News Corp, the mass media giant chaired by Rupert Murdoch of Fox News fame, has moved to buy Investor’s Business Daily, a fairly popular American newspaper and news website covering the global stock market and business activities. 

News Corp is paying $275 million to buy Investor’s Business Daily from O’Neil Capital Management, an asset management firm that’s owned the paper for a long time. The firm is chaired by William J. O’Neil who’s himself the founder of the paper.

As part of News Corp, Investor’s Business Daily will be housed under Dow Jones, a News Corp subsidiary that also operates the famous Wall Street Journal. It’s an ideal acquisition for Dow Jones which’s a leading global provider of business news and information.

• Investor’s Business Daily, IBD for short, owns business website Investors.com which’s a digital outlet generating the most revenue for the company. It’s monetized primarily with subscriptions, subscriptions that News Corp notes overlaps with that of its Dow Jones subsidiary and thus will bolster its profitability.

• IBD has nearly 100,000 digital subscribers that it draws revenue from. The company says it reached an audience of 10.8 million average monthly unique visitors in February 2021.

As for News Corp, it’s acquiring IBD at a time of flourishing business for itself. Its most recent financial quarter was the most profitable it’s been since it was spun out as a separate company in 2013, reporting a profit of $261 million on $2.4 billion in revenue. 

With its record profitability, it’s then no surprise that News Corp has coughed out a large amount of cash to buy IBD. Its acquisition of IBD is expected to close in the second quarter of 2021, still subject to regulatory approval that’s likely to be given with no hassle.

Photo: “Rupert Murdoch – World Economic Forum Annual Meeting Davos 2009” by World Economic Forum, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

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