Time Inc. CEO Joe Ripp predicted the company will return to revenue growth in 2016, helped in a small part by its acquisition of ad-targeting firm Viant and robust digital growth.
But the upbeat forecast couldn’t keep the bears away from Time’s stock. It closed down 8.6 percent, to $12.40 — an all-time low.
Its fourth-quarter net income fell 62 percent, to $17 million, from the year-ago period.
“The North Star of Time Inc. is rebuilding the company for revenue growth,” Ripp told analysts in an upbeat conference call before the market opened.
“In fact, we currently estimate we will achieve revenue crossover in 2016,” he said. The company predicted its revenue for the current year would rise by anywhere from 1 percent to 5 percent.
Revenue fell 5 percent in 2015.
Wall Street seems to be punishing the stock for missing fourth-quarter profit forecasts.
Ripp is clearly banking on better days ahead. He hailed the acquisition of Viant technology as “game changing for us.”
“Marketers are selecting media partners that have either data-driven capabilities or premium content,” he said. “We will be able to deliver both in a single platform and will stand apart from those that offer just one or the other.”
The Viant deal includes the remnants of Myspace, the once white-hot social networking site that was bought by News Corp. (parent company of The Post) for $580 million in 2005 but sold for $35 million in 2011 to Specific Media — which was, in turn, bought by Viant.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Ripp told Wall Street analysts that it will add $100 million in digital ad revenue in 2016.
For the full year of 2015, revenue dropped to $3.1 billion.
Advertising revenue in the fourth quarter declined 2 percent, to $484 million — but digital revenue surged 17 percent, to $102 million, helped by video and programmatic advertising.
Ripp said that Time’s digital sites draw 119 million unique visitors, up from 65 million two years ago.
“We believe our digital advertising revenues could increase significantly by growing native branded content and video, and we expect meaningful improvements in the monetization of our large-scale mobile and social audiences,” Ripp said.
And pulling in some of the TV money now up for grabs is a big part of the turnaround strategy.
Video, he said, enables marketers to “solve impression blindness on mobile devices … With TV audiences fragmenting and rapidly declining, we believe the TV ecosystem has broken wide open and we are already participating in this disruption as advertisers shift dollars into digital video and OTT [over the top] offerings.”
Chief Financial Officer Jeff Bairstow said the company expected to post 2016 operating income of $440 million to $490 million.
Bairstow said he expects the company to continue to outsource jobs, particularly to its facility in Bangalore, India.