he bought the business lifestyle brand from Uzabase. He tells us how it all started and how it’s going, about memberships and advertising, and the Quartz mission to make business better.

We’re perilously close to covering our running costs thanks to the generous donations of our contributors. If you feel you can chuck us a couple of quid to reach our target, we’d be eternally grateful. We promise not to spend too much of it on coffee.