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When The Daily Beast acquired Newsweek in 2010 there was talk of great things to come from the newly merged companies, even though Barry Diller said he expected the partnership to lose $50 million before it crosses over into the black and that number could grow as the media outlet has watched 24% of their traffic flee from their sites.
Speaking to analysts at IAC’s earnings call Diller remained positive despite traffic problems at the site, noting:
“In a year, year-and-a-half or so, I think it’s probably a year-and-a- half, I think we’ll have no losses and be on the positive side.”
Diller’s estimate halves the two-to-three year time frame editor-in-chief Tina Brown gave in May and comes as Newsweek traffic is down by 24.5% in Q2 2011.
Those numbers become more troublesome when realizing that Daily Beast traffic is actually up according to comScore, but not enough to make up for the quickly eroding base of users at Newsweek.
It should be noted however that Newsweek magazine sales are actually up 7.8 percent.
According to Forbes:
Since there was considerable overlap between the two sites’ audiences, the best indicator here is combined unduplicated audience. That shrunk 24 percent between June 2010 and June 2011, from just over 7 million to 5.4 million. (On the analyst call, Diller said NewsBeast’s month audience was 10 million; presumably he was quoting internal figures.)
Now we just have to sit around and wait for more news to determine how the sites plan to actually go from eight figure yearly loses to “in the black” in just 18 months with a somewhat eroding visitor base.
Here’s a look at site traffic for TDB and Newsweek:
