The UK-based Future Plc today (22 February) announced the appointment of Jon Steinberg – former leader of BuzzFeed and Mail Online US, and creator of Cheddar News streamer – as the new CEO of Future Plc, with effect from April. Steinberg succeeds Zillah Byng-Thorne who has transformed the one-time tech magazine publisher into a transatlantic digital powerhouse.
Having joined the company almost 10 years ago as CFO and become CEO after five months, her achievements need no embellishment. Future’s £1.8bn market cap is some 70x that of 2013. In seven years, revenue has multiplied 13x, profit 15x, and EBITDA margins have climbed to 33%:
| £k | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 |
| Revenue | 825 | 607 | 340 | 222 | 125 | 84 | 59 |
| EBITDA | 272 | 196 | 93 | 52 | 19 | 11 | 5 |
| Margin | 33% | 32% | 27% | 23% | 15% | 13% | 8% |
| EPS growth | 24% | 77% | 57% | 95% | 35% |
It’s a great story of reinvention in a market where magazines almost everywhere else have been shredded by lost readers and advertisers. The Future CEO has seen more clearly than many of her peers the potential of long-established magazine brands, content and audiences to generate game-changing digital revenue.
Indeed, the transformation of what is now the UK’s largest magazine-centric (but very digital) company contrasts with its US counterpart Dotdash whose acquisition of magazine leader Meredith has, to say the least, been problematic.
Future has more than 250 print, digital and events brands which reach 1 in 3 online adults in the US and UK – an audience of more than 400mn principally across four broad sectors: Lifestyle, Knowledge & News; Games, Entertainment, Tech & Sport; Wealth & Savings; and B2B.
Its revenue is almost evenly split between advertising, readership and eCommerce. It divides 60:40 between the UK and US and 65:35 between digital and print. Future publishes more than 100 print magazines, and 743 bookazines, and has 111k event attendees and 13mn newsletter subscribers.
Significantly, its 10 largest online brands include just two that started out as magazines (Marie Claire and PC Gamer) but six are in the tech-entertainment sectors that have been always been at the core of Future.
The company had been founded in 1985 by Chris Anderson in the decades before he created TED Talks. He built Future into a sprightly specialist publisher which he sold to Pearson Plc for £52.5m in 1993. He then decamped to San Francisco and set about building a US version of the business he had left behind.
When private equity bought Future back from Pearson, Anderson merged his new US publishing company into the UK business and, with a clutch of international acquisitions, they IPOd in 1999. Future was an instant hit on the London Stock Exchange during the first Dotcom boom. Within a year, it had a market cap of £1bn, although revenue was just £250m and the company was stubbornly loss-making. But breached bank covenants, rising debt and falling revenues almost killed the company two years later. Anderson quit again and went off (armed with the fledgling TED conference) to carve out his new world role. That was the first ‘bust’ for Future Plc which subsequently burned no fewer than three CEOs with erratic M&A, volatile newsstand sales, and stockmarket profit warnings.
But the almost perpetual sense of inevitable crisis seemed to evaporate with the 2014 appointment of Byng-Thorne as CEO no.4. On her first day, the company’s market cap was a mere £25mn – the same as in 2001 when Future had been rescued by new investors and the fortuitous $68mn sale of the once lustrous Business 2.0 magazine.
Everything happens fast at Future. Two years later, its value was up to £29mn with the £14mn acquisition of UK rival Imagine. By 2020, when it acquired TI Media (the former IPC Media and Time Inc UK), it had again reached the £1bn valuation first achieved a decade earlier.
Despite Future’s remarkable recovery, the rollercoaster of stockmarket sentiment has maintained an intermittent chorus of doubt throughout the Byng-Thorne revolution. Every time the shares soared so did some voices of doubt. Investment analysts and competitors periodically speculated about when the “next” Future crisis would occur. In 2020, one investment report claimed with faux authority “Future’s potential for success rests on the ingenuity of its management in turning a sizeable collection of often distinct and shrinking assets – which it has largely acquired since 2016 – into a cohesive, profitable and cash generative enterprise… we are incredulous that such a hopeful outcome can be achieved.”
It was a catalogue of alleged accounting inconsistencies and snipes at executives. But, by the time it appeared, so had the impressive results of some of Future’s major acquisitions. Slowly the consistent growth in earnings, margins and cashflow have all but erased the almost superstitious forecasts that the company would crash again sometime.
Although the reducing band of sceptics have watched the company’s market value halve from a dizzy £4bn in the past few years, even that process underlines the point that Future can manage only its results not the wild expectations that investors periodically heap onto it. By that measure, some speculators have been disappointed. But longterm shareholders have enjoyed the Byng-Thorne decade during which she has transformed Future by:
Building proprietary systems: Perhaps the CEO’s background as CFO and acting CEO of the brilliant digital transformation AutoTrader persuaded her of the need to have strong proprietary systems. After years during which magazine publishers everywhere had come to believe that systems were (almost) a waste of time and money and best left to others, the new CEO developed what has become a world-beating strategy with a tech stack that includes: Vanilla (a single modular web platform and content management system); Hawk (eCommerce); Hybrid (advertising system including an open auction marketplace to manage yields); Aperture (customer audience data platform); Falcon (lead gen); and Kiosq (monetising paywalled editorial content). The systems development has clearly depended on CTO Kevin Li Ying who, as Future’s longest-serving executive, first joined the company in 2003. The tech has been crucial to its success, not least in integrating acquisitions quickly and cost-effectively.
Diversifying revenues: After coping with the collapse of print advertising, publishers everywhere have been doubling down on reader subscriptions. But Future has also built an unrivalled eCommerce business. It helped, of course, that the company’s core business was tech for young people. But it saw more quickly than most the value of producing content (like “recommendations” and “top 10” lists) specifically to generate online sales. The 2022 revenue profile speaks volumes for the successful diversification: Advertising (36%), eCommerce (33%) and Readership (31%). It is now also working hard to develop B2B revenues especially in areas like tech and entertainment where there is an inevitable blurring between consumer and business audiences and content.
Commanding the strategy and the detail: You need to know about the agony and ecstasy of Future’s historic performance in order to appreciate the achievements of Byng-Thorne who has an unrivalled grasp both of the broad strategy and the financial and operational detail of the increasingly complex international company. It has helped to ensure the successful integration of the acquisitions. The CEO is impressively in command – which might, of course, partly explain her surprising decision to quit her all-consuming 24/7 transatlantic job.
Maintaining a competitive paranoia: For all her success in transforming Future, the CEO has never lost her sense of competitive paranoia, of the risk that ‘it could all go wrong if you’re not careful’. That’s a level of humility, realism and alertness that has helped her build strong support among colleagues in the boardroom and around the company. She’s a tough, demanding leader who is always out there fighting for the team’s continuing success.
Building a formidable board consensus: She has built a formidable consensus at the Future board through robust analysis, successful delivery and the determination to pre-empt problems and correct mistakes. As a result, the board supported a rapid step-up in acquisition spending (more than £1bn in 2020-21 alone) including the biggest investment so far, in the Go Compare price comparison site. The board’s wholehearted confidence in the judgement of their CEO helped to ensure that raised eyebrows from surprised investors did not develop into any kind of opposition to the plans.
That sure-fire blend of managing the big strategic picture as well as the financial and operational detail has helped to ensure the success of an increasingly ambitious acquisition strategy whose major milestones during the past seven years include the following 18 companies / brands bought for a total of some £1.5bn:
| Future Plc acquisitions | Location | Date | Price | Media |
| Imagine Publishing | UK | 2016 | £15.5mn | Bookazines |
| Homebuilding (Centaur) | UK | 2017 | £32.8mn | Events/ magazines |
| Purch | US | 2018 | £99.8mn | Tech reviews |
| What HiFi (Haymarket) | UK | 2018 | £10.7mn | Magazines |
| New Bay | UK | 2018 | £9.9mn | B2B |
| Mobile Nations | US | 2019 | £75.6mn | Digital |
| SmartBrief | US | 2019 | £43.6mn | Newsletters |
| Barcroft Studios | UK | 2019 | £23.4mn | TV/video |
| TI Media | UK | 2020 | £140mn | Magazines |
| Cinema Blend | US | 2020 | £9.9mn | Digital |
| Go Compare | UK | 2021 | £557.2mn | Price comparison |
| Marie Claire US | US | 2021 | £13.3mn | Magazine |
| Mozo | Australia | 2021 | £17.2mn | Price comparison |
| Dennis Publishing | UK/US | 2021 | £299.6mn | Magazines |
| ShortList | UK | 2022 | £200k | Digital |
| WhoWhatWear | US | 2022 | £105.2mn | Digital |
| What Culture | US | 2022 | £22.7mn | Digital |
| ActualTech | US | 2022 | £39.1mn | B2B/ digital |
| Gardening KnowHow | US | 2023 | £14.8mn | Digital |
The acquisition success owes a lot to Byng-Thorne’s insistence on cautiously using only cost savings (not hyped revenue) to justify price multiples. But it also includes some finely targeted objectives. In 2016, Imagine Publishing looked a bit like a mini-Future tech magazine company for a pricey £14mn. But Byng-Thorne saw that the best asset was a portfolio of hundreds of high-priced bookazines which have continued to perform, despite the decline of many of the magazines which spawned them. The acquisition of Purch and Mobile Nations gave TechRadar (Future’s online world leader outside the US) the clear-sighted opportunity to make it in North America too; it has done. Many of the runners-up in the auction for Dennis were deterred by the clear signs that its largest brand The Week had evidently plateaued in the UK. But Future identified rapid growth almost everywhere else at Dennis: The brilliant startup The Week Junior, The Week in the US, and the once-sleepy Kiplinger financial newsletters. Plus the UK magazine industry’s best subscriptions operation.
Perhaps nothing underlines the transformation of Future more than the fact that the company – which in 2017 generated 60% of its revenues from print – is now 65% digital and rising. But it is important to note that the company’s largest online brand in 2023 is TechRadar with 31mn users – a brand launched by Chris Anderson back in 2007 and which, incidentally, was once worth more than the whole company. The 30-year-old vintage magazine PC Gamer is also still in Future’s top 10 online sites. Those brands underline the sense in which the company’s longest-serving CEO for almost two decades did not make Future. But she did re-make it.
There have, though, been disappointments. Why else would the Future board be recruiting the next CEO externally? While there had been at least two internal candidates, the board has recognised that “ZBT” is handing over a company much larger and more complex than the one she inherited in 2014. That’s why the successor, Jon Steinberg, is a highly-experienced, digital-strong CEO with impressive experience in the North American market from where much of Future’s next phase of growth is expected to come.
The outgoing CEO is not the first hyperactive, hands-on-everything executive to have failed to recruit or prepare a successor, even from the ranks of the many companies acquired during her tenure. The issue has been highlighted by the almost accidental way her planned departure was disclosed in September. Where was the board’s succession planning before she decided to quit? But the board did, finally, expedite the search for a new CEO. Some investors had expected an appointment at this week’s shareholder AGM, which came and went with little more than confirmation of a slight slowdown in tech advertising and eCommerce. But there’s no crisis at Future. That’s a thing of the past, thanks to Zillah Byng-Thorne.
