Earnings: Martha Stewart Living’s Online Revenues Up 82 Percent; Looking Proactively At Online M&A

Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia announced its Q3 earnings today, and online was a big focus…CEO Susan Lyne mentioned that the company plans to stream daytime’s “The Martha Stewart Show” at Marthastewart.com (the cable repeat of the syndicated show on Discovery’s TLC was dropped earlier this year).
The company also has a deal in place to share video (and ad revenue) with Google, as well as a content-sharing relationship with Yahoo. The website also showed significant growth, with revenue up 82% to $2.8 million.
MSO has already announced plans to launch a social networking site and component to its current site. “We’ll be working hard on personalization, community,” Lyne said, detailing potential communities such as people looking for Halloween costume tips and crafters.
Conference call transcript: Our Internet segment reflects advertising revenue of $1.5 million, relative to $400,000 in the prior year quarter…for Q4, we expect Internet revenues to be $5 million to $6 million, with an adjusted EBITDA roughly flat with prior year, as we continue to invest in people and technology in preparation for the re-launch of our marthastewart.com website in early 2007.
On potential acquisitions: “We are keeping our eyes increasingly open for potential acquisitions, but they have to be priced right. We are trying to be proactive here and to look at a lot of companies that could be interesting content plays for us or undervalued brands that might exist out there that could allow us to Omnimedia something new.”

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