How to put a value on a media company
What the spreadsheet doesn't show you.
If you’ve ever looked at how media properties get valued and felt like the numbers didn’t add up, you’re not wrong. They often don’t. At least not if you’re only looking at the financial statements.
The spreadsheet stuff matters. But they’re not what separates a media company someone will pay a premium for from one that sits on the market for months. The difference lives in a set of less obvious factors that are harder to measure but far more predictive of long-term value.
This letter is about those factors.
Owned vs. rented attention
This is the single biggest divide in media valuation and most people still underweight it.
If your audience reaches you through a platform, an algorithm, a feed, or a recommendation engine, you don’t have an audience. You have traffic. Traffic can disappear overnight because someone else controls the dial. We’ve watched this happen repeatedly with publishers who built enormous reach on popular social media platforms, then watched it evaporate when algorithms shifted. Creators who had millions of views on one platform and couldn’t move a fraction of that audience anywhere else.
This is why we’re seeing every creator place a newsletter link in their bio. They own that audience.
Email subscribers, paying members, direct app installs are all fundamentally different assets. It’s not just more stable. It changes the entire economics of the business. You can price differently. You can launch new products into an audience that already trusts you. You can survive platform shifts that kill your competitors.
When someone is evaluating a media company, the ratio of owned to rented attention is one of the first things that should matter. A company doing $2 million in revenue with 80% of its distribution owned is a categorically different business than one doing $2 million with 80% of its distribution dependent on a platform it doesn’t control. The second one isn’t really worth $2 million in revenue. It’s worth whatever that revenue looks like after the next algorithm change.
The dependency question
Every media company has dependencies. The question is how deep they go and how hard they are to replace.
Some dependencies are operational: a specific CMS, a particular ad network, a tool in the workflow. These are annoying to replace but survivable. Other dependencies are existential: a single writer whose voice is the entire brand, a platform that delivers 90% of traffic, one advertiser that accounts for half of revenue.
The tricky part is that some existential dependencies are also what make a media company valuable in the first place. A publication built around a singular voice can command incredible loyalty and pricing power, but it’s also fragile in a way that a more institutional brand isn’t. That’s not a reason to avoid building around a strong voice. It’s a reason to be honest about what it means for the value of the business and to think deliberately about how to reduce that fragility over time without killing the thing that makes it work.
When you’re assessing a media property — whether you’re building it, buying it, or investing in it — map the dependencies. Not just what they are, but what happens if each one goes away. The companies that are worth the most are the ones where no single dependency can kill them.
Revenue composition
A dollar is not a dollar in media.
A dollar from a single advertising client who could leave next quarter is worth less than a dollar from a diversified set of sponsors. A dollar from sponsorship is worth less than a dollar from subscriptions, because subscriptions are more predictable and harder to lose. A dollar from subscriptions is also worth less than a dollar from a mix of subscriptions: content, paid community, events, B2B, and so on. The circle goes on.
Two newsletters can have the same number of paying subscribers and the same monthly revenue, but if one built its base through its own channels and the other got most of its growth through Substack’s discovery engine, those are not the same business. The first one owns its growth. The second one is renting it. If Substack tweaks how recommendations work or deprioritizes a niche, that revenue doesn’t have anywhere else to come from. That said, there’s a flip side. A newsletter that grows organically through platform discovery has very low acquisition costs, which makes it attractive to a different kind of buyer.
Most media companies know this intellectually but don’t act on it until they have to. They find one revenue stream that works and ride it until it stops working. By then, building the next stream is an emergency instead of a strategy.
The revenue composition also signals something deeper about the business: how many different ways it has found to be valuable to its audience. A media company with four revenue streams isn’t just more diversified, its audience trusts it in four different contexts. That’s a much stronger foundation than one built on a single transaction type, no matter how profitable that single stream is today.
Depth vs. breadth of attention
Reach is the metric everyone defaults to because it’s easy to measure. But reach alone tells you almost nothing about value.
A publication that reaches ten million people who spend nine seconds skimming a headline is not more valuable than one that reaches fifty thousand people who read every word and act on what they read. The second one can charge more per impression, convert at higher rates, launch products its audience will actually buy, and build the kind of trust that compounds over years.
The buyers we speak to care for some qualifiers that most skip fast. How often do people comment on your posts? More importantly, how often do people go back and forth in the comments? Every excuse for someone to return is the equivalent of a free promotion.
The problem is that depth is genuinely hard to measure. Open rates, time on page, scroll depth — these are all proxies, and imperfect ones. But you can feel it in other signals: reply rates, word of mouth, how people describe the publication to others, how often other publications link back to it as a source, whether readers show up consistently or only when an algorithm puts something in front of them.
If you’re building a media company, the temptation to optimize for reach is constant. Bigger numbers feel like progress. But the companies that end up being worth the most are almost always the ones that chose depth first and let reach follow naturally, not the other way around.
In an interview with Colin and Samir, TBPN’s founders talked about deliberately capping their ambitions at 200,000 subscribers. If they ever hit ten million, they said, something must have gone wrong. Their daily live show draws anywhere between 4,000 to 10,000 concurrent viewers, which sounds small until you think about who those viewers are. They’re executives and investors with the kind of spending power that makes a small number go a long way. The show is targeting $15 million in ad revenue in 2026 and that kind of economics doesn’t just come from reach. It comes from knowing exactly who you’re talking to and refusing to dilute it.
Optionality
Some media companies are just media companies. They produce content, they monetize attention, and that’s the business. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it has a ceiling.
Other media companies sit on top of something that could become more than media. They’ve built audience relationships, data assets, distribution infrastructure, or domain expertise that could power adjacent businesses in commerce, software, services, events, education, and more. The media is the foundation, but it’s not the whole structure.
This optionality is real value. It’s also the hardest thing to put in a spreadsheet because it’s not generating revenue yet. But the best acquirers and investors see it. They’re not just buying what a media company is today, they’re buying what it could become, given the assets it’s already built.
The key word is “could.” Optionality that’s never exercised is worth zero. What makes it valuable is a combination of the underlying assets being genuinely transferable to new contexts and a team that’s capable of actually making the transition. A media company with a highly engaged audience of software engineers could plausibly launch a recruiting business, a tool marketplace, or an education platform. Whether it’s actually worth more because of that depends on whether anyone there can realize that potential.
Recommended read: Is a $330m valuation insane for Semafor?
What this means in practice
None of these factors show up cleanly in a valuation model. They resist quantification, which is exactly why they create information asymmetry — and why understanding them is an advantage whether you’re building, buying, or selling.
If you’re building a media company: think about these factors early, not when you’re trying to sell. The structural decisions you make in the first few years like how you build your audience, how you diversify revenue, what dependencies you accept, determine your value years later in ways that are very hard to reverse.
If you’re evaluating a media company from the outside: the financials are the starting point, not the answer. Two companies with identical P&Ls can have wildly different risk profiles and growth potential based on the factors above. The numbers tell you what the business is doing today. These factors tell you what it’s likely to be doing in three years.
The media companies that are genuinely valuable tend to score well on most of these dimensions simultaneously. They own their audience. They’ve diversified their dependencies and their revenue. They’ve built depth before breadth. And they’ve created optionality that extends beyond content.
That combination is rare. Which is precisely why it’s valuable.
You made some very nuanced, interesting points!