Gannett (GCI) Acquires Majority Stake in Grateful Ventures
Gannett Co., Inc. GCI has recently acquired majority ownership in Grateful Ventures, LLC — a digital media company — specialized in lifestyle content including food and cooking websites as well as blogs.
This investment is expected to strengthen and diversify USA TODAY NETWORK’s portfolio — a subsidiary unit of Gannett — alongside increasing its audience base. Also, it is likely to boost the parent company’s owned and operated digital websites.
With this acquisition, Gannett looks to contemplate new avenues of revenue generation in order to offset the dwindling advertising revenues in the print media industry. In fact, the increasing online readership has made the print-advertising model increasingly redundant.
Apart from Gannett, other publishing companies like New Media Investment Group Inc. NEWM, The New York Times Company NYT and The McClatchy Company MNI are looking for different ways to generate revenues.
Initially, Gannett will focus on Grateful Ventures’ food and cooking category that will run on the former’s websites. The USA TODAY NETWORK’s content and promotions are anticipated to boost Grateful’s reach through Thanksgiving.com in the holiday season as well as enhance its blogging network, Food Blog Stars. Further, both will together develop — FoodBlogs.com — a social media platform especially for food bloggers.
Going forward, there are chances to expand and launch new lifestyle sites that consist of beauty and style, parenting, health and fitness, among others. Moreover, the Phoenix-based Grateful Ventures has intentions to launch a state-of-the-art video-production and photography facility including a kitchen studio.
In 2018, as part of USA TODAY NETWORK, Grateful Ventures will introduce various personality-driven lifestyle contents, which includes long-tail videos, live interactions, events as well as passion-related subjects to build a meaningful relationship with its audience. These strategies, in turn, are likely to expand USA TODAY NETWORK’s advertising-related stuff through branded content, influencer marketing along with events sponsorships.
Notably, Grateful Ventures, founded in 2014, reaches about 8.5 million audiences in a month. Therefore, we believe this ownership to boost Gannett’s print and online media categories with producing original and high-quality contents, besides increasing viewers’ base.
A glance at Gannett’s share price performance shows that the stock has rallied 12.8% in the last six months, underperforming the Zacks Newspapers Publishing industry’s gain of 21.2%. Currently, the industry is placed at the bottom 17% (213 out of 256) of the Zacks classified industries.
Gannett, the owner of local newspapers and more than 100 local media brands, carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). Also, the stock boasts a VGM Score of A, which highlights its inherent strength. You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.
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New York Times Company (The) (NYT) : Free Stock Analysis Report
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New Media Investment Group Inc. (NEWM) : Free Stock Analysis Report
McClatchy Company (The) (MNI) : Free Stock Analysis Report
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