How Time Turned Events Into Its Biggest Revenue Driver

The legacy news brand Time has nearly completed that most modern of digital media pivots: After years of gradual transformation, it has now become an events company.

This year, revenue from its events business—including the attendant digital footprint of those events—is on pace to represent 50% of its total revenue. That’s up from 28% in 2023, according to chief strategy officer Dan Macsai. Within the advertising business specifically, events make up nearly 80% of its revenue.

The shift has been rapid: Time hosted 11 events in 2022 and will host more than 40 this year. Advertising revenue overall grew 23% year over year in 2025, which followed on double-digit gains in each of the two prior years.

“If you’d asked me 13 years ago what powered Time’s business, I would have said print or digital,” Macsai said. “Now it is unquestionably events. They’ve become the front door to Time—more new partners start their relationship with us in our event rooms than anywhere else.”

That front-door dynamic is showing up in the data. Ninety-one percent of Time’s 2025 event partners also invested across other Time platforms, including digital, social, and branded content, according to the company. For Time, events are a customer acquisition engine in addition to a revenue stream.

The growth of the sector is rooted, in part, to approaching events sponsorships from a collaborative mindset rather than a fixed offering, Macsai added. Rather than selling logo placements or stage time, Time now works with partners to build integrated presences across its franchises. (Time also does not ticket its events.)

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Rolex, for instance, is the official timepiece of the Time 100. And on Tuesday, Time named Target as its inaugural Design Partner across four major 2026 franchises: Women of the Year, Time Creators, Time Next, and the newly launching Time 100 Sports.

“I tell people that Time is a megaphone,” Macsai said. “We ask: What do you want to say with that megaphone? Then we amplify it far beyond the room.”

That amplification is increasingly the point. Time reaches more than 100 million people globally, and each partnership is designed with structured digital and social extensions that expand reach well beyond the live audience. The result has been a roster of repeat partners—including Toyota, Booking.com, Cognizant, Pinterest, Rolex, and now Target—and 33 new brand partners added in 2025 alone.

The publisher is also expanding its franchise portfolio aggressively. 

This summer it will launch Time Sports, celebrating the 100 most influential figures at the intersection of sports and culture. A Time 100 AI Leadership Forum is set to debut in May in New York. And later this year, the company will introduce Executives of the Year, its first business-to-business editorial and events platform, spotlighting CIOs, CTOs, and chief data officers.

Despite this rapid expansion, the events business has not come at the expense of editorial standards, according to Macsai. Every event mixes sponsored and purely editorial content, and speakers do not receive questions in advance. 

Eric Fleming, an experiential consultant who worked with Time in the early days of its events expansion, around 2019, said the company’s trajectory reflects a broader transformation. 

“We’re witnessing a live-time case study of watching an old media organization transform into what it means to be a modern media organization,” he said. “They’ve gotten really smart about how to do this. They are not just rinsing out a ballroom and throwing some slides on the screen.”

Fleming flagged one meaningful risk. As Time’s events business has taken on a significant global footprint, with gatherings in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Cannes, it is acutely susceptible to geopolitical disruption in ways that a purely digital business would not be. For now, though, the momentum is hard to argue with. 

Time’s evolution mirrors a broader shift playing out across the media industry, where publishers from Semafor to The Atlantic have leaned into events as a more durable, differentiated revenue stream than digital advertising alone. 

“The events business is not easy,” Fleming said. “We do a lot of pointing at things that go wrong, but driving these kinds of results requires a lot of people doing everything right over and over again.”