• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, Yesterday

Time was off to a roaring start in the first half of 2025, with projected ad revenue growth of 24%. What’s more, it has seen an 83% improvement since 2022 in meeting the cash needs of the business, CEO Jessica Sibley reports in a memo. 

Of course, no actual dollar figures were provided. But Sibley is hailing several initiatives, including “harnessing the power of AI to bring Time’s trusted journalism to a wider audience.” 

As part of this, Time is partnering with AI platforms OpenAI, Perplexity, ProRata, and Amazon Alexa. “We’d rather be in the room shaping the future than learning about it from a podcast,” Sibley explains. 

In addition, Time has launched an AI Toolbar on Time.com for its Person of the Year in collaboration with Scale AI, OpenAI, and ElevenLabs. 

Next will be an on-demand podcast created with Scale AI. AI hosts will summarize four top stories from The Brief, a newsletter.  

"This fall, a major upgrade to the AI experience will “enable multilingual, personalized AI interactions including AI search, chat, translation and an experiences across the site,” Sibley says. 

Apart from AI, Sibley also mentioned several other projects.

For instance, “Our strategic pivot to a B2B-focused model is being realized, through our focused go-to-market approach with integrated partnerships, a rapidly growing global live journalism and events business, and leveraging new platforms and innovations in technology,” she writes. 

In addition, in May, Time expanded its health and science vertical with Time Longevity. Also in May, Time Studios debuted UNTOLD: The Fall of Favre with Netflix.

Meanwhile, the content distribution model has changed.  

“With less than 15% of our core business’s revenue tied to webpage traffic, Time is positioned for resilience as distribution continues to fragment, supported by 1 million print subscribers, nearly 2 million newsletter subscribers, and more than 60 million social followers,” Sibley says. 

Time’s first direct mail letter in 1923 said the goal was to cram into 24 pages “a complete account of the week’s developments in politics, art, science, foreign news, sport, books, and all the other things that interest you.”

102 years later, Time seems to be following that model. Sibley says it is becoming a viable company through its “high impact journalism and our ability to engage audiences globally with exclusive reporting as we embrace new ways of storytelling.”