👉 Background: News Corp is the global media and publishing behemoth that was founded in 1980. It owns newspapers all over the world from The Wall Street Journal to The New York Post to The Times in the UK. In Australia, it owns The Australian, Herald Sun, Daily Telegraph and a whole lot more. It also owns a 61% chunk of Aussie real estate giant REA Group.

‍👉 What happened: The year panned out pretty well for News Corp after it saw its full-year revenue jump 2%  and its EBITDA jumped 14%. A big shoutout goes to REA Group as well as their US publication Dow Jones who led the charge. But, it was News Corp’s OG Aussie publications that reaaaaally let them down.

‍👉 What else: Melbourne’s Herald Sun, Brisbane’s Courier Mail and Adelaide’s The Advertiser all lost paid subscribers in FY25. And, subscriber churn in its media division is an ongoing challenge that News Corp needs to manage.

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‍What's the key learning?

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‍💡Subscription churn is the number or percentage of customers who stop paying for a subscription service in a given period. For media companies, churn is a critical metric because their subscriber revenue is recurring, so that means losing a paying reader isn’t just a one-off hit, it’s an ongoing loss of income.

💡In News Corp’s case, a 1-2% drop in subscribers across tabloids means thousands of people cancelling. And right now, there aren’t enough new subscribers offsetting the churned ones. The problem for News Corp is that this compounds over time.

💡In fact, improving retention by just 5% can boost profits by anywhere between 25%- 95%.The flip side is that acquiring a new customer costs 5 to 7 times more than retaining an existing one. So News Corp needs to address is media churn... or just focus on its digital offerings in order to survive and thrive.