Fox reported a blowout earnings report Tuesday, with the 2024 presidential election and a stacked live sports schedule seeing quarterly revenue rise by 20 percent year over year to $5.1 billion and net income more than doubling to $388 million.
Advertising revenue topped $2.4 billion in the latest quarter, an increase of more than $400 million year over year.
The earnings report comes one quarter after Fox reported a huge fiscal first quarter, thanks in large part to the 2024 election, which drove political advertising. Tubi, Fox’s free streaming service, also saw substantial growth.
The company’s fiscal second quarter also included a positive impact from the election, with a compelling World Series and NFL matchups also cited as growth drivers.
The current quarter will likely be a big one for the company, thanks to Super Bowl LIX, which it will host on Feb. 9. Sources say that Fox has secured more than $8 million for 30-second ads, and had a long waitlist of brands hoping to buy last-minute spots. Fox Sports saw gains from the Major League Baseball’s World Series, college football and National Football League games during the latest financial quarter.
“Our only disappointment in sports is that we will not be moving forward with Venu, our sports streaming joint venture with Warner Bros. Discovery and Disney,” CEO Lachlan Murdoch told analysts during a morning call. “In the end, the legal distractions around the business became increasingly difficult to bare,” he added of the legal limbo that prompted the decision to not move forward with the sports-focused streamer.
And Fox News has dominated the cable news business in ratings ever since President Trump’s election in November. Murdoch told analysts that the cable news channel has seen “increased demand from existing blue chip advertisers, as well as new clients coming to the network due to record share of audience.”
“Momentum and share in ratings has continued through and after the inauguration on the day,” Murdoch added as he said Fox News had outperformed its peers in the 24-hour cable news arena during the second quarter.
Murdoch also talking about Fox looking to launch a direct-to-consumer service, likely by the end of 2025. “We are designing an offering to really target those cord cutters and cord-nevers that are not traditionally in the cable bundle,” he told analysts.
Fox Corp. has so far kept mostly free of a competitive streaming arena, except for launching its free, ad-supported streamer Tubi. Murdoch gave few details on content and brands destined for the new DTC service, but he added the overall package will be “holistic of all of our content, of sports and news.”
That suggests Fox News content will be part of the consumer offering, as will Fox sports content that could have been distributed as part of the abandoned Venu service.
In addition, Murdoch argued Fox sports content will continue to be distributed across multiple platforms, including traditional linear TV networks, cable TV, digital MVPDs and Fox’s own DTC services. The goal, he added, was Fox protecting its traditional linear TV services, while expanding its reach in streaming, where advertising dollars are increasingly flowing.
“We see the traditional cable bundle as still the most value for our consumers and the most value for our company. So we’re huge supporters of the traditional cable bundle, and we will always be,” Murdoch insisted.
That meant not aiming to turn existing cable TV subscribers into streaming customers, and initial expectations for the DTC offering will be “modest,” he added. “But having said that, we do want to reach consumers wherever they are, and there’s a large population, obviously, that are now outside of the traditional cable bundle,” Murdoch argued.
The Fox Corp. boss underlined how his proposed DTC offering followed the failure of the proposed Venu sports-focused streaming platform to launch. Murdoch said Fox wanted “another distribution outlet for our brands to access consumers in the market, wherever they are, and that is what we continue to be focused on, maximum distribution of our content, whether that be traditional digital streaming or our own DTC offering in the near future.”
