Entertainment Daily Owner Digitalbox Launches Specialist Sites After Google Changes

Digitalbox’s business model relies heavily on driving high traffic to mobile-optimized sites, which the company says allows it to achieve significantly higher ad revenue per session compared to other publishers.

Digitalbox reported revenue for the six months to 30 June rose 32% to £1.6m, with adjusted EBITDA (before depreciation, amortisation, impairment of goodwill and intangible assets and share-based payment charges) rising from a £100,000 loss in the same period in 2023 to a £300,000 surplus.

Entertainment Daily ‘Blocked’ by Google

Digitalbox’s largest brand, both in terms of revenue and audience size, is Entertainment Daily, whose main vertical is operatic series.

In early 2023, Entertainment Daily was “blocked” by Google from Search, News, and Discover, leading to an overall 27% drop in traffic over the year. It finally regained visibility in November.

However, the brand’s stormy cooperation with Google continued this year.

Digitalbox reported that Entertainment Daily saw a “significant amount” of traffic coming from Google in January and February this year, but then suffered a major hit following the March major update.

“While we expected generally stable advertiser demand throughout the period, we did not expect Google’s algorithm to block our largest brand,” the statement read.

The team managed to restore the site’s presence in Google search results and News, but not in Discover.

“We are still focused on tactics to restore the site across all three primary channels after the next Google Core update in August,” the accounts wrote.

Carter said: “We were able to regain momentum in search in the middle of the first half of the year, but I think we expect more challenges going forward.”

Daily Mash subscribers surpass 4,200

Although it relies on advertising for most of its business, the satirical website Daily Mash operates on a subscription model and currently has over 4,200 subscribers.

The Mash Premium offer, which provides unlimited, ad-free access to the site featuring some proprietary stories, has increased from £20 a year to £30. This means that at the new higher price, the paywall could bring in more than £126,000 a year. The Daily Mash made just under half that (£59,000) in the first half of the year.

However, the brand, which will publish a book before the end of the year: The Daily Mash Class Wars – A Field Guide to Being British, was the only Digitalbox site to make a loss in the first half of the year (of £56,000).

Digitalbox plans further acquisitions

Student site The Tab, which was acquired in 2020 and repaid its purchase price within 18 months, has seen a 3% increase in traffic and has made a positive contribution each month since it was fully repaid. While its model is based on British universities, the company said its central team’s entertainment output has gained traction in the US.

Satirical website The Poke was acquired in December 2022 and has now fully repaid the acquisition costs after 18 months. The company said it had a “strong six months” in which its audience grew by 21% and session values ​​also increased after a year of integrating Digitalbox’s Graphene ad stack.

Digitalbox’s latest acquisition is TV Guide, and in May 2022 the deal was announced to be worth £550,000.

The company said the site recouped 31% of its acquisition cost in the first half of 2024 thanks to a series of technical improvements and a 30% increase in traffic, as well as expanding its editorial content to include content around streaming shows.

Carter said additional acquisitions are in the works, potentially including sites that were hit hard by Google’s changes.

Despite the search disruption, Carter said Facebook is still “relatively strong” for Digitalbox.

In February, the publisher launched an invite-only performance rewards program on Facebook that lets creators earn money for engaging with photos, text, and video posts.

Carter said: “They’re actually rewarding content creators for their engagement. So it’s a departure from their previous monetization models, which were pretty basic: If you put a video on Facebook, you could monetize it with a mid-roll ad or a post-roll ad around your content, and you would get a direct share of that revenue.

“They’ve moved away from that and gone to the idea that the longer you can keep people on the platform, the more engaged they are, the better… over the last six months we’ve done quite well with that.”

Carter said the UK digital advertising market was “down slightly” in the first half of the year compared to the first half of 2023, but was “relatively stable… compared to the previous turbulent years we’ve had”.

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