“Hand in hand, I don’t do this for money”: Zillah Byng-Thorne on success at Future | Publishing in the future

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When Zillah Byng-Thorne takes over at Future, she remembers spending her first year worrying she won’t be able to pay employees as the doomed magazine company faces the prospect of bankruptcy.

Seven years later, it is on track to earn more than twice what the publisher was worth at the time, having orchestrated a remarkable turnaround in the media business to create a £4.7 billion stock market.

Initially hired part-time as Chief Financial Officer – she joined from AutoTrader, where the experience of the highly successful transition from print to e-commerce proved invaluable – within a year, she secured shareholder support to lead the transformation and was installed as CEO in April 2014.

future share price

At the time, Future — founded in Bath in 1985 with its roots in video game-focused titles — was quickly succumbing to readers and advertisers turning away from magazines to digital media and was struggling to meet financial commitments.

Future originally focused on gaming titles.

With the share price plummeting at 83 pence, valuing the company at around £30m, Byng-Thorne put all British employees at Future on redundancy notice, eventually laying off about 40% of its 1,000 employees, revoking titles without digital future.

“Work was at death’s door, he lost faith in him,” she recalls. “In those days, I would go home at night thinking ‘Am I a constant worry? “

“For the first 12 months, I wondered if I would be able to pay my salary next month. I had a management responsibility not only to shareholders but to stakeholders and employees to get through that period and become the company we are today.”

The business is a behemoth with revenue rising by a fifth to £272m in the six months to the end of March, and pre-tax profit more than doubled to £57m, more than the company made in the entire previous financial year.

With a share price of 386p and a market capitalization of £4.7 billion – levels not reached since the first dotcom boom two decades ago – it is valued at more than double DMGT, the parent company of Daily Mail, Mail Online, i and Metro Newspapers.

The secret to the success of Britain’s largest magazine publisher – Byng-Thorne prefers to call it “a niche media company that owns magazines” – has been to increase volumes in both traditional print magazines as well as build a massive digital advertising and e-commerce machine from the back of its portfolio of titles.

Woman & Home, bought from TI Media last year.

This includes making a deduction for each online reader, for example “Best Buy” products in a review on TechRadar, which continues to purchase a product from a partner website.

In 2015, Future generated £1m in revenue online, compared to £85m in the last first half financials, which also showed a 31% increase in online users to 311m.

Scott, 46, says the company’s revenue now derives about a third of all advertising, e-commerce affiliates, subscriptions and copy sales at the newsstand.

The company is also on a seemingly insatiable buying spree, having spent over £1 billion to acquire more than a dozen companies in a bid to increase volume and acquire key assets.

magazine number

Earlier this week, Future paid £300m to Dennis Publishing, the magazine publisher behind titles such as The Week and Minecraft World. Last April, the company completed a £140m acquisition of TI Media, formerly Time Inc UK which is home to titles such as Horse & Hound, Woman & Home and Marie Claire.

The year capped the £594m deal to buy price comparison website GoCompare, the biggest future deal ever.

The company’s increased exposure to print titles does not bother Byng-Thorne, who says predicting the magazine’s death was premature.

“I hate closing magazines, which is not why I get up in the morning,” she says. “We have a very comprehensive process in place to look at how we can extend the life of the title, and what we can do to make it sustainable.”

However, the downturn in the UK’s broader consumer magazine market makes for bleak reading.

Rotation

Between 2010 and 2020, total annual circulation — the number of magazines purchased from retailers, subscription copies, or those obtained for free — fell by about two-thirds, from 1.5 billion to 513 million.

The number of titles registered with the Trading Audit Office more than halved between 2013 and 2020 – from 540 to 242, mainly due to the shutdown – and the display advertising market shrank from a peak of £570m in 2011 to £260m last year.

“There is a lesson to be learned from Future’s success: There are still significant revenue driven publishers,” says Alice Pickthall, media analyst at Enders Analysis.

For Four To Two Future magazine.

“It is the death of the print magazine in that structure in which there has been a shift in consumption, but it is not the death of what is the essence of the magazine, this content. The future is a diversified model and a mix of revenue, and that is what Future has done aggressively.”

The success of the future has paid off well for investors, with a £100 investment when Bing Thorne became CEO in 2014 was worth around £5000, and it has already generated more than £26m in stratospheric performance for the company.

However, in February, nearly 40% of investors failed to agree to a new incentive scheme that could get it more than £40m by September 2025.

advertising spend

She says the new scheme will also see staff sharing up to £95m, but she also believes it is worth the eye-catching salary packages.

“Honestly, hands in my heart, I’m not doing this for money but I want to be treated fairly,” she says. “You have to win Spurs, you don’t get paid just for coming.

“If you create a lot of value for other contributors, you must also be adequately rewarded. I also don’t want to be paid if I don’t do a good job.

“I am so lucky, I have more than I ever dreamed of as a little girl. I do this because I love what I do.”

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