In an era of under-reliable information sources, much of the future success of media may depend on specialist providers. The growing disenchantment with polarised news coverage and flakey information, is presumably, encouraging many consumers to retreat to specialist sources they trust.
That may, indeed, already be the reason for the growing success of digital providers serving “professional consumers” (prosumers) that are simultaneously building audiences among consumers and business people. After all, what could be a more reliable stamp of authority for reader-viewer-users than the fact that an industry’s experts are reading the same content? It’s an authority that also speaks volumes to advertisers and sponsors who, in market after market, realise that high-level consumers have so much in common with an industry’s executives. Top-end theatre goers, fashion buyers, investors, travellers, and gourmets may be indistinguishable from those managing the businesses they patronise.
The phenomenon is not new.
The success of Vogue has long been underpinned by the magazine’s readership among fashion executives. Likewise, for the industries served by Wine Spectator and Decanter and specpubs on topics like boats, cars, and ‘planes. The Financial Times, Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg are also prosumer brands, serving a dual purpose as B2B media for financial industry professionals as well as information services for financially-savvy consumers. Arguably, The Economist has been playing a similar role in politics and economics for 182 years.
But the recent growth of prosumer media brands also reflects a broader and more longterm change in business itself. Time was when most businesses were owned and managed by specialists who would spend a lifetime steeped in their industries and reading ‘trade and tech’ magazines focused on their own craft skills.
It all started to change with the growth of investment markets, business education, technology and international trade: people, funding and tech became transferable. Even before the catalyst of digital disruption, the hard walls between industries had started to come down, spawning a new generation of business information services to supplant once-dominant “technical” journals in the reading habits of executives.
Apart from meeting the needs of ‘transferable’ 21st century business people, the “new” information sources have increasingly attracted the readership of prosumers who share an interest in a specific industry alongside their own work in areas like tech, media, finance and marketing. It’s the opportunity for single-sector media businesses to build profile, influence and profit.
That’s the new-wave business model powering a generation of prosumer media like the Business of Fashion, The Athletic, Wired, The Information and Fast Company. To that list, we can add Politico, the transatlantic consumer brand whose profits primarily come from subscriptions for professionals in politics, and Semafor, the three-year-old newsletter brand funded (B2B-like) by its events for leaders in business and public policy. These and a growing number of others illustrate how prosumer brands are developing ‘new’ business models to disrupt legacy media.
It’s a trend that has motivated Adam White, founder of the 11-year-old Front Office Sports (FOS), self-described as “the leading media news organization covering the business of sports.”
FOS claims a monthly reach of 130mn (some 75% in North America) through newsletters and social media. It tells advertisers: “Sports prosumers are well-educated, influential, early adopters. They define success by being multi-hyphenate leaders at work, at home and in life. They’re fans who crave more than just the box score – they want richer storytelling that helps them uplevel their sports consumption”.
White aims to make it the Politico of sports.
He says: “Our audience is made up of prosumers. They’re professional consumers who work in white-collar industries like tech, finance, media, real estate, and marketing. And that’s our whole thesis: all these athletes want to be business people and all these business people were athletes or are connected to sport in some way or are interested in it. And people now really, really care about what happens off-the-field because owners have become larger-than-life personalities. Athletes are now billionaires.”
He had started the site in 2015 as an undergraduate at the University of Miami, who had no idea to guide his future career other than the love of sport, which had prompted him to study Sports Administration: “Front Office Sports started after I did a class project in my freshman year.”
On his return home to Phoenix, Arizona for vacation, White pondered the idea of a web site about the sports industry, paid a friend to make the logo and launched it on Wix. “The early incarnations of FOS were based on the longform Q&A interviews of his university class project. Really, at the time, it was just an interview platform. I would sit down, have informational interviews and publish them. My idea was that, by the time I graduated, I wanted to make sure I had enough relationships to get me a job. I did a total of 110 interviews.”
He started to think big in 2019 with the first external funding, from Jason Stein’s SC Holdings, an investor in sports, media and advertising (whom White had befriended on Twitter. Yes). The revenue lift-off was delayed by the pandemic but audiences grew strongly during enforced working from home. After initial funding from friends, family and also from B2B publisher Crain Communications, Jeff Zucker’s Abu Dhabi-funded media-sports-entertainment investor RedBird IMI became a 35% investor in 2023 and is now the majority shareholder: “It gave Crain the opportunity to exit the business with a meaningful gain in a year or so. Redbird was a huge stamp of approval for us.”
White says: “I don’t want people to think about us as a B2B publication for sports but an enterprise news and content organisation that covers the business of sports. That can be for people who work in sports, and for people who aren’t in sports. But we want to make sure that the content is approachable, unique and compelling whether they’re consuming us on TikTok, X, Instagram or in our newsletters.”
Meanwhile, he claims 800k+ signups and 35m+ monthly opens for the free, twice-daily newsletters, 30mn monthly video views, and 2mn monthly page views. The CEO says: “We’ve built a business that’s really meaningful and very impactful in our space. The audience is up and so is our influence and impact. We get cited in major outlets and other channels a thousand times a month from our journalism. For a business our size, with a 20-person newsroom including editors, that impact is significant.”
Is it more consumer than B2B? “I think in a way, it’s probably 50% or more prosumer because there’s not that many people actually working in sports. If you take our followers on LinkedIn, which is a good cross-section of our audience, it’s finance, real estate, technology, marketing, media and entertainment. We have a great affluent, influential, unduplicated audience for those brands and they’re engaging with our content in a way that’s much different to other people. That’s the pitch, and its worked.”
FOS is a distinctive digital startup, not least because it eschewed equity funding for four years and now, in RedBird IMI, has a majority owner for whom the sports business is an obvious strategic interest. That might explain the growth trajectory. You can regard its 2025 revenue of $17mn either as a 3x increase in three years (from $6mn in 2022) or as a still relatively small company in one of the world’s booming business sectors. It’s still primarily a US business, although you suspect that the sports business growth in the Middle East should soon spur FOS’ own international expansion.
But last year saw FOS break through into profit for the first time and 2026 might well see it doubling the 2024 revenue:
| SnapShot Front Office Sports | |||
| $mn | 2026 | 2025 | 2024 |
| Rev | 22 | 17 | 12 |
| Ebitda | 7 | 5 | — |
| People | 70 | 55 | 46 |
It’s a nicely successful, high-quality media business. But, arguably, the growth doesn’t actually match the worldwide expansion of the business of sport. That may, of course, change during 2026 with the US hosting of the Olympic Games and the soccer-football World Cup.
This is the year of opportunity but there are two clues to the future growth of FOS.
First, it’s (sort of) seeking to emulate Semafor’s programme of events for opinion formers. The FOS annual Tuned In summit is expected to attract more than 500 delegates to New York this year. Events (with an FOS team of just three people) now account for almost 20% of FOS revenue, a big change in the last two years. But it’s a distinctly lower priority than Semafor, for example.
Second, there’s FOS’ 80% of revenue from advertising and sponsorship which invites other comparisons. It is notable that the New York Times-owned The Athletic is believed to have more than trebled its advertising revenue from some $30mn in 2024 to an estimated $100mn+ in 2025. What might increasingly be seen as the main competitor to FOS had virtually doubled its ad revenue in the first half of last year. More to the point, FOS total revenue in 2024 was equivalent to 36% of The Athletic’s ad revenue but it may now may be less than 20%.
It might just prompt revenue diversification into, say, subscriptions and data (something not yet on the FOS agenda) or ramping up events especially outside the US. Where would Politico or Semafor respectively be without those strategies?
But the dramatic growth of The Athletic and Semafor (especially outside North America) might just suggest to Adam White and RedBird’s Jeff Zucker a possible collaboration with a major international operator (Bloomberg, Reuters or Politico’s Axel Springer?). Such a combination may just help the lively and insightful Front Office Sports to fulfill its promise at an especially promising time.
It might be time for a less patient strategy.
