Email: a valuable asset yet to be tapped into by TV production companies

The sale of the Free Press to Paramount has brought the value of email lists into focus.

This week, it was announced that Paramount has purchased

Bari Weiss

’

The Free Press

for a reported $150m. A whole lot has been written about this deal: the blurring of the lines between creator and traditional media, online advertising versus subscription businesses, plus of course wider politics and the future of CBS News.

Rather than delve into any of these issues, this post is instead about the email-first dimension of the Free Press, and how email addresses are one of the most valuable but often overlooked pieces of data a company can have access to.

And TV and film production companies have somewhat of a unique - and often overlooked - ability to build email lists that can add value to a business.

Over the past five+ years, there has been an explosion in email-first businesses, primarily in the form of newsletters. I’ll go into why newsletter businesses are so valuable in more detail, however as a headline, it is because they can be a heady mix of a direct relationship with audiences, require little technical infrastructure combined with clear monetisation options with high profit margins, which can quickly grow as the subscriber base increases combined with the target market demographics.

The Free Press isn’t the only email-first business that has sold for a big sums in recent years, for example:

• Morning Brew - bought by Axel Springer in 2020 for $75m when it had 2.5m subscribers

• The Hustle - bought by Hubspot for $30m in 2021 when it had 1.5m subscribers

• Axios - bought by Cox Enterprises for $525m in 2021, it had 2.7m subscribers and 1m subscribers to its local newsletters (although Axios was and is wider than just newsletters)

• Graydon Carter’s Airmail has been acquired by Puck News.

And it isn’t just big sales that are happening; there are all sorts of smaller more focussed newsletters that have built enough value to be bought:

• How Newsletter Founders Are Quietly Getting Acquired

• I Sold my Newsletter Business

In this post, I’m going to try to draw back the curtain on how lucrative well curated and maintained email lists can be when aligned with a coherent strategy for a particular audience.

And then go on to argue that many TV production companies are sitting on a potential treasure trove which would make businesses in other sectors green with envy….