Updated to include earnings call: Net income was 50 cents a share — up 47.8 percent for Scripps year over year, aided by a strong showing from Scripps Networks, Shopzilla’s rapid growth and a $40.8 million cash payment for ending its JOA in Birmingham. Network ad revenue hit $163 million, up 27 perecent over last year. By comparison, ad revenue at newspapers managed solely by Scripps rose 6.3 percent, to $140 million.
This was the company’s first full quarter with Shopzilla in house. The site showed segment profit of $7.3 million on revenue of $35.million, compared to $1.2 million on $15.9 million revenue in the same quarter last year. (Segment profit is a pre-net number as reported by Scripps.) So far this year, Shopzilla has taken in some $91 million in revenue compared to $67.4 million for all of last year. The company is projecting segment profit between $13-15 million for the online comp shopping service in 4Q05.
Earnings release | Webcast
Earnings call: Lot of talk about Shopzilla. Chairman and CEO Ken Lowe: “We’ve been busy broadening Shopzilla’s search capabilities with the ambitious yet very attainable goal of providing a service where consumers can easily find everything that’s for sale on the web from virtually every online merchant. Shopzilla’s really made great strides towards that goal and is already perfectly positioned, like our networks, to uniquely answer the growing advertiser demand for accountability.” Shopzilla is being integrated into the company’s own sites starting with Scripps Networks; phase 2, Lowe said in response to a question, will be dynamic links. “It’s still a work in progress. It’s to safe to say the growth you’re seeing is just coming from the popularity of this business and consumers really starting to catch up with the fact that this is an efficient way to shop.”
Scripps is launching a branding campaign for Shopzilla across all of its media — newspapers, cable nets, web sites. Lowe mentioned the traction Shopzilla gained with women when it changed from BizRate.com and got a good laugh out of an analyst’s joke about pressure to change the parent company’s name to “Scripzilla.”
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