Gannett Co., Inc. (NYSE:GCI) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript
Gannett Co., Inc. (NYSE:GCI) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript February 22, 2024
Gannett Co., Inc. misses on earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $-0.16 EPS, expectations were $0.08. Gannett Co., Inc. isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).
Operator: Greetings and welcome to Gannett 4Q 2023 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Mr. Matthew Esposito of Investor Relations. Thank you, Mr. Esposito you may begin.
Matthew Esposito: Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining our call today to discuss Gannett's fourth quarter 2023 financial results. Presenting on today's call will be Mike Reed, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Doug Horne, Chief Financial Officer; Kristin Roberts, Chief Content Officer; and Chris Cho, President of Digital Marketing Solutions. If you navigate to the Gannett website, you will find that we have posted an earnings supplement in addition to our earlier press release. We will be referencing it today on the call as it provides you with additional detail on this quarter's performance. Before we begin, please let me remind you that this call is being recorded. In addition, certain statements made during this call are or may be deemed to be forward-looking statements, including those with respect to future results and events and are based upon current expectations.
These statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results and events to differ materially from those discussed today. We encourage you to read the cautionary statement regarding forward-looking statements in the earnings supplement as well as the risk factors described in Gannett's filings made with the SEC. Except as required by law, we undertake no obligation to publicly update or correct any of the forward-looking statements made during this call. In addition, we will be discussing non-GAAP financial information during the call including same-store revenues, free cash flow, adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA margin and adjusted net income attributable to Gannett. You can find reconciliations of our non-GAAP measures to the most comparable US GAAP measures in the earnings supplement.
Lastly, I would like to remind you that nothing on this call constitutes an offer to sell or solicitation of an offer to purchase any interest in Gannett. The webcast and audio cast are copyrighted material of Gannett and may not be duplicated, reproduced or rebroadcasted without prior written consent. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Mike Reed, Gannett's Chairman and CEO.
Mike Reed: Thanks, Matt. Good morning to all of you and thanks for joining our call this morning. I'm pleased to share with you details on our solid fourth quarter and very solid 2023 full year performance and how we are building on this momentum already in 2024. 2023 was a year marked by innovation, resilience, and collaborative efforts at Gannett. We rallied around new ideas, new approaches, and new avenues, and implemented substantive change in our organization, which drove meaningful improvement in our key metrics. As a result, we achieved four consecutive quarters of sequential improvement in same store revenues. We grew adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow for the full year. We significantly increased our net income. We developed new partnership revenue streams, and we improved our capital structure.
In 2023, adjusted EBITDA grew 4% over the prior year. We repaid approximately $142 million of debt, which combined with the growth in adjusted EBITDA, significantly reduced our first lien net leverage from 2.7 times to 2.0 times. We also significantly improved free cash flow in 2023 and we maintained a strong liquidity position with just over $100 million of cash on the balance sheet. We are very excited to carry this momentum into the year ahead. As you'll hear from Doug later, among progress in several other areas in 2024, we expect another year of adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow growth, another $110 million in debt repayment and further reduction to our first lien net leverage. In 2023, digital revenues were approximately $1.1 billion and represented 39% of total revenues, growing over the prior year.
Over the past year, the investment and successful execution of our content strategy allowed us to grow our digital audience and engagement, as well as improve the overall monetization of our audience. Our expectation for 2024 is that total digital revenues will make up over 45% of total revenues by the end of the year and we expect digital revenues to grow approximately 10% versus 2023, and importantly, begin to outpace the declines we see in our legacy revenue streams. As a result, we are expecting total revenue growth near the end of 2024. We've talked about the inflection point in the past being the end of 2024. The inflection point is when revenue flips from declining to growing and as I just said, we're expecting that towards the end of 2024 as we enter 2025.
There were numerous accomplishments in 2023 and they underscore the strength of our strategy at a time when the media industry faces many challenges. I'm sure many of you have read in the press over the last couple of months that many of our peers have recently announced sizable layoffs, nonprofits have been forced to close, and some media outlets have ceased to exist. Although we face similar headwinds, we believe our scale and our strategy are differentiators and that our results are continued proof that we were on the right path. Remember, we grew profitability in 2023 and our outlook this morning forecasts continued growth over the next 3 years. Later today, you'll hear from Kristin Roberts on how we are reinvesting in our newsrooms, particularly in our small communities.
And as we enter 2024, we are energized to have laid the necessary groundwork for sustainable growth here at Gannett. Important to our success in 2023 and the success in 2024 is the growth of total digital revenues. We have seen solid progress across several of our digital revenue streams and in the Q4, total digital revenues continued to grow over the prior year. Our digital revenue strategy and the foundation for anticipated future growth is to expand our audience and improve engagement, and improve the platform monetization at each point in the customer journey with us. We believe the greatest revenue opportunity lies in a comprehensive monetization strategy that maximizes revenue across the entire spectrum of our 187 million average monthly unique visitors, which by the way grew 4% year-over-year.
An important component of the monetization of our audience has been digital only subscription revenue. In Q4, digital only subscription revenue and digital only ARPU experienced new highs, reflecting a more strategic acquisition and pricing model. We believe we have continued upside in both areas as we maintain our focus on smart customer acquisition, in-depth local content, and effective pricing strategies. While digital only subscription revenue growth remains a key element given its highly recurring nature, we are balancing it with a focus on our digital advertising business. In the fourth quarter, our initiatives around audience expansion and increased engagement led to the best quarterly performance for digital advertising in all of 2023.
First party data is crucial to unlocking further value in our digital advertising, lengthening the time on-site and creating personalized smart customer journeys that allow for the full implementation of multi point monetization. By leveraging our data science capabilities, we launched first party data led campaigns across 50 demographic segments and 800 interest segments in 2023. The deprecation of the third-party cookie is expected to result in a substantial shift in the advertising industry. While its full impact remains to be seen, we believe we are well positioned in 2024 to capture increased premium revenue as we expand our already robust first party data capabilities. Another channel to increase our overall monetization is through partnerships.
We made great strides with partnerships in 2023, as we align with brands that share our values and are expected to expand our audience. Within the quarter, we announced two more partnerships with Jackpocket and Home Solutions. Our five announced partnerships in 2023 create a new digital revenue stream with significant potential and importantly at a very high margin and that have become immediately accretive to our total revenue and to our total free cash flow. For 2024, we expect to generate approximately $20 million in this very high margin partnership revenue, more than doubling 2023 levels, virtually all of which is accretive to adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow. Over the next 5 years, we believe this partnership revenue can grow more meaningfully.
And while we expect to launch new partnerships in 2024, the more substantial revenue growth is expected to come from scaling our existing portfolio of partnerships, further embedding the content across our platform and driving increased engagement. Now central to our strategy is our commitment to expanding our audience and their engagement through our renewed content strategy focused on creating joyful experiences. Since joining us as our Chief Content Officer, Kristin has made a remarkable impact on the domestic Gannett Media segment. Kristin and her team are executing on our strategy to rapidly expand our audience and content, amplify our journalism, and drive diversified revenue streams. Over the past two quarters, the team has driven a significant increase in audience growth, page views and readership per story, while also leveraging the power of data to deliver the right outcomes for each consumer.
I'll now hand it over to Kristin to recap our team's accomplishments in 2023 and hear what we can expect in 2024. Kristin?
Kristin Roberts: Thank you, Mike. We are doing exactly what we said we would do when we launched our renewed content strategy six months ago. More people are reading and watching us than ever before. We are using strong journalism to serve our communities in ways that are also expected to create revenue, and we're showing that content can be the engine of growth at Gannett. All of this success is linked to the ambition and the energy that our content team brings to the challenge every day. As I outlined last year, our strategy centers on audience growth. Expansion of our audience, along with deepening insights and engagement, creates the foundation expected to maximize monetization across increasingly diverse revenue streams.
In 2023, we experienced significant audience expansion due to strong improvements in the efficiency of our content team. This, in turn, resulted in increased page views and readership per story. We also remained focused on staying attuned to our audience's preferences, particularly around college football and high school sports. In 2024, we will be entering the next phase of our plan, which is engagement. Initiatives such as rebooting our small newsrooms and gearing up for the 2024 election will be at the top of our list. So let's briefly walk through each of these. A key focus for us in 2024 is reinvesting in our small newsrooms. Last year, we launched an initiative with the conviction that putting reporters into our smallest newsrooms was critical, but not enough on its own to be sustainable.
We needed to experiment with new ways of engaging hometown readers at a small site scale. Our reporters combined of first-person voice with a newsletter approach that invited readers to join them in experiencing their community firsthand, the results were remarkable and gave us the confidence to boldly expand this strategy. We're hiring more journalists in communities that, like the pilot sites, have lost local news reporters, and we're converting more of our smaller newsrooms across the country to take advantage of the engagement, reader satisfaction, and retention that the newsletters offer. We're also directing our focus toward the 2024 elections with our one team unified strategy leading the charge. Our mission is to leverage the strength, power, and footprint of the USA TODAY network to create the preeminent balanced source of news, information, tools, and guides that empower voters to make informed choices on specific issues and political races that will set America's direction for the next four years.
We will center our election journalism on the people we serve, not the candidates courting them. The USA Today network is committed to making the voter the VIP of our election strategy. We will help readers, viewers, and listeners become more informed and ready to make the best choices for themselves and their families at the ballot box. We're also leaning into local through meaningful voter guides in more than 100 cities and towns, as well as service journalism, community events, and engagement opportunities that allow our readers, viewers, and listeners to get accurate, nuanced coverage of their specific communities. We will be launching a helpful email course that prepares readers to vote, and we're creating explanatory journalism on platforms we know our audiences are already on.
We've redesigned our results page to get audiences the information they care about faster, and we're investing to make it all happen. We're creating roles and redeploying journalists throughout the network to focus on better serving the voter during this election. Ultimately, all of these initiatives are expected to have a tangible impact on our company, both in delivering on our mission of serving our audience as well as revenue generation. We drove meaningful audience growth in the second half of 2023. We're scaling the outcomes of our successes in 2024, and we're leaning hard into new initiatives expected to drive new and sustainable growth. I am profoundly thankful to be leading the content team. We are proud to be a growth engine at Gannett, and we're doing it with a commitment to our purpose.
Back to you, Mike.
Mike Reed: Thanks, Kristen. We're so excited to see the significant audience growth in the closing months of 2023, especially when you're considering how large our audience already is to see that large scale and then to be able to continue to grow from there is very exciting and we look forward to scaling and having that impact our 2024, 2025 and 2026 results as we go forward. And in parallel to the digital revenue growth in our media properties is the growth of our DMS business, LocaliQ. Our DMS business continues to operate at a high level and it ended the full year 2023 with more than $475 million of highly recurring revenue, approximately 15,000 core platform customers, double digit adjusted EBITDA margins, healthy ARPU, and customer budget retention rates of over 95%.
In spite of the relatively flat performance in core platform revenues during the fourth quarter, we did manage to achieve full year growth over the prior year. And importantly, we anticipate revenue growth for the first quarter of 2024, as well as the full year. We are also pleased to see core platform ARPU hit a new high in the fourth quarter. We are excited to have Chris Cho lead our DMS business in 2024. Chris is a proven leader in the product field and his team is laser focused on driving future growth, expanding our product portfolio, and providing a best-in-class marketing solution for our SMB partners. And I'll now hand it over to Chris to provide an update on the business and outline some of the exciting initiatives that are in motion.
Chris?
Chris Cho: Thank you, Mike. I'm pleased with the remarkable resilience our DMS business showcased despite a more challenging environment in the latter half of the year. In 2023, our DMS business continued to grow. Our fundamentals remain strong, and we laid the groundwork for expected success in 2024 and beyond. As we head into 2024, I am thrilled about the strategic initiatives underway as well as the ones we are poised to pursue. In the fourth quarter, DMS revenue reflected a continuation of the macro trends from Q3. General consumer stress and weakness slowed the growth in our largest vertical home services, along with other large verticals such as health care, professional and other services. We have already begun to see this dissipate in 2024 and as a result, our DMS revenue is expected to grow 1% to 2% in Q1.
And we also anticipate a higher growth trajectory for the full year of 2024 than experienced in 2023. Several actions are currently underway expected to further accelerate the business. In 2024, we will strategically align ourselves to meet demand where it is most prevalent and offers the greatest potential. Home services will remain a high priority given its size and its growth potential. We continue to be highly optimistic about this customer segment and expect to see double digit growth for the full year of 2024. Additionally, we will replicate the scale achieved there by doubling down in areas where we have strong domain expertise and have seen strong demand such as health care, real estate and health and fitness. Scale in verticals is incredibly important in serving our clients and optimizing customer results and we've been building that critical scale beyond home services, and we are well positioned to meet the increasing demand in these verticals.
The contribution from these high potential categories is expected to accelerate in 2024 as we leverage our extensive knowledge and expertise in both sales and service within these domains. Additionally, in 2024, we are placing a strong emphasis on product development to expand our overall portfolio and increase our total addressable market with AI powered solutions that we believe will make the LocaliQ value proposition even stronger for our clients. I am energized. I'm excited to be leading our DMS business into 2024. We have made great progress in 2023, and we believe the potential is even greater for the year ahead. I want to thank the incredibly talented LocaliQ team for their relentless effort to achieve our goals and deliver innovative marketing solutions to our valued customers.
Mike?
Mike Reed: Thanks, Chris. It's very exciting to see where the DMS business is heading under your leadership. The expansion into these new categories is going to be a critical component of growth, give us great diversification in our revenue streams and frankly it increases our addressable market for this business that combined with our new product development gives us a lot of confidence that we'll return to pretty significant growth in this business over the next three years. So really excited to see that. And overall, I'm very excited by the execution in 2023 by Gannett and its team and the progress we've already made in 2024. We have a top tier passionate leadership team, one of the best I've ever worked with frankly and I've been a CEO for a long time in this industry and I just love this team we've assembled.
We have a dynamic content strategy and a growing DMS business. We feel the momentum shifting here at Gannett and we are heading into 2024 with incredible optimism. And with that, I'll now turn the call over to Doug to provide additional detail and color around our 2023 fourth quarter financials, as well as the details on our full year 2024 and midterm business outlook. Doug?
Doug Horne: Thank you, Mike, and good morning, everyone. As Mike mentioned, we are very excited with the progress in our digital revenue, the resulting solid financial performance in the fourth quarter as well as the significant progress against our strategic priorities. Let's begin with our consolidated results and just to note, all the comparisons are on a year over year basis unless otherwise noted. For Q4, total operating revenues were $669.4 million a decrease of 8.4% or 8% on a same store basis. This represents a 40-basis point sequential improvement from Q3 revenue trends, marking four consecutive quarters of top line trend improvement. It is encouraging to note that we are seeing positive developments in several key digital areas.
As we look ahead, our execution remains focused on cultivating sustainable revenue growth, growing our digital audience and customer base, increasing our monetization of this base and continuing to stabilize our print business. As we continue to execute on these fronts, we expect the pace and the magnitude of our revenue trend to accelerate -- trend improvement to accelerate. Adjusted EBITDA totaled $74.1 million in the fourth quarter, a decrease of 18% or $16.2 million. Adjusted EBITDA margin in Q4 was 11.1% compared to 12.4% in the prior year. Revenue declines were largely mitigated by strategic cost controls, although in the fourth quarter, we cycled against some of the larger temporary cost savings from the prior year, which resulted in an estimated $9 million impact in savings from the prior year quarter.
On a sequential basis, adjusted EBITDA increased $14.6 million representing solid growth over Q3. The solid improvement in adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA margin from Q3 to Q4 reflects a seasonally stronger revenue, enhanced focus on high margin revenue streams and our commitment to expense management. In Q4, we continue to modulate our cost base in alignment with our overall revenue trends. Operating expenses in the fourth quarter decreased approximately 9% despite the temporary actions in the prior year, and we are also pleased to see the continued deflationary pressures for some of our larger raw material categories. We anticipate that these cost savings will contribute favorably to our operating expense trends moving forward. Total digital revenues in Q4 were $277.1 million up 2.
9%, representing the 3rd consecutive quarter of growth. Digital advertising, which is a component of total digital revenues, posted its strongest results for the year, thanks to stabilizing rates in our programmatic business and a notable increase in our platform page views. This is a very promising sign, which we believe reflects the success of our expanding audience and our renewed content strategy. Our digital only subscription revenue growth remains strong with increased subscriptions on a sequential basis and significant year-over-year growth in digital only ARPU. In Q4, our digital only subscription revenues reached a high of approximately $42 million growing 18.3% on a same store basis. Digital only ARPU also reached a new high of $7.05 growing approximately 20% year-over-year.
Longer term, we see an opportunity to double our digital only ARPU due to the highly local and relevant content our team produces. While our print advertising trends remain impacted by secular declines, we are pleased to have improved our trend by 7 points compared to the Q4 in the prior year. Print advertising remains an effective tool for many national and local businesses, and we expect these trends to return to mid-single digit decreases in 2024. The results in print subscription revenue continue to show promising improvements driven by the actions we have implemented to enhance the subscriber experience. We are pleased to report that our service levels and the percentage of open routes are at their best levels in two years. In Q4 alone, our open routes decreased an additional 20%.
Furthermore, the conversion to mail delivery has proven to be a consistent and effective delivery model to our consumers in areas where staffing delivery routes is a more persistent challenge. In 2023, we successfully converted 46 markets to mail delivery with plans for approximately 53 more markets in the first half of 2024. Mail delivery not only provides a better consumer experience, but it is on average approximately 50% of the cost compared to carrier delivery. In Q4, our other revenues category, which includes commercial printing and delivery as well as other digital syndication and affiliate revenues, benefited from growth in partnership revenue, but we did experience an overall 8.5% decrease on a same store basis due to the secular declines associated with commercial print volumes.
In the fourth quarter, we began reporting in three segments. Separating our Gannett Media segment into two segments, domestic Gannett Media and Newsquest. Domestic Gannett Media is comprised of USA TODAY daily and weekly content brands and approximately 220 local U.S. markets across 43 states. Newsquest reflects the operations of more than 220 local brands and magazines across the UK. The primary operational difference between the two segments is the home delivered nature of the print product in the U.S. and the single copy retail outlet distribution model in the UK. This difference in distribution models creates a difference in margin for the two segments. Looking at the Domestic Gannett Media segment, we believe our strategic initiatives continue to play a crucial role in driving sequential improvements in same store revenue trends.
For Q4, our same store revenue decrease of 9.3% represents an 80-basis point improvement from Q3 revenue trends. Additionally, our digital businesses continue to operate at a high level in Q4 with total digital revenues growing 5.6% on a same store basis. As a result, total digital revenues returned to full year growth on a same store basis, and we expect this to accelerate this momentum in 2024. Turning to Newsquest. Despite the challenged inflationary environment in the UK, Newsquest delivered a strong quarterly performance. For Q4, adjusted EBITDA in the segment was $11.3 million growing 23.3% compared to the same period in the prior year. For the full year, our adjusted EBITDA of $50.1 million reflects the highest figure since 2017, growing approximately 25.2% over the prior year as a result of the successful integration of the Q1 2022 Archit acquisition.
For Q4, total revenues were approximately $58.2 million down 2% on a same store basis and represents a 390-basis point sequential improvement from Q3 revenue trends. Equally important, we are pleased to see total digital revenues experience their second consecutive quarter of growth in Q4, which is a trend we expect to continue in 2024. In our Digital Marketing Solutions business, total core platform revenue in the Q4 was $119.4 million. Adjusted EBITDA for the segment was $12.5 million representing a margin of 10.4% in the fourth quarter. We had approximately 15,000 core platform customers in the fourth quarter with core platform ARPU reaching a new high, up 2% over the prior year. As Chris highlighted, our strategic plan for 2024 involves continuing to optimize and grow our core DMS solutions while at the same time expanding our product portfolio with AI powered software solutions, which we believe will increase our total addressable market and core platform revenue.
Let's now shift to the balance sheet. At the end of the fourth quarter, our cash balance stood at $100.2 million and our outstanding net debt was approximately $1 billion. Our Q4 free cash flow improved by $14.4 million to $12.7 million and for the full year free cash flow was $56.5 million which is up approximately $60 million from 2022. We ended Q4 with approximately $1.1 billion of total debt, reflecting $23.9 million of total debt pay down for the quarter. For the full year, we repaid $141.6 million of total debt, which exceeded our initial projections for the year. Debt repayment remains our primary use of capital allocation and we will continue to focus on reducing our overall leverage. As a result, we expect to repay $110 million in 2024.
I'm also pleased to report that our first lien net leverage ended the year at two times, which reflects our current year debt reduction as well as the improved EBITDA performance in 2023. In Q4, we completed three real estate and nonstrategic asset sales bringing our full year total to $85.3 million. In 2024, we expect our real estate and non strategic asset sales to be in the range of $45 million to $50 million and we will continue to evaluate our full product portfolio on an ongoing basis. In 2024, we are committed to making greater investments in our people and technology and reducing the amount of money spent on underutilized real estate. This means that we are assessing our office space on a market-by-market basis to free up additional resources to reinvest in journalism and content, bolster both our nationwide and local coverage, better serve our partners and accelerate our digital future.
We have a significant real estate footprint in McLean, Virginia, which has been underutilized since the pandemic, which like for many companies prompted a fundamental shift in how and where Gannett employees work. Given the success of our flexible work model and our current office space requirements, we plan to vacate our McLean office, move our headquarters to our existing location in New York City and transition the USAID Newsroom to our DC Bureau. It is important to note that as a result of these moves, we will incur an impairment charge of approximately $45 million in the first quarter of 2024, but importantly, this will not impact our cash flow. Turning now to our guidance. As we look forward to 2024, we expect another year of adjusted EBITDA growth over the prior year, driven by improving revenue.
[Technical Issues]
Operator: This is the operator. Speakers, can you hear me?
Kristin Roberts: I'm Kristen. I can hear you.
Operator: I cannot, Mr. Esposito, can you hear me? I think…
Kristin Roberts: Yeah. I think the main room just went out, So I'm going to tell them now.
Operator: Alright. Let me just quickly connect them. Just give me a moment. The management line has been disconnected. Please be on hold. I'll be quickly get them reconnected. Ladies and gentlemen, the management line has been reconnected. Please go ahead.
Doug Horne: Thank you very much. Apologies for the technical difficulties. As I was mentioning, we are planning to vacate our McLean office space in Virginia, and as a result of these moves, we will incur an impairment charge of approximately $45 million in the first quarter 2024, but importantly, this will not impact our cash flow. Going to now turn to our guidance. As we look forward to 2024, we expect another year of adjusted EBITDA growth over the prior year, driven by improving revenue trends and ongoing cost management. We expect total digital revenues to grow approximately 10% year-over-year, bringing total revenue trends in at low to mid single digit declines year over year. Revenue trends on a same store basis are expected to begin growing on an overall basis as we near the end of 2024.
We expect revenue trends to continue to improve sequentially starting in Q1. We expect adjusted EBITDA in the first quarter of 2024 to perform similar to the fourth quarter of 2023, steadily improving to meaningful growth in the back half of the year. In 2024, we will continue to make further investments in our technology infrastructure and in our product portfolio, driving an increase in capital expenditures year-over-year. This is expected to have a $15 million impact on free cash flow for 2024. However, free cash flow is still expected to grow in 2024. The expected digital revenue growth in 2024 is the foundation for what we believe is sustainable growth in total revenues across 2025 and 2026 along with growth in adjusted EBITDA and net income.
Free cash flow generation is expected to accelerate in future years with a 40% CAGR from 2023 to 2026. As we grow our audience, expand our product suite and diversify our digital monetization, we believe we can establish a sustainably growing media and digital marketing solutions company that holds true to our mission to enrich the communities and businesses we serve. I will now hand it back to Mike.
Mike Reed: Thanks, Doug. Again, as Doug said, apologies for the technical difficulties, our line dropped. It seemed to happen right when we mentioned that we're moving the Gannett headquarters from McLean to New York. So maybe the old Gannett gods were trying to tell us something. Anyways, let me recap before we move to Q& A and then I'll be back after Q&A too to wrap the call up. To recap, as we're entering 2024 with a great deal of optimism as you've heard here this morning. We have a very strong team here at Gannett. We've made several key hires to our leadership team and believe we have the right structure and personnel in place to drive the speed and execution that we need to evolve this business. In 2023, we saw significant improvement in our key financial metrics.
We told you we would focus on profitability, digital revenue growth, and improve our balance sheet, and we have done just that. We grew adjusted EBITDA for the full year, which combined with our $142 million of debt repayment reduced our first lien net leverage by about 27% to 2.0 times. We generated free cash flow of approximately $56 million representing over $60 million of growth over the prior year. We improved our revenue trends in each quarter consecutively throughout the year and we expect to end 2024 with revenue near flat and we believe this sets us up nicely for anticipated revenue growth in 2025. Total digital revenue for the full year continued to grow with nearly 40% of total revenue coming from digital sources and more than 41% from digital in the fourth quarter.
We expect that percentage to move towards 45% of total revenue in 2024. We are also seeing wins in several of our key digital initiatives. Importantly, we are growing our audience and our engagement with that audience. Our paid digital subscription strategy resulted in new highs in revenue and ARPU, as well as increasing volumes in the back half of the year. The five partnerships we announced in 2023 are expected to become a greater contributor to our overall performance in 2024 and of course beyond. These high margin deals are anticipated to generate approximately $20 million in affiliate revenue in 2024 and grow more meaningfully over the long term. As you can see, our commitment to our strategy and most importantly our readers and customers is unwavering.
We believe we are on the path to sustainable revenue growth, while also increasing our free cash flow generation. Now, I'll turn it over to the operator for questions. Operator?
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