The company behind media brands like TheStreet dot com, Men's Journal is Surfer magazine as well, is changing its narrative. The Arena Group announcing its first ever profitable quarter in Q three. The turnaround charged by cutting quarterly operating expenses fifty one percent year over year and growing the audience a phenomenal amount. Joining us now as Sarah Sarah Silverstein,
she's the CEO of the Arena Group. So coming to a profit for the first time, You've done that by reducing costs, But I know you haven't also shrunk the editorial team very much. So you're reducing costs, keeping your staff, and somehow growing the audience.
How do you do it.
We're keeping our editorial costs. We're also keeping our tech costs. We've made some cuts in lower margin businesses, but we feel like we really need good content and to continue to grow our real audience to go into the next chapter and show that not only can we be profitable, but we can also grow.
And I want to get into the content story, but I do want to talk a little bit more about the cost cutting, because fifty one percent is quite a number when you look over the next year. For example, do you think that you're pretty much at the end of your cost cutting cycle or do you think that there's still more to come.
Yeah, we really try to do all of that upfront, mostly because we really believe in transparency and our business leaders being a part of the decision making. So if that was always looming overhead, we were worried that they wouldn't get on board and help us make the right decisions. So we're really trying to open up our books a little bit to the team so that they can make the best decisions for long term profitability as opposed to short term results.
I am curious about the role of different franchises that you have within the Arena group. You have different arenas as you've called them sports. What role does that play right now? How competitive is this space and how much room for growth is there given that you have people wanting to read more about sports and sports betting continues to take.
Off absolutely so. Our Athlon Sports publication has grown really huge now they're in the top ten. I think they grew three hundred percent over the last few months, so it's been really exciting for us. And we have more than one sports publication. We also have this fun and Yeah, as people are more interested. You know, we follow the audience, We follow what their interests are.
I typically would go to a newsstand and pick up like Men's Journal or old school Men's Fitness. Right, that's not how the kids are consuming media nowadays. I know a lot of companies aren't even putting out a paper magazine anymore. It's the same I imagine with Arena Group. How much bigger is you know, the online presence than the publishing presence.
The online presence is the whole thing. So our digital media is really where we make our money and where are sustainable businesses. But we do still have magazines. Athalon does a lot of previews for each season instead of a regular weekly or monthly magazine, and same with Powder and Surfer. They have at least one issue that goes out a year, which is really nice for the brand. But that's not how we make our money.
That's really interesting. I mean, there is something to be said for buying physical, heavy magazine with the glossy pages and the bright pictures.
But you get on the airplane, you put it on your coffee.
Table exactly exactly. But yeah, everything's online now. I want to talk a little bit about the portfolio of companies that you work with, because obviously you have a big presence in sports, in lifestyle sort of categories as well. What does the due diligence look like on your end when you're evaluating what brands that you want to work with.
Well, right now, we're growing our audience so much because we don't have a pay well for any of our journalism. The only thing that is behind a paywell is our street investment product. All of our content is brand safe. We're really trying to build out a real retail ecosystem and expand our commerce team and our first party data and how all that connects. So for us, if it's part of the bigger plan, if it helps us grow our audience that we're reaching our real organic audience, then it's for us.
How often are you thinking about inorganic opportunities you've turned a profit, can you put that money to work to acquire something to build any of your Yes.
Right now we're I mean we would be looking at partners like things publications that we could bring on, and also tools and services that we could bring on. But we're certainly not looking to buy traffic right now because our value is in how do we leverage the real audience that we have.
I like how you use the term arenas there. Well, I guess at the arena group, you say, this is our sports arena, this is our lifestyle arena, this is our finance arena, which is what you ran before you took over the parent company, and it's what I think we're most interested in, right, So, how did you drive so much growth at the Street. We notice it as a competitor and as a source a lot of times.
And what do you think about interest right now in the finance arena as we hit all time highs on the S and P, you know, super tight spreads on credit.
I mean, it's been great for the Street. The Street's original focus when it was under Jim Kramer was the subscription product, so I had a lot of room to grow and that the Street is such a smart team that it was really about how do we get this in front of the audience, And that was just a little bit about It was mostly about changing what we were covering instead of trying to be the statement of record where we can't compete with a Bloomberg that has
twenty five hundred journalists. I'm probably going to say the number wrong. But we have a small team that's trying to story selection allows them to say this is what's important for you today, and that made a huge difference for us.
Sarah, I think a lot of publishers are thinking about this right now. How are you thinking about the role of artificial intelligence as you grow your platforms?
So we are not looking at artificial intelligence to create content. I think that we can't win in that area. Google's going to beat us, other people are going to beat us. But we are looking for artificial intelligence to help us in our technology and serving people better and like what's the next thing that they should read or to serve our retail partners better.
All right, Sarah, it's really great to have this conversation with you. Hope to see you again soon. And that, of course is Sarah at Silver's Sign of the Arena Group