In September, The Athletic’s ad-free era officially ended.
First launched in 2016 as a subscription business, The Athletic was acquired by The New York Times last January for $550 million.
Sebastian Tomich, The Athletic’s chief commercial officer and a longtime fixture in the Times’ ad tech division, believes the Times can use its blueprint for building a publishing business on The Athletic. That includes monetization through both subscriptions and ads, without one compromising the other.
And he’s also betting that advertising is an easier sell for sports fans than news readers.
“Sports fans almost want advertising to be part of their experience because they are used to all the integrations you see when you go to games and when you watch on TV,” Tomich said. “The field is so ripe to do creative things.”
The next steps for The Athletic on its mission to become a global leader in sports coverage include producing more audio and video content, potentially launching a streaming channel and expanding its footprint in the Asia, Africa and Middle East markets.
Tomich spoke to AdExchanger.
AdExchanger: What kind of ad experience are you building on The Athletic? How similar to the other New York Times properties do you want it to be?
SEBASTIAN TOMICH: In sports media, there aren’t a lot of premium products. You have broadcasters who treat their digital products as downstream from broadcast. And that ends up being a vessel for selling pre-roll advertising.
Similar to what The Athletic pulled off editorially, we’d like the advertising product to be a bit elevated from the competition. We can take what we’ve done at the Times and bring it to The Athletic, and that would be a win. But I want to be able to do things that are specifically for sports fans.
What do you have in mind?
There are opportunities in brand and athlete collaborations. You could treat an app like a physical space and have brands own specific areas of it. And we can own local markets – for example, a brand could sponsor our Minnesota Wild coverage and give things back to the Wild’s fans.
Are there ads you don’t want on The Athletic?
Pre-roll video is the one thing I know people will pay to get out of. We’re paid products, so it’s hard for us to do pre-roll. You see it in the comments when a journalist inserts a YouTube video into the content and pre-roll ads show up with it. You get a lot of negative feedback, and we didn’t even sell the advertising.
Is expanding into other media channels, like a CTV channel, essential for your growth plans?
I don’t see us acquiring sports [broadcasting] rights, competing with Amazon, Disney and Apple. But everything else is on the table. Sports is a visual product. And sports talk radio is a giant industry. Sports podcasting is something we already have a strong foothold in, and we have a nascent video business that will no doubt grow. We don’t do any live events right now, but we will in the future.
The Athletic has dozens of podcasts, including The Tifo Football Podcast. What’s your podcast monetization approach?
Podcasts were our biggest part of the business last year.
We’ll continue to do host reads and creative programs that stretch across podcasts or link what we’re doing in audio to the rest of the coverage. We have programmatic, and we have run of audio. And we also see an opportunity to connect The Athletic’s audio business to the Times’ audio business.
I only see programmatic audio growing. But audio is going to go the same way every other ad format has gone: You have a gold rush, the platforms take over, the middle part of the market gets wiped out, and the stuff that’s left are the hits and the niche podcasts, which probably have to be more custom in terms of how you monetize.
You’ve said that The Athletic is focused on direct sales, but if there’s no direct buyer for an impression, do you default to open auction?
The priority is direct first, premium programmatic like PMP and PG next, and then open auction.
We have open on right now. But my dream is to be sold out to the point where nothing goes to open market.
How are your PMPs bringing in other audiences from the Times’ portfolio?
We share the same tech stack with the Times. In the past, the Times has been viewed as a news brand with different sections for travel, style and sports. It’s now becoming a house of brands, with New York Times news, Wirecutter, games, cooking and The Athletic. And underneath that is an ad tech stack that can go across the portfolio.
You can buy audience segments; you can buy ad experiences; and you can buy programmatically.
The Athletic recently launched a Formula One vertical sponsored by Michelob. Are sponsorships essential to expanding your coverage areas?
The dream is for every sport we cover to have dual revenue streams. There are some sports that we don’t see a subscription opportunity, but we definitely see an advertising opportunity. Tennis is one example – it’s seasonal, with big spikes around the Majors, but it’s hard to imagine a daily tennis report that large amounts of people pay for.
In the case of F1, right now it’s outside the paywall. Long term, we see a subscription opportunity. But for now, we’ve got sponsors, and we want to focus on bringing them a big audience first, and then over time we can look at building the subscription business.
Are there other publishing businesses you’d emulate or are excited about right now?
There’s not a lot of great examples of innovation going on in publishing and media. And I hope new companies sprout up that are rooted in creating value for people, not just selling advertising.
I’ve been in publishing since 2008, so I’ve lived through difficult times that produced a wave of new digital media companies. I hope we can see the same thing going forward.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
For more articles featuring Sebastian Tomich, click here.
