Fox Corp is in the early stages of expanding into lifestyle verticals across categories like outdoors, home and books, CEO Lachlan Murdoch told Axios in an interview published today.
The eldest son of Rupert Murdoch was speaking with the author of the Axios Media Trends, Sara Fischer.
The comments come just a week after Murdoch spoke about the company’s streaming plans at a media and comms conference and just days after he attended the Fox Corp TV Upfront.
The push into lifestyle content builds on the success of Fox News Media’s subscription streaming service, Fox Nation, which launched in 2018, said Axios.
“It’s seen as not just a news brand,” Murdoch said at Fox Corp.’s headquarters in New York City.
“A lot of the content on Fox Nation is lifestyle content. It’s outdoors content and documentaries.”
While Murdoch wouldn’t disclose subscriber figures for Fox Nation to Axios, he said the total addressable market for the service is much smaller than what CNN executives projected for the now-defunct CNN+ subscription streaming service. “It’s in the higher single-digit millions,” Murdoch said.
Other verticals that could make sense for the brand as it expands include food and home, Murdoch told Fischer.
Fox News Books, the book publishing arm that the company launched in 2020 with HarperCollins, is “a profitable business” and “a huge opportunity,” Murdoch said. So far, the company has sold over 1 million copies of books on behalf of Fox News personalities. “You’ll see over time, we’ll pick up third-party authors, too.”
Credible, the personal finance recommendation engine that Fox acquired a majority stake in 2019, will be used to help expand Fox’s personal finance vertical, said Axios. Today, Credible exists as a section within Fox Business’ website that helps users compare prices among lenders.
Fox Weather is the most ambitious expansion of the Fox News Media portfolio in recent months. The 24/7 digital, ad-supported streaming service is supported by dozens of local affiliates across the country. Murdoch calls the Fox Weather app, which has had over 1.5 million downloads since launch, “a big offering from an ad revenue point of view.”
When asked by Axios if Fox News programming was too divisive, Murdoch told Fischer: “I think when you’re in the news business, and you’re number one … you get a lot of heat and it just comes with the territory.”