Great. Apologies for the delay here. Welcome to the Fox Fireside Chat at the Goldman Sachs Communicopia Technology Conference. I have the privilege of introducing Lachlan Murdoch, who's the Chairman and CEO of Fox. Thank you so much for joining us.
Mark, thank you very much for having me. I'm sorry about the delay.
Yeah, maybe to kick.
How fast can you talk?
I can go as fast as you can go. Maybe we can just start out big picture, strategy, talk about the interplay of Fox One, Tubi, the linear assets.
Sure. Thank you. Big picture, our businesses are firing on all cylinders. We've got tremendous momentum across both all of our brands, and advertising revenue, and also our distribution revenue. It's going incredibly well. The strategy was set back in 2019 when we sold the majority of our entertainment assets to The Walt Disney Company. That strategy has proven to be prescient in its success and where we've positioned ourselves in the media ecosystem. It's going incredibly well. We've launched new businesses and invested, I think, prudently. The interplay between Fox One and Tubi really gives us more distribution opportunities to reach consumers, customers, and viewers where we wouldn't ordinarily be able to reach them. Tubi reaches an incredible audience. There are 60 million cord-cutters in the United States. It's a tremendous target market for us. Tubi has really hit it out of the park in addressing them.
It's also on the path to profitability in the near future. What we're doing is, as it gets towards profitability, we're reinvesting that capital in Fox One, which also is our first sort of scale direct-to-consumer business. It has, in the first few weeks, already exceeded expectations.
Earlier this week, the company announced the resolution of the matter related to the Murdoch Family Trust. To the extent that you're willing to talk about it, how should investors interpret what that means for the company?
Sure. I'm happy to talk about it. It's great news for investors. It gives us clarity about our strategy going forward. It shows that our strategy will be consistent. It's clear, and it's very sustainable. I think it's great news for investors. In 2019, as I mentioned, when we sold our assets to The Walt Disney Company and really set this new path for the company, since then, we've increased our revenue by nearly $5 billion. About $2 billion of that comes from increased advertising revenues, and about $2 billion from distribution revenues. Due to that, we've increased our EBITDA by nearly $1 billion. We've returned $8.5 billion to investors. We can continue to do that now. We can be very focused on returning capital to investors, driving our profitability, and really importantly, investing in our core brands, especially in our great journalism.
We are very pleased to be able to move forward and remain focused on the path that we're on.
Great. I'd love to ask you a little bit about FanDuel. The company has an option to acquire nearly 19% of FanDuel. Maybe you can just discuss the timeline, how FanDuel can fit into the broader sports strategy, and how sports betting could help the Fox Sports strategy be differentiated relative to others in the marketplace.
Sure. We have two key investments in sports wagering. Obviously, the 18.6% option in FanDuel, which we will exercise before 2030. That investment today, if you take the median sell-side analyst valuations, we are $3.1 billion in the money in that option. We have 2.5% of its parent company, Flutter. That's worth, on the market today, $1.1 billion. If I add the two of those together, it's worth about $9 to $10 per share on our stock price. We think they're tremendous investments. We are very committed to them. We are committed to becoming a licensed company so that we can exercise that option. We've already engaged with 26 states for licensing. That process is at its initial stages. It can be complicated.
I have to say, pursuant to your previous question, the resolution of the control of the company to the family trust actually will make that licensing process much more simple. We think that's an important step for us as well.
That's great. Shifting gears to Fox One, the direct-to-consumer product launched on August 21 at $19.99 per month. Could you talk a little bit about the Fox One go-to-market strategy, early indications of the consumer demand and market reaction? Maybe you can loop into that, the bundle with ESPN.
Great. Fox One launched only a few weeks ago. It's very early days. I don't want to read too much into our success and our data over the last few weeks, but suffice to say that its take-up has exceeded our expectations. What you can see on Fox One is that news is really helping drive audience and reach Monday to Friday. With sports, starting with college football in its first week and now with the NFL, it gives it a tremendous audience, viewership, and acquisition capabilities over the weekend. The balance between news and sport, which is also there's a lot of overlap in those audiences, has been very successful. We are seen as, amongst all of the direct-to-consumer media platforms out there, really an essential service. We have had approaches and we're in conversations with many other platform providers about bundling with them.
You'll see as we move forward our ability to, and our intent to, bundle with other providers to offer consumers the greatest choice and the greatest value. The ESPN bundle launches October 2. It'll be $39.99 per month. We think it'll be an essential bundle, the essential sports bundle for sports fans in America.
Great. Could you just describe how you're seeing the current state of advertising? You guys concluded the upfronts with double-digit volume increases. It's been quite good for you all. Maybe you can talk about the market, what verticals you're seeing some strengths and weaknesses.
Sure. Absolutely. We hit an incredibly strong upfront. I can only really talk to what I know intimately, which is our advertising, where we sit in the advertising market, rather than the broader advertising trends for perhaps some other genres and other services. For us, our advertising demand is very strong, very strong. We see this across sports. We see it across news. Sports being driven by our premium portfolio of sports rights, whether it's the NFL, college football, baseball, and of course, the FIFA World Cup at the end of the year. News is driven by our ratings, which remain incredibly strong. We see no reason for that to change. Entertainment, our broadcast network in Fox Broadcast, has had the strongest scatter pricing increases, and double-digit scatter pricing increases than we've seen in years. Tubi goes from strength to strength.
The beginning of this fiscal year has maintained its momentum with advertisers. We might come back to talk about the CTV market. It's in a very unique position, Tubi. It's obviously a free service, which is the best brand position possible. It reaches over 2/3 of its audience to a cordless market, to people that are not in the traditional cable or broadcast ecosystem. That's a market that's very hard to reach and very critical for advertisers.
Maybe in the last couple of minutes that we have, could you just talk about what the strategic priorities are for Fox at this juncture?
Sure. Look, obviously, growth in our traditional brands. Fox News finished the last fiscal year as the number one channel in all of cable, not in news, in all of cable, which is a tremendous position to be in. The first two months of this year, in July and August, we finished as the number one network in all of television in the U.S. We beat all of our broadcast competitors. This is a great position to be in, particularly because our CPMs for our advertising are half of what broadcast is, the broadcast networks. This is the best deal ever for advertisers. We have advertisers flooding onto the service, and the ones that are on the service are spending more and more. It's a tremendous amount of value for them. We will continue to focus on our traditional brands.
We talked briefly before about sports, and we are investing, I think, prudently in our digital growth, whether it's our digital platforms online, whether it's Fox One, whether it's Tubi. We are now growing in Fox Latin America.
Great. Lachlan, thank you so much for the time. It's a pleasure and a privilege to have you on stage here with us.
Great. Thank you very much, Mike.
Thank you.
Thank you.