• by Wayne Friedman , May 8, 2024

Fox Corp.'s first-quarter advertising declined $640 million in the company's most recent quarterly period to $1.24 billion -- almost entirely due to the absence of Super Bowl advertising revenue a year earlier.

Advertising revenue at its national broadcast TV and stations came in at $834 million, including its cable TV network operations -- mostly Fox News Media -- at $296 million.

For the latter, Fox says it saw lower digital advertising as well as modest pricing declines with direct-response advertisers. In addition, the year earlier, Fox's national sports networks carried the “World Baseball Classic.”

Tubi helped offset some of its TV ad revenue declines -- rising 22% year-over-year, representing about 2% of its total advertising business, estimates Brian Wieser, media analyst at Madison & Wall.

Wieser says the expected boom from political advertising in this big Presidential election season has so far been underwhelming.

“Political advertising is also evidently coming in at levels that are softer than what we saw in 2020,” he says. Still, at Fox, “soft as it might be at the present time, [political] probably accounted for a couple of percentage points of growth, indicating a low single digit underlying decline.”

But Fox's affiliate revenue remains steady -- even amid industry wide cord-cutting, which has affected national TV cable and other networks.

Fox's affiliate revenue was up 4% to $1.94 billion -- 9% higher for its broadcast TV operations to $834 million and a slight 1% more for its cable TV networks to $1.1 billion.

Total Fox Corp. revenues were down 16% in the period with adjusted cash flow -- earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization -- improving up 7% to $891 million.

Early morning Fox Corp. stock was up 1% to $30.14.