Ups and downs for News Corp in the latest quarter include subscriber growth in Australia and at its upmarket UK mastheads, while The Sun there, and also the New York Post fell.

But the real highlight was a 17 per cent jump in revenue to a record US$343 million (A$540 million) for listings operator REA Group, driven by the continued strong Australian residential market.

News Corp Australia closed the year with 1.12 million digital subscribers, 979,000 of them for news mastheads, up from 1.051 million and 940,000 respetively the previous year.

The Sun dropped to 70 million global monthly unique users from 143 million the previous year, and the New York Post to 90 million uniques from 124 million in 2023.

Chief executive Robert Thomson reported second quarter revenues of US$2.24 billion, up five per cent, and driven by growth in digital real estate, book publishing and Dow Jones. Net income from “continuing operations” in the quarter was US$306 million, up 58 per cent on the same period a year ago.

“News Corp had a fruitful quarter, qualitatively and quantitatively,” said Thomson. “Revenues on a continuing operations basis, which excludes Foxtel, grew five per cent to US$2.24 billion, net income from continuing operations surged 58 per cent to US$306 million and total segment EBITDA rose 20 per cent to US$478 million.”

He described the agreement to sell Foxtel to DAZN for A$3.4 billion as “a significant step towards simplification”. On the generative AI front, he was “pleased with our partnership with OpenAI” and “looking forward with relish to document discovery” in News’ legal action against “the perplexing Perplexity”.

Thomson said the “sudden rise” of DeepSeek was a salutary lesson for all AI players, but lacked the immediacy of trusted news “and, ultimately, content will be king in the world of AI.”

On the book publishing front, revenues rose eight per cent or US$45 million, thanks to key titles such as Cher’s The Memoir and Gregory Maguire’s Wicked

… not to mention higher bible sales.

News media revenues fell two per cent (US$ 12 million) mostly because of

lower revenues from the transfer of printing contracts to News UK’s joint venture with DMG Media, and lower advertising revenues. Segment EBITDA increased US $17 million (30 per cent) thanks to cost savings

at News UK from the DMG Media deal.

Circulation and subscription revenues were flat.

Pictured: The joint venture with DMG Media led to rationalisation of UK print capacity