Time is (no longer) money

Time will remove its digital paywall on June 1, making all of the magazine’s online content – including its 100-year archive – free to the public, per a new report from Axios.

🤔 Why now?... The decision is actually the latest in a series of changes made at the company since 2018 – which is when Salesforce founder Marc Benioff and his wife Lynne purchased the media brand from the Meredith Corp. for $190 million. With Benioff’s counsel, the company has successfully diversified its income streams and reduced its dependence on subscription-based revenue.

• Since its 2020 launch, Time Studios, the publisher’s TV and film arm, has brought in over $100 million in docuseries sales to streamers like Netflix, HBO, and Amazon (including the $30 million sale of jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy to Netflix).
• The company’s events business was on pace to bring in over $10 million in revenue last year, per Ian Orefice, president and COO of Time and Time Studios.

Aaaand don’t forget NFTs. Time started selling digital artwork in 2021. By April of 2022, it had made over $10 million in profit from NFT sales. For context, the site currently generates an estimated $7.2 million/year in digital subscription revenue.

📸 Big picture: Not everything is changing at Time. The company will continue to charge for its timeless (the pun was intended, and we are sorry) print magazine, which has about 1.3 million paid subscribers.