News Corp prepares to offload Unruly to Tremor
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp has reached a provisional deal to sell its video solutions arm, Unruly, to adtech business Tremor.
Initially reported by Sky News in the UK, a Murdoch-founded news outlet, the deal sees News Corp take an equity stake in Tremor, and the business become the media empire’s video lead for the next three years.
News Corp is planning to sell video ad service Unruly at a discount in a bid to streamline its business
This is the best thing that could happen to Unruly.
An innovative tech business has no place in the lacklustre, ink smeared halls of the past and the lack of Murdoch funding is a small price to pay.
News simply bought an auto play video player for $130M. Kudos though to the founding team for exiting at such a high price.
The Cannes parties will be subdued without the News Corp dollar
A further sign that print is failing dismally when NewsCorp starts hacking off portions of its business to offset losses.
Unruly was the unit that failed to turn a profit. It is also implied in the article here, with ongoing losses at both unruly and News America Marketing.
It feels like Unruly had an identity crisis where it had to become more than a purely outstream business, plus News Corp (at least in Australia) charging a high markup on their CPCV offering didn’t seem to help either
The previous MD, Lance Traore, used to present at events stating a sale price of $250m (including a Mumbrella event). This was obviously based on hitting certain targets which i guess did not happen.
from my reading, news limited only got some stock from tremor (no cash).
based on the 6.91% worth of tremor’s stock that news limited is receiving, that’s worth GBP 14.42 million based on tremor’s stock price as of today. converting GBP to australian dollars, $27.4 million.
so news limited bought unruly for $130 million (or possibly a higher number), and sold it for $27.4 million (and got stock . . . not cash). their tremor shares are locked up for 18 months (news cannot sell those tremor shares until around june 2021).
How does a company get the power of the sales force of News ltd and have such a strong decline? Answer : Facebook / YouTube / media in-house, other superior video options & service, a good sell story to News where someone missed the cracks etc
the perfect exit by the previous owners who would have had a good inkling on what was around the corner
Nice theory. A factor that the previous owners wouldn’t have been able to anticipate (but which has now worked in their favour) was how abysmal News Corp was at promoting their own acquisition in market.
Unruly (or anything interesting in digital for that matter) was rarely ever mentioned to us in agency updates – all we got was the same shit about circulation figures and the power of EMMA (lol).
As the first comment states above, Unruly as a product deserved much better than News.
i believe there was some solid negotiation at high levels by News to get Unruly on plans in the early days but the market changed
Knowing News, it would be less negotiation and more..
“You better add that $40k Unruly booking to your $160k front page buy…. or you wont get your $2m worth of annual added value”
You nailed it! Media agencies didn’t have a choice . Not an ideal situation
also, worth noting that the purchase of Unruly occurred when they were in the UK, europe, asia and only just properly entered the AU market and so all their long term relationships and growth are from those markets
what would be the value of the Australian business?
Tough market out there
from my further reading, news limited only got some stock from tremor (no cash).
based on the 6.91% worth of tremor’s stock that news limited is receiving, that’s worth GBP 14.42 million based on tremor’s stock price as of today. converting GBP to australian dollars, $27.4 million.
so news limited bought unruly for $130 million, and sold it for $27.4 million (and got stock . . . not cash). their tremor shares are locked up for 18 months (news cannot sell those tremor shares until around june 2021).