Arena Group Hits Profitability Again as New CEO Focuses on ‘Competitive Publishing’

By Christiana Sciaudone • April 16, 2025

The Arena Group reported a second straight quarter of profit for the final period of 2024. The publishers of TheStreet and Men’s Journal saw revenue for the year dip 12% to $126 million.

Some noteworthy figures include:

  • Quarterly revenue from continuing operations was $36.2 million, up 8% sequentially compared to Q3 2024.
  • Income from continuing operations was $7.2 million, or $0.15 per diluted share for Q4 2024, compared to $4.8 million, or $0.13 per diluted share in Q3 2024.
  • Adjusted EBITDA for Q4 2024 was $13.0 million compared to $11.1 million for Q3 2024.
  • Loss from continuing operations was $7.7 million in FY 2024 compared to $37.2 million in FY 2023.
  • Adjusted EBITDA was $27.0 million in FY 2024 compared to $13.2 million for FY 2023.

“In 2024, we built a strong foundation with Athlon Sports. This started with premium content, expanding our print products at newsstands and growing our social footprint,” said Paul Edmondson, chief executive officer of Arena.

In February, the board of directors of The Arena Group terminated the employment of Sara Silverstein as CEO, saying it “believes a new entrepreneurial operational strategy is necessary to execute its exciting growth plan.”

Paul Edmondson was named interim CEO. He was formerly the company’s chief operating officer. Silverstein had been focused on a commerce-led strategy for growth.

Edmonson and investor Manoj Bhargava spoke in a video about the company. The men described what they called “competitive publishing,” in which writers get paid if the audience likes the content and viewer satisfaction.

“Competitive publishing is a new model designed for 24/7 breaking news coverage where multiple talented teams compete. It’s proven to grow audiences, pay talent better and more fairly, and be profitable for The Arena Group,” Edmondson said. “We launched this model on Men’s Journal in Q1 2025, and at Parade and The Street at the start of Q2 2025. The results are very promising. We expect to be profitable in every quarter of 2025.”

Operational highlights from the quarter include:

  • Athlon Sports: Audience traffic increased to 284 million page views in Q4 2024, up 20% vs Q3 2024. The site averaged 94 million page views a month in Q4 2024.
  • Parade: Digital traffic of Parade and Parade Pets saw more than 53 million average monthly users and 74 million average monthly page views, up 6% vs Q3 2024.
  • TheStreet: The financial brand delivered 36 million average monthly page views in Q4 2024, up 1% vs Q3 2024.

AMO’s Take

By: Jacob Cohen Donnelly

The business is profitable, so that alone is worth celebrating. Bhargava said something in the video that I will paraphrase: if you’re not profitable, you’re not a business. We’re aligned there.

The thing that worries me is this concept of “competitive publishing.” When both Bhargava and Edmonson talked about this, they zeroed in on pageviews as a metric, which doesn’t make sense. Even Bhargava said that, “they [talent] get paid based on the customer satisfaction rather than what their [journalists] view on life is.”

I agree that customer satisfaction is something we as publishers should pay very close attention to. But the issue is that a pageview doesn’t indicate that. It indicates that someone came to the site. That’s like saying someone walking in the front door of your store is pleased because they showed up.

Here are questions to determine true customer satisfaction:

  • How often does that visitor come back and from what source?
  • Did they sign up for a newsletter?
  • Did they share the article?
  • Did they leave a comment?

Or anything that shows some sort of positive behavior. You want to know that you’re transitioning that user from a flyby reader who hit your site because they came from Google and turning them into a loyal reader. If they’re doing that, incentivizing on moving more of the traffic to those behaviors is a good thing.

However, the way so many of these schemes work is that they reward the writer based on how many pageviews they generate. The problem here is that you inevitably focus on the kind of content that is rewarded by the platforms rather than content that builds a loyal audience. Thousands of publishers have figured out how to get pageviews; not many have figured out how to build a loyal audience.

When you incentivize for a specific behavior, people will do that no matter the cost. Pageviews as the leading metric is a recipe for failure, especially in this era of traffic getting hard to come by.