How Newsweek, Nearing Nine-Digit Revenues, Engineered an Unlikely Turnaround

The general interest publisher Newsweek, which turns 93 years old next month, generated $90 million in revenue at a profit margin of 20% last year, the clearest evidence yet of the commercial turnaround afoot at one of the most historic news organizations in the U.S.

The 2024 revenue alone more than quadruples the sales Newsweek generated in 2018, when current chief executive and co-owner Dev Pragad took over operations at the company. That year, Newsweek generated $20 million in revenue but at a loss margin of 10%.

Since then, the publisher has engineered one of the more unlikely reinventions of the digital media era, slogging through a protracted legal battle while building an enormous digital footprint that has enabled the company to generate robust programmatic revenue.

It has been profitable on an EBITDA basis since 2019, generated profit margins north of 20% since 2022, and was profitable on a standalone basis in 2024, according to Pragad.

“The mindset we have is that we are grateful that we had the opportunity to transform this business,” Pragad said. “We focused on attention to detail, which has allowed us to move from a position of strength to strength as we work to diversify the business.”

With the distractions of its past largely settled, Newsweek has now turned its eye to the future. The company has found profitability largely thanks to a solid digital advertising business, which made up 63% of its revenue in 2024, but it has plans to launch and grow a handful of new lines of business in the coming months.

Audience growth and new features

Newsweek owes much of its current momentum to its steady audience growth, which runs counter to the declining readership plaguing much of the news media.

Pragad attributes the increase largely to Newsweek’s data-driven approach to editorial, using audience preference to determine what is covered and how. Still, many newsrooms employ a similar strategy but have not experienced such consistent growth, according to Prohaska Consulting partner and senior vice president of publisher operations and tech strategy Ameet Shah.

The audience traction also stems from using Reddit as a central hub for its distribution strategy.

Since September 2023, when Google unveiled its Helpful Content Update, Reddit has risen dramatically in search engine visibility. By organically seeding links to its reporting in popular Reddit forums, such as r/politics, Newsweek has seen a traffic windfall. 

In December 2024, for instance, the publisher saw nearly 20% of its overall traffic come from Reddit alone, according to data from Similarweb. Most publishers expect to generate a single-digit percentage of their total traffic from the platform if any at all.

The 300-person company has also introduced several on-site features designed to encourage reader engagement and time spent. 

A partnership with Google AI unveiled in October yielded an improved recommendation algorithm, suggesting related articles to readers that were responsible for between 300,000 and 500,000 incremental page views per day in November, according to Pragad.

Similarly, the publisher has taken pains to feature reader comments prominently across the home page—roughly 10,000 are posted daily, according to senior vice president of audience development Josh Awtry—to encourage its audience to invest themselves in Newsweek reporting.

In October 2023, it also began attaching a Fairness Meter to its stories, inviting readers to evaluate the bias they perceived in its reporting. 

Since its debut, readers have submitted more than 3.5 million votes, with 70% of them rating articles as fair, according to Awtry. This tool, along with other features like The Daily Debate, helps to underscore the centrist approach Newsweek has taken to its reporting.

“The page-view generation is really interesting—and hard to determine why it’s so successful,” Shah said. “It suggests that the peripheral aspects—recommendations, fairness, comments—are features that are resonating.”

Past legal controversy

Alongside driving growth, Newsweek has had to contend with navigating its own series of internal criminal scandals. 

The troubles stem from Newsweek’s former owner, International Business Times, which acquired Newsweek in 2013. In January 2018, IBT founder Etienne Uzac became the subject of a money-laundering investigation that involved Olivet University, an American college, and The Community, a church once accused of being a cult.

In 2018, IBT spun out Newsweek as an independent entity co-owned by Pragad and Jonathan Davis, who was the CEO of IBT until December 2022. In July 2022, IBT sued Pragad and the holding group that manages Newsweek, seeking to undo the 2018 deal.

That suit was dismissed in December 2022, after which IBT appealed the decision in June 2023. The appellate court dismissed the appeal and reaffirmed the validity of the contract authorizing the spin-out, according to public legal documents. In September 2024, the controversy passed the six-year statute of limitations, making it impossible for IBT to advance any further claims.

The multiyear saga weighed on Newsweek financially, on top of absorbing the attention of its newsroom, which fastidiously covered the melodrama, and its executive team. The debt Newsweek owed stemming from its IBT ownership also forced the publisher to manage costs stringently, which led to criticism of its practices at the time.

New and expanded business lines

The company has since dug itself out from its financial and legal burdens and is now focused on using its growing profitability to build for the future. Chief among these priorities is a series of commercial objectives. 

First, it aims to increase the portion of its advertising revenue generated through direct efforts, according to head of sales Danielle Varvaro.

In 2024, it generated about 80% of its ad revenue through programmatic and 20% through direct sales. In 2025, the company is aiming for 60% and 40%, respectively by growing its business-to-business advertising operation, verticalizing its non-news content, and working with relevant brands.

Core to that effort is a nascent events business, which Newsweek only began monetizing last year. In October it hired Megan Knapp, who led experiential at Digiday for 10 years, to build out the new division. The company aims to host 30 events this year.

Both this push into business-to-business advertising and events coincide with another major initiative from Newsweek: its rankings business, which uses Newsweek reporting to rank businesses within its non-news content, then monetizes the rankings with brand licensing deals.

This division has been the fastest-growing part of the Newsweek business for the last two years, and in 2024 it made up 13% of Newsweek’s overall revenue, according to Pragad. Content syndication makes up about 16% of its revenue.

The company has also begun exploring a series of potential subscription efforts. 

Still, the company plans to approach all of its new ventures with an iterative mindset, part of its broader emphasis on experimentation.

“Just because you have a plan doesn’t mean it’s going to work—you try ten things and you’re lucky if two or three work,” Pragad said. “The real question is: What do you do with those learnings? I think our team is good at that.”