Are Media boosts digital audience with Dotdash Meredith ad deal
Are Media has signed a deal with US lifestyle publisher Dotdash Meredith to sell ads on DDM’s digital properties, bringing Are’s ad network reach to more than 10 million people (14+) according to Ipsos data.
The deal rolls in the Australian audiences of DDM properties such as People and Allrecipes to Are Media’s lifestyle stable, which includes The Australian Women’s Weekly, Better Homes and Gardens and Woman’s Day. This is for advertising purposes only: there is no editorial tie-up, and the US sites retain their dot com addresses.
Jane Huxley
”Everybody’s driving growth where they can get it,” Are CEO Jane Huxley told Mumbrella. “Digital is one of those areas that is growing exponentially for all of us. [The DDM deal] does give us that digital scale along with our 6 million reach in print. We now reach 10.4 million [people] digitally every month.”
Huxley was effusive about the deal being an important turning point for the lifestyle magazine business.
“Bringing this announcement out today is literally a new era for us, not just for the scale that this deal brings, [but] because I think we’ve really come through a lot of challenging times and I feel very motivated and very bullish about where we are going.”
“There’s a part of me that thinks, finally, the sun’s out.”
Are Media has a long history in Australian media under different names. Originally the magazine arm of the Packer-owned Australian Consolidated Press (ACP), it was rolled into PBL with Nine and then sold to Bauer Media in 2012. The business contracted under Bauer as print felt the digital pinch, although Bauer did expand by buying Pacific Magazines in 2020. Bauer then immediately sold to private equity firm Mercury Capital and the business was renamed Are Media (for “Audience, Reach, Engagement”).
”Our clear strategy has been on diversifying our revenue whilst maintaining the integrity and trust in our brands,” Huxley said. “That’s meant a lot of investment in digital over the last few years. [We are] looking now towards partnerships to expand our reach, to expand our presence in the markets where they make sense and where they fit with the strategy that we are driving forward.”
Anna Quinn
Mumbrella also spoke with Are Media’s new sales director Anna Quinn about the DDM deal. Quinn was at ACP in the 2000s, and said the business was constrained at that time because Ninemsn (a joint venture between Nine and Microsoft) owned the magazine’s digital rights.
“We were really hamstrung in a digital sense, we didn’t own our digital destiny, Ninemsn had all our mastheads, so we were very late to the digital game and very hamstrung in what we were able to do,” Quinn said.
“It’s fantastic coming back and being able to see what Jane’s done in terms of getting us to that digital transformation. They’ve done an amazing job of creating that digital footprint. Now DDM allows us to take it on steroids and amplify … which is really exciting.”
When Huxley took up the reins at Are in 2021, the company was pursuing a digital aggregation strategy it had inherited from Bauer. The idea was grouping magazine content not by masthead but by vertical under the “To Love” banner, for example, Homes To Love, Food To Love and Now To Love.
Huxley has been phasing that out and returning to a masthead-centric digital identity. The “nowtolove.com.au” homepage currently defaults to the Woman’s Day masthead.
“Everything is of its day,” Huxley said. “ It was the right strategy for the time, but what we need to do is ensure that we are reflecting the right strategy for [this] time. We’re at a very different time now than we were three years, five years, or 10 years ago.”
Huxley and Quinn would not divulge current revenue splits for Are by their digital advertising, print and affiliate shopping lines.
The DDM deal will allow Are to increase digital ad revenue, which is desirable in terms of a potential sale by Mercury. Digital businesses are typically valued at higher multiples of earnings than traditional or offline organisations.
Huxley said Are’s existing digital reach is 4.3 million people, meaning the DDM deal effectively doubles its addressable digital audience. Print readership is around 6 million.
“Funnily enough, there’s not a lot of duplication [between Are’s print and digital audiences],” she said.
Quinn said this duplication between Are’s existing digital audience and print was only around 15%. The duplication with the expanded post-DDM audience is not yet known.
“ I think that primarily we see print skewing slightly older and certainly more regional in its reach,” Huxley said in explaining the modest overlap.
Quinn said DDM had wanted to do the deal in order to “align with a premium publisher”. Huxley said DDM was “ looking to grow globally and expand their direct sales and monetization in what they see as their key international markets.”
“ Australia is a very big market for Dotdash Meredith, that is part of the strategy that they have as an organization,” Huxley said.
“In terms of partnering with us, we went through an RFP process, we went through a lot of extensive work to ensure that we were a good fit, that we could deliver on the deal, and that we could indeed represent them in the market alongside of our own brands.”
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topics
ACP
ACP Magazines
Anna Quinn
Are
Are Media
Bauer
Better Homes and Gardens
Dotdash Meredith
Jane Huxley
ninemsn
PBL
Woman's Day
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