{"id":605488,"date":"2023-02-07T07:49:51","date_gmt":"2023-02-07T13:49:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.sellorbuyhomefast.com\/index.php\/2023\/02\/07\/the-athletics-sebastian-tomich-is-looking-beyond-ads-and-subscriptions-to-reach-profitability\/"},"modified":"2023-02-07T07:49:51","modified_gmt":"2023-02-07T13:49:51","slug":"the-athletics-sebastian-tomich-is-looking-beyond-ads-and-subscriptions-to-reach-profitability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2023\/02\/07\/the-athletics-sebastian-tomich-is-looking-beyond-ads-and-subscriptions-to-reach-profitability\/","title":{"rendered":"The Athletic\u2019s Sebastian Tomich is looking beyond ads and subscriptions to reach profitability"},"content":{"rendered":"
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February 7, 2023\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a0\u00a04 min read<\/span> | By Kayleigh Barber<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Subscribe: Apple Podcasts<\/a> \u2022 Stitcher<\/a> \u2022 Spotify<\/a><\/p>\n

Last September, The Athletic introduced ads<\/a> to its business model for the first time (aside from podcast and newsletter ads that\u2019ve been in the mix since the publication\u2019s origins in 2016). This opened a door to revenue diversification, something the subscriptions-centered business had been lacking.<\/p>\n

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The path to profitability was originally set for 2023<\/a>, and was later pushed back to 2025 after The New York Times bought the sports publication. To achieve this profit goal, The Athletic\u2019s chief commercial officer Sebastian Tomich is focused on more than just selling ads directly to prospective advertisers. Programmatic advertising, ticket sales, sports betting partnerships, and licensing intellectual property to streamers to produce documentaries and scripted series are all priorities for 2023, he said on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.<\/p>\n

Here are highlights from the conversation, which have been lightly edited for clarity and length.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

The first meeting is always the easiest to get<\/strong><\/h2>\n

I had the benefit of leading the charge for a company that\u2019s getting into advertising for the first time. And so one of the benefits of that is that you\u2019re always gonna get the first meeting. It\u2019s the second and third meeting that become a lot more challenging to get, but I\u2019ve got 1,000 clients to meet with just to show off what we\u2019re doing. And I have to believe, I do believe and the team believes, that this is always going to be a meeting worth taking.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We are not seeing any type of challenge in terms of getting meetings. Of course booking ad dollars in a contracting market is always going to be more challenging than a growing market. But it helps a lot to be new. And also, there\u2019s a huge benefit to being able to build something from the ground up. We\u2019re not spending any time trying to unwind any legacy system or antiquated way of working with advertisers. We get to start fresh.<\/p>\n

The programmatic tap is on \u2014 for the moment\u00a0<\/strong><\/h2>\n

It\u2019s money, we can turn it on and off. And, personally, I have a bias towards great design and I tend to find that programmatic advertising can infringe on that. I\u2019m always pretty cautious, particularly when you have a product where people are paying for it directly. So I\u2019m never going to say programmatic is a central focus. Programmatic is a way to generate revenue [though] and again, you always have the opportunity to turn it off. It is on right now and it\u2019s on as long as we need it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The thing I will say to the team is the more we sell directly, the less we sell programmatically. So please sell more. And from a quality perspective, generally what I\u2019m finding right now is it is benign. Of course there are things that come through that I don\u2019t love, but they tend to be pretty isolated. And we\u2019ve been able to maintain this healthy balance with getting some programmatic advertising in but at the same time maintaining the premium experience that makes people feel good about paying us directly.<\/p>\n

Natural extensions into the world of sports\u00a0<\/strong><\/h2>\n

We are thinking of [ticketing, merchandise and betting] as ways that we can add value to sports fans\u2019 lives. And they happen to also be ways we can make money too. But like betting or not, a sizable portion of our audience is betting on sports and so it makes sense for us to have some type of offering. In this case, we have great partners at BetMGM, we have betting content, we have exclusivity with them, we have been providing odds \u2014 we\u2019re not doing affiliate marketing for them, so we\u2019re not incentivizing people to bet \u2014 but for those who are interested, we have been a contact for them. The world of affiliate marketing is just something we\u2019ve chosen not to pursue at the moment [but] I have learned now to never say never on anything.<\/p>\n

In the case of ticketing, same thing, like what sports fan isn\u2019t trying to go to a game. So again, it\u2019s an opportunity for us to make money and also provide value back to the readers. We do not have a partner right now, but it\u2019s something that we are very interested in pursuing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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