Fox Corp’s fiscal year closed at the end of June, and boy was it lucrative.
Fox’s revenue last quarter increased 28% year over year to $4.2 billion, thanks in no small part to the FIFA World Cup. Ad revenue was up an eye-popping 78% YOY to $1.9 billion, which Fox attributed not just to the World Cup but also to continued growth at Tubi, its AVOD platform.
And with its pending acquisition of Roku still on track to close in 2027 (more on that later), Fox’s streaming ambitions are only getting bigger.
In the meantime, though, roughly $1.5 billion of Fox’s ad revenue growth – which shot up 108% YOY – came from its television segment, which includes Fox and Tubi, but not Fox News. (It’s worth noting that Fox News added 400 new advertisers during Fox’s past fiscal year.)
And speaking of cable network programming – an area where other major broadcasters have been struggling mightily – Fox was able to grow advertising and distribution YOY by 22% and 7%, respectively.
For its full year, Fox achieved a record $17.1 billion in total revenue, up 5% YOY. Ad revenue also grew 7%, which is no small feat given the tough comps set by the success of last year’s Super Bowl LIX and the 2024 presidential election, which fell during Fox’s previous fiscal year.
CEO Lachlan Murdoch told investors on Thursday that Fox was ahead of all other networks in live sports consumption during the company’s 2026 fiscal year – remarkable considering that NBC had Super Bowl LX, the Winter Olympics and the Spanish language World Cup broadcasts during that same time period.
Same time next four years?
But the World Cup only comes around every four years. So what will Fox do to maintain its momentum in the interim?
In the short term, according to CFO Steve Tomsic, Fox will continue to benefit from World Cup programming this quarter, and the company also anticipates that the midterm elections later this year will boost advertising revenue significantly for both local stations and on Tubi.
And in the meantime, Fox has already completed what Murdoch called “one of the strongest upfronts in our history,” with double-digit growth in deal volume.
Murdoch also noted that Fox was able to amplify the World Cup across its entire portfolio, which is something the company expects to replicate for future events, such as the new NFL broadcast season beginning this fall.
That portfolio now includes streaming subscription service Fox One, which launched last August. The World Cup was a huge growth driver for the service.
“Through Fox One, we continue to see minimal cannibalization of our traditional pay TV business,” Murdoch said, “reinforcing our strategy of targeting the cordless population.”
Tubi do be do
But Fox One isn’t where Fox reaches most cord-cutters – Tubi is.
A whopping 70% of Tubi users are “cordless,” according to Murdoch, making them extra attractive to advertisers who would be unable to reach them on traditional TV. It also probably doesn’t hurt that nearly 60% of Tubi’s audience is Gen Z or millennial.
Tubi’s revenue last quarter grew 35% YOY, while engagement grew 17% over the same time period. The platform also recently reached 110 million monthly active users, 20 million of which came for World Cup-related content. And, in keeping with the theme of cord-cutting, one-third of viewers who watched the first two opening World Cup matches did so on mobile devices.
But soon, Tubi won’t be the only CTV feather in Fox’s cap. The company expects to close its pending acquisition of Roku in the first half of 2027, which translates to somewhere within Fox’s upcoming Q3 or Q4.
Although Fox’s executive team did not say much about the Roku acquisition during their investor call, Murdoch did say he views the addition as an extension of the “successful strategy and skill execution” that is making Fox One and Tubi so successful.
“Roku brings us streaming at scale through its open, partner-friendly platform that makes it a leading TV streaming platform in the US,” Murdoch said.
Which suggests that whatever Fox has planned for Roku, it doesn’t involve closing the service off to Fox’s competitors – at least not yet.
