Hello. Welcome to News Corp's Dow Jones Investor Day. We will begin with some introductory remarks from News Corp's Chief Executive, Robert Thompson, followed by presentations from Dow Jones' Chief Executive, Almar Latour and other members of the Dow Jones' executive team. We will conclude with a Q and A session for the investment community. The materials for the prepared remarks portion of the presentation are available on our website at newscorp.com.
The presentation and Q and A session may contain certain forward looking information with respect to News Corp and Dow Jones' business strategy and other matters. Actual results could differ materially from what is presented or discussed and are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties, including but not limited to those identified in News Corp's filings with the SEC. News Corp's Form 10 ks, Form 10 Q and Form 8 ks filings identify certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ and contain cautionary statements regarding forward looking information. And now, opening remarks from Robert Thompson, Chief Executive, News Corp.
Welcome to our Investor Day, one which will focus on the prospects for and the innate potential of Dow Jones, whose digital networks stretch across the globe, complementing our international assets and informing and edifying readers around the world. Our confidence in Dow Jones and its talented team will be on display today, when we will highlight the portfolio and the personnel of a company that is now a separate segment. That resegmentation was itself a sign of our faith in the potency of Dow Jones, and we are keen that investors and potential investors comprehend the nuances of the business and appreciate its worth. One objective today is to sketch the market conditions and competitive context, so that you can measure our performance and track our trajectory. Before formally delving more deeply into Dow Jones, let me highlight a few broader trends at News Corp itself.
The company has certainly changed profoundly since the Solomonic split from Fox 7 years ago. During that period, we refurbished our portfolio, enhanced our digital expertise and simplified what had been a somewhat eclectic mix of businesses. We have sold News America Marketing. We have sold Amplify, the education company. And we have sold the local newspaper group that was a part of Dow Jones.
We have acquired Harlequin Books, bolstering HarperCollins. And we bought Move, the operator of realtor.com, making us by some measures the largest digital real estate company in the world. These are but a few of the numerous necessary initiatives taken to strengthen the company, a strength that has been evident during this time of crisis for society and for many other businesses. The character of News Corp has indeed been transformed. In fiscal 2014, digital real estate services comprised 5% of revenues and 18% of total segment EBITDA.
While last year, those figures were 12% 29.5%. Our digital personality has expanded exponentially. That was particularly notable in the Q4 of fiscal 2020 with 178,000,000 average monthly uniques at the New York Post network. MarketWatch and wsa.com recorded 67,000,000 and 70,000,000 average monthly uniques, respectively. Realtor had an average of 80,000,000 monthly uniques in Q4 and set a record in August with 92,000,000 monthly uniques.
These are broad and deep reservoirs of readers and of potential clients and of nascent customers. 2 profound trends prevail in our media businesses. There is far greater emphasis on subscription revenue, which has grown 43% since 2014. And while print advertising has declined across our mastheads, we have seen a sustained expansion in digital advertising. There is no doubt that Dow Jones has been a pivotal part of that growth.
It is patently more profitable than The New York Times and has a lucrative professional information business that complements The Wall Street Journal and The Barron's Group. And Dow Jones has important partnerships with our other businesses. That complementarity is integral to our stated ambition to be more than the sum of our parts. That auspicious math becomes truer with each passing day. MarketWatch drives traffic to realtor.com, which can surface zip code specific subscribers for wsj.com, while Mansion and Mansion Global have created a global footprint for prestige real estate.
And readers in London or Singapore or Sydney are potential Barron's buyers. Meanwhile, we are certainly not complacent about costs. We have just launched a shared services program across News Corp to ensure that we reduce administrative expenses, create contemporary low cost workplaces and deploy best in class lowest in price technology. On the sometimes vexed subject of tech, the role of Dow Jones in the landmark negotiations with the digital companies has been crucial. The terms of trade truly have changed.
Facebook's first deal to pay for content was with the Wall Street Journal and New York Post, and that precedent has resonated around the world. The Wall Street Journal is a cornerstone of Apple News Plus and there are clearly other negotiations in motion. These talks are confidential, but likely to be meaningful and material. There have been fundamental changes in digital valuations and values, and I am proud that News Corp has led
the global debate. This revaluation, this revolution would simply not have been possible without the support of Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch and the News Corp Board
or without the leverage that an extraordinary asset like Dow Jones has provided us. And so to narrate the journey today, I turn to Elmer Latour, who has worked for the company in Europe and Asia, run our digital editorial team and graced and enhanced the Barron's Group. Elmer and his colleagues are now in the process of transforming Dow Jones and they have a particularly compelling story to tell.
Thank you, Robert, and welcome everybody to the studios where we record The Wall Street Journal and Barron's TV shows. It's great to be here. It's the first meeting that we're having with you, and we're tremendously excited to have this opportunity. We're excited to share our great story with you and excited to share our confidence in the future of Dow Jones. We're excited to share our great team with you.
One note before we start, there will be a Q and A session after our presentation. Please submit your questions via the question tab on the right hand side of the page. We look forward to hearing from you. Today, there are 3 things we'd like to focus on, 3 takeaways for you. 1, our strong foundation and a window into who we are today 2, our opportunities, particularly membership, advertising and risk and compliance and 3, how we plan to capitalize on those opportunities, how we plan to succeed.
Here's a quick overview of our key brands and businesses. Most
of
you will be familiar with some or all of them. They include iconic brands like The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, Dow Jones Newswires, MarketWatch, news search engine, Factiva, and Dow Jones Risk and Compliance. We are unlike any other business in the news and information space, highly diversified with a unique audience. We think everyone in business should come across Dow Jones a few times a day. We believe we have plenty of room for growth.
To highlight who we are and where we're going, here's a short video.
Business, finance, markets, global forces that shape the course of the world. The price of gold
has been going haywire. More volatility means more risk.
How you invest.
We've seen the White House raise lots of concerns around TikTok.
Your next career move. 30,000,000 Americans are out of work.
My first time ever filing for unemployment. Your company's next step.
The relationship between the world's 2 largest economies are really deteriorating.
Since 18/89, Dow Jones' news,
I don't know exactly the answer.
Today's shopping ecosystem is shifting. It is a responsibility that has never been greater.
According to the Wall Street Journal.
A recent report from the Wall Street Journal. Today, the complexities of the world are staggering, which is why we are even more driven to ask the tough questions.
How do you feel about the prospect of living the rest of your life as an international fugitive?
And report the truth.
The economic recovery might be much more vulnerable.
In order to provide the data, analysis and facts that are needed, so you can make the decisions that matter most.
As you just saw in our video, we have a long history of guiding our audience to make important decisions and key moments in their lives, in world history and in business. And even today, the information we provide is more relevant than ever. An old motto from the Wall Street Journal paraphrased sums this up very nicely. It goes like this: We help our users put truth to good ends. We offer facts and analysis that our audience can turn into action.
That's our differentiator. Our mission is to be the source of truth and insight for decision makers. We want to help people make decisions in business, in finance and in life. This is what we are committed to every day. This is what makes us get up in the morning.
Indeed, we know that we are building on top of a foundation that is stronger than ever before. If you take a look at our last fiscal year performance, this is clear. Record digital audience, record subscriptions, record digital revenue of $1,000,000,000 for the first time, record risk and compliance revenue and record recurring revenue, which as you'll hear later today gives us more predictability, more resilience and which prepares us very well for the opportunities ahead. Taking advantage of key trends will guarantee growth for our membership business for advertising and for risk and compliance. So let's take a look at these trends.
First, there's a flight to quality. Uncertain times and market volatility require reliable data and analysis. You all know this perhaps better than anyone because you experience this every day yourselves. We enjoy great trust from our readers and users. In fact, Reuters Institute Digital News Report recently named The Wall Street Journal the most trusted national newspaper brand in the U.
S. Think about that. We are the most trusted newspaper brand in the U. S. Readers turn to us because they crave reliable information.
It's a unique position in a polarized environment and in the midst of some of the biggest crises that we have ever seen. We're proud to say that our audience turns to us as the definitive source of truth and analysis. Right now, we are experiencing a momentous generational shift. This means we are in the midst of a historic wealth transfer where wealth goes from 1 generation to the next. Cerulea Associates projects that nearly 45,000,000 U.
S. Households will transfer a total of more than $68,000,000,000,000 in wealth to heirs and charity over the course of the next 25 years. This means more people will need financial and personal finance information in order to make decisions. It also means that the wealth management industry will need to stay closely up to date on changing markets. And it means that there will be a heightened focus on corporate responsibility demanded by this next generation.
Dow Jones is here to help both investors and professionals make incredibly important decisions. We are in an ever more complex world where there are more risks for companies. And in this complex world with geopolitical and regulatory changes, companies are in the spotlight. They need to manage risk much more carefully than before. If you combine this then with a compliance space that is stricter than ever before, more and more people will be coming to Dow Jones hungry for our offerings.
Companies will need more of our analysis, particularly in the area of financial crime. We see our risk and compliance business as a growth area where we will increase investment. And then there is the addressable market. We know there are more than 90,000,000 decision makers out there in the U. S.
Alone that we haven't yet reached. We think we can capture a far larger share of that market than we have so far. Now let's focus on how we plan to succeed. We have 4 key priorities to ensure future growth. They are scale, connect, accelerate and super scale.
1st, scale, digital scale. We expect that increasing our digital scale will boost all our revenue lines. We've seen this again and again. We'll focus relentlessly on building further digital scale. But here's the important part.
It's quality at scale, and there's a difference. We'll do this by investing in data and technology and in associated talent. We will also diversify our product set in order to serve new markets at different price points. Next, connect. We are deeply committed to key market segments and will deliver value and products based on the needs of users.
Think of this as Dow Jones becoming even more customer centric. Whenever we connect deeply with specific communities, be it in B2B or B2C, we see great results. We see this today in our communities of retail investors, wealth managers, retirement, compliance managers and the C suite too. We know that we can connect even more deeply with these communities and serve them better with content, in-depth analysis, convening power and by listening more carefully to meet their needs. Dow Jones also is open to partnering with more third parties to offer relevant goods and services.
Think of this as unleashing the Dow Jones platform. Accelerate. In order to support the above, we will accelerate how we as a company operate, improving structure and workflow, while also changing our workplace and technology. We will be lighter, faster and we will be focused tightly on digital channels. And then there's super skill.
We attract exceptional talent because of the great opportunity that lies ahead of us and because of our unique mission. People are passionate when they work for Dow Jones. We will invest in top talent and continue building a workforce that matches our ambition. We will build an inclusive and exceptionally skilled Dow Jones, and we will invest to drive tech advances as well as support all of our other priorities. You'll meet some of our great talent next.
Here's a brief agenda for the rest of the presentation. Susie Watford will take you through membership followed by Matt Murray, who will talk about our journalism then Josh Stinchcomb will discuss advertising and Guy Harrison will share details about Dow Jones Risk and Compliance. And Christina Van Tassel will go through our financials. We'll close the session with the Q and A session. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Susie Watford, Chief Marketing and Membership Officer.
Susie?
Thanks, Omar. So you've heard how we built an extraordinary foundation for growth, how the opportunity we have is unprecedented and how we will win. And it's very different to 20 years ago when I first started working in news when the questions being asked were how do we grow, how do we transition to be a digital business and how do we attract younger audiences. Well, across our own today, we're bigger than we ever have been. We have more members than ever before.
Our business is more digital, both in terms of revenue and membership, and our membership is getting younger. And it's because of our focus on three things: serving our members with our valuable journalism our mission to be digital first and our vision of membership. And as a result, membership isn't just the biggest driver of revenue at Dow Jones, it's the engine for all of our growth. You might be wondering what membership means. Well, I'm referring to those customers who subscribe to us.
Today, that's subscribing to our news brands, so the Wall Street Journal or Barron's. But in future, it could be to any Dow Jones service, consumer or professional. And I talk about membership as subscription is a transaction, but membership is a relationship. It's about community, how we connect our members to us and to each other, and how we serve that community with our trusted journalism. Crucially, how we build a lifetime relationship that can act as a platform for growth.
So how are we serving our members? Well, our journalism is not a nice to have. It's essential to our members. And I can't talk about being essential and the role we play in members' lives without first talking about trust. In multiple studies from multiple sources time and time again, the Wall Street Journal is voted the most trusted newspaper in America.
Why this matters? Well, from our internal research, we know that high trust correlates to a high willingness to pay, which makes sense, right? The more you can trust something to do the job you need it to do, the more you're willing to pay for it. And we work hard to protect our position as a trusted source. We clearly differentiate between news and opinion.
We make sure the members understand that difference. And we have strict standards and ethics guidelines and a team who are dedicated to making sure that what you read is factual and correct. And this deep commitment to factual reporting and clearly signaled insightful opinion means we stand out in a polarized society. It means our opportunities across the political spectrum as we're trusted on the left and on the right. Across our titles, we see that our journalism is valued and our audience is valuable.
In fact, Wall Street Journal members talk about how they use the Wall Street Journal and how they rely on it. And in customer research, the statement that resonates most highly with journal members is that the Wall Street Journal is useful to me. And on Barron's, 98% of members are inspired to make investment decisions after reading it. The audience is unmatched in terms of quality. We have more C suite readers across Dow Jones than other titles.
These leaders are at the center of our decision making and our decision making audience. But ultimately, we are all decision makers. And everyone could do with our trusted insight, as Omar said, in business, in finance and in life. We help members make decisions from the classroom to the boardroom, from the needs a MarketWatch reader has as they make their first investments, to Wall Street Journal members looking for their first job out of college or their first position on the board, through to Barron's customers thinking about where to invest and what to do next with their money. And the great news is that our audiences are getting younger.
In fact, the average age of a Wall Street Journal member has gone from 56 to just 49 as we get increasingly digital. We're creating lifetime relationships that can translate into lifetime revenue, acquiring audiences at a younger age and seeing strong engagement and satisfaction with subscription. We're an essential source of trusted journalism at every stage of life. And we've been able to translate that into a fast growing membership business. And we've done it by becoming digital first.
Together, we have built a world class digital membership machine. We've transformed the team to bring in new digital skills, and we continue to hire the very best and the brightest. We set the team up around the customer lifecycle and brought on digital sales and social media experts, data scientists, digital marketers. And they work hard to find and convert reach or interest into sales and maintain and grow it through membership. For this to work, we have to maintain and grow our scale.
In Q4 of FY 2020, Dow Jones titles reached an average 150,000,000 monthly uniques, significantly up year on year. We saw record numbers during COVID-nineteen, but we've rebased higher than pre COVID averages. In fact, we're far bigger now than even during the 2016 election spike. Demand for our news is at an all time high, and the flight to quality is real. And this translates directly back in sales because of the digital model that we've built.
The Wall Street Journal was first to create a paywall back in 1996, which led to the 1st digital subscribers. But we've rethought this for a new digital age, creating a dynamic paywall that's propensity led and focused on the customer. What do I mean by that? Well, there are different types of paywall models that have emerged: no paywall, all paywalled, premium models where some content is paywalled and some isn't, and metered models. Our paywall uses machine learning to understand a customer's propensity to subscribe.
We then serve an experience that either gives access to read more or ask the prospect to subscribe depending on where they are in their customer journey. This has allowed us to more effectively take advantage of a new digital ecosystem, using social media and digital channels to promote our greatest assets, our journalists and our journalism, in order to drive sampling and acquire more members. As a result, on-site conversions have increased fourfold since the beginning of calendar year 2015. This model has allowed us to become increasingly efficient in our marketing. In fact, cost per order, or SAC, subscriber acquisition costs have come down each year.
It's probably no surprise to you that markets, business and opinion are key sections for driving conversion on The Wall Street Journal. Market volatility and economic uncertainty drive reaching conversions for both the Wall Street Journal and Barron's, which as Almar mentioned, means more people than ever are turning to Dow Jones. Some of our biggest stories for reaching conversion are shown here. And today, 65% of our total sales are driven from our own websites, showing we're effective in using our products to drive sale. We've doubled digital circulation revenue, driven by digital membership since FY 2015.
In fact, digital membership now accounts for almost 60% of our overall circulation revenue, and it's been driven by scale, deep data and understanding and operational effectiveness that's translated into digital revenue growth. Circulation revenue from digital membership overtook that from print in FY 2018. We've maintained high ARPUs and grown volume to increase revenue. We've grown our scale whilst maintaining premium pricing. We are twice the price of The New York Times in digital.
On The Wall Street Journal in the last 5 years, we've increased prices 3 times for digital membership. The Wall Street Journal is now priced at $38.99 a month in digital and Barron's $19.99 a month. And you may wonder what that means for ARPUs. Well, today, across Dow Jones, digital ARPUs remain high relative to our peers. We do use introductory offers to drive conversion, and we've shown we can convert these people to premium price subscriptions.
We expect to move to an increasingly mixed model with different ARPUs to attract different communities to Dow Jones, creating new products and services with increased customer choice and opportunities for cross sell and upsell. In fact, just now we're testing a new membership on MarketWatch that can act as a new paid entry point for membership. And it's early days, but we're excited to see conversions being driven from within the existing ecosystem and the cross pollination of our unique assets. Being digital is crucial we focus on driving engagement, and we do that by driving daily habit through our journalism, through our products and through the experience. And this focus on habit is crucial in order to deliver value to members and manage churn.
Lower churn is driven by higher engagement. And churn is coming down year on year and has been for the last 2 years as we get increasingly sophisticated in our approach. How are we doing that? Well, we invest in understanding customers from day 1. Shown here are 2 steps of a multistep onboarding journey.
We ask job title, job level, industry coverage, preference areas. We personalize the experience to meet customers' needs, and it's critical to drive habits early on in the journey. We understand what behaviors drive habit, using the app, signing up to newsletters, following our journalists, attending events, all these are behaviors that drive engagement and habit. And the on boarding journey aims to drive early adoption of these habits as well as understanding a member's needs. So I'm going to wrap up with what does growing membership look like.
Well, growing membership means membership and circulation is now the biggest revenue driver at Dow Jones, dollars 740,000,000 across digital and print. And digital transformation has powered our growth. At Dow Jones, we have 3,800,000 members. And on The Wall Street Journal, the biggest membership in our history and nearly 3,000,000 members in Q4. And volume growth has sped up.
We had a record breaking year for membership at Dow Jones, driven by the unprecedented level of crisis. Digital membership across Dow Jones grew by 600,000 members or 28% year on year. And this is the power of 1 Dow Jones, all brands working together to create an even stronger community of members. And a focus on scaling membership and serving communities is our platform for growth, driving more volume and value from membership and building an ever more valuable audience for advertisers that you'll hear more about from Josh and a platform to cross sell and upsell other dial tone services. And I want to leave you with this as this is a bit that we're really excited about, our opportunity.
According to our research, we see an addressable market in the U. S. Alone that's more than 90,000,000 people. These are people that have an interest in our type of news across Dow Jones. Business, general news, investments, technology, politics delve deeper and 56,000,000 have a willingness to pay.
So in addition to the 3,800,000 members we have today, there's a prospect pool of 12,000,000 people who are likely or very likely to subscribe according to our survey work. Our task is to increase reach and willingness to pay and create propositions to convert these people to membership. Added to that, we've got a global opportunity. Over 10% of our base is ex U. S.
Today. So based on what I've just shared, our long term aspiration is to double our membership by focusing on serving decision makers and building a platform as powerful as the people who use it. I shall now hand over to Matt Murray, our Editor in Chief.
Thank you, Susie. Hello, I'm Matt Murray. I have the extraordinary privilege of being the Editor in Chief of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones. It's a true pleasure to be with you today to talk about what we do in news, what distinguishes us and the opportunities before us. Now as you all know, Dow Jones has been a vital news source for Americans, particularly in the realm of business since The Wall Street Journal was founded 131 years ago this summer.
Barron's, which came along soon after, celebrates its 1 100th anniversary next year. As we've grown in peaceful and tumultuous times, we've lived through and chronicled dramatic changes across the entire business landscape, including in our industry. But through every era, our core news mission has remained fundamentally the same. Simply put, we aim to be the world's definitive source of news and information on business, finance, economics and money. Global forces that shape the world and our lives and are key to understanding them.
We view these subjects expansively as vitally important news topics, yes, but also as a lens for everything we cover from travel to fashion, politics to sports. We pursue exclusive stories with the goal of breaking all major scoops in our core areas, but also bringing our readers analysis and depth. Our best work provides actionable intelligence, information that is relevant and useful. We also play an important role as a watchdog that holds powerful institutions to account. I like to say that in all we do, we want to be the first read and the last word, the news break at the front end of a story and the deepest, smartest take on the back end.
Now our newsrooms are built on important values. As news journalists, we have a unique role to play in our society, providing facts, data, information and reported analysis, but never our own assertions or opinions. At The Wall Street Journal, we also have a strong tradition of robust and thought provoking opinion journalism favoring free markets and free peoples. In the interests of our readers and for our mutual editorial integrity, we maintain a strict divide between news and opinion. On a day for investors, I think it's worth noting that at the heart of our business, Dow Jones has an important social purpose in society, providing the objective facts and insights that businesses, governments and healthy public life in general depend upon.
We all recognize the challenges that the digital era is presenting to that shared understanding every day. But in that purpose, we frankly see a unique opportunity to stand apart in the media industry. Now you heard Almar talk earlier about our role as the source of truth for decision makers. For us in news, a decision maker means anyone who wants a job or has a job, a career or an ambition, who seeks wealth or career fulfillment, who earns a salary, spends money or saves for their dreams, who desires an edge as an investor, an employee, a manager or an entrepreneur or who simply wants to better understand how the world really works. As Susie said, in our steady membership and traffic growth, we are seeing that in times of change and upheaval, readers are seeking out reliable trusted sources of information.
Now while our core values haven't changed, we have evolved to keep up with readers and remain at the leading edge of digital innovation in our industry. You can see that in the products we're creating and the ways we are delivering them to connect to our audiences. Today in our modern newsrooms across Dow Jones, we have more than 1500 journalists in more than 50 locations. At The Wall Street Journal alone, in an average week, we produce 1,000 digital articles, 3 dozen videos, 41 podcast episodes, 4,800 newswires headlines, 3 live events, more than 100 newsletters and 6 daily newspapers. We continually redeploy our resources to follow where the news leads.
In recent years, that has meant among other things, expanding our coverage in areas including technology, politics, health and medicine and China. We've also built large newsroom teams focused on community and live events, video and audio and digital experiences and product. Dozens of digital strategists and engineers in the newsroom are focused full time on bringing our journalism to audiences however they want it. In just the last few months, while working from quarantine, we have created a new portal for job seekers and investors, launched initiatives aimed at helping young adults get their financial start in life, created a new digital edition of the daily newspaper, brought audio capability to many of our news stories and reinvented our live events to tap into a new much larger virtual audience. Earlier this month, for instance, our first ever job summit registered an audience of more than 9,000 attendees.
At the root of it all is impactful journalism that without fear or favor sets agendas and moves markets. In recent years, the Wall Street Journal staff have documented the deep conflicts at big platforms like Amazon, Facebook and Google, exposed the illusions and delusions at Theranos and WeWork, documented how mismanagement at PG and E hurt customers and contributed to California's wildfires, captured with depth and breadth the growing trade war between the United States and China and broken just about every big merger in business. These are just some examples, but they exemplify the work we do, the values we stand for and the organization we are building for the future. With companies, careers and geopolitics undergoing profound shifts, we have seen that the need for verifiable and trusted facts that reach a wide audience is greater than ever. We also know there are a lot of great stories to tell.
In months years to come, the newsrooms at Dow Jones will continue to bring those stories to our audiences and to invest smartly in their needs from college students to retirees, from rising professionals to seasoned investors and CEOs. We are well positioned and committed to helping all our communities, including those of you on this call today, understand and navigate the complexities of the 2020s as you turn to us for the first read and the last word. Thank you. And now I'd like to hand it over to Josh Stinchcomb.
Thanks, Matt. I'm Josh Stinchcomb, the Chief Revenue Officer. I oversee and will be discussing advertising across all of our consumer brands. We enter the fiscal year with strong digital advertising momentum. We've seen digital ad growth for 3 straight years and have outperformed our legacy competitor, The New York Times, in digital ad growth for 4 straight quarters.
In fact, as of Q4 of last fiscal, we are a digital first ad business with digital representing 54% of total advertising in the quarter. Now general advertising challenges including the secular decline in print notwithstanding, there are favorable market conditions that will help us grow our digital revenue. Growth in B2B digital ad spend is projected to far outpace digital spend generally over the next 18 months, 22.5% in 2020 and 11% in 2021. 66 percent of our digital ad business is B2B. We're well positioned to build on this momentum and take advantage of the digital ad tailwinds for three reasons.
1st, a high quality audience that trusts us with their attention and their data. 2nd, improved offerings in growth areas. And third, a greatly enhanced team. So starting off with our high quality audience, Susie spoke about our growing membership and in fact, our reach into professional communities is second to none. We reach 80% of the U.
S. C suite. Our readers influence 9 out of every $10 of the purchases that businesses make. And the aggregate personal net worth of our readers is $16,900,000,000,000 ranking number 1 in our competitive set for readers with liquid assets over $2,000,000 Now equally important is our ability to segment these audiences into addressable communities using first party data, data collected from across Dow Jones and News Corp more broadly. This allows us to target advertising to specific audiences.
And in fact, over the past 12 months, we've seen direct digital ad rates increase by 15% from their already very high starting point. So as we scale our total readership, the size of these addressable communities will increase as well. Our second competitive advantage stems from the fact that over the past 24 months we have developed and aligned our capabilities to take advantage of growth areas in digital advertising. Highly customized solutions on one hand like branded content and virtual events and data driven automated offerings on the other side, which are made in part possible by Ad Tech Innovations at Dow Jones and News Corp. So starting with custom content.
This is the creation of digital content on behalf of our advertising partners designed to inform and motivate readers. We've invested in talent and it's paying off. Our proposal win rate has improved 19%, a reflection of the quality of our ideas. Our renewal rates have improved by 38%, a reflection of satisfied customers. And we've seen a 42% increase in revenue generated from multiyear $1,000,000 plus partnerships, all of this leading to more predictable advertising revenue.
Our virtual events business, which is in essence a digital offering, is incredibly strong out of the gate, and we expect to have at least 155 events in fiscal 'twenty one. Now fiscal year to date as compared to in person events, commitments are being made much faster. We're seeing 2 times the scale in attendees and 2 times the efficiency in production costs. So what started as a response to the crisis is proving to be a very promising digital business that will complement our in person events when they return. Our custom content and events businesses have clients from all sectors.
Now on the other side of the ad spectrum is the data driven increasingly automated offering and it's in high growth mode. Our premium programmatic or private marketplace revenue grew 68% in FY 'twenty. Our partnerships with Twitter and Spotify allow us to tap incremental revenue from growing buckets of spend, namely social and audio, with little lift from our sales team. Revenue from those partnerships more than doubled last fiscal. And the 1st party data products, the segmented communities I mentioned before, grew 26% in FY 'twenty.
The roster of clients buying our data driven products is impressive and growing. Finally, we are doing all of this with a sales and marketing organization that is increasingly digitally savvy and better skilled for where the business is going. We've changed the profile of the team by rebalancing heads between traditional sales roles and more specialized roles around custom content and programmatic. And at the same time brought new digital expertise into the sales ranks, ultimately a more diversified, better skilled and increasingly efficient organization. So in summary, the combination of the fast growing custom solutions driven revenue and the data driven automated revenue have created a robust defense against the issues threatening publishers generally, namely reader trust erosion and the phasing out of 3rd party cookies for targeting.
So as we scale and reach and data collection, we will further differentiate ourselves in the B2B space, ultimately comprising a category of 1, a premium digital publisher with deep subject matter expertise, consumer trust, 1st party data at scale and a team and offering fit for purpose. And now I'll turn it over to Guy Harrison.
Thanks, Josh. I'm Guy Harrison, General Manager of Dow Jones Risk and Compliance. As you heard earlier from Elmar, regulation is growing rapidly and becoming ever more complex. Today, I'm going to explain how Dow Jones Risk and Compliance is helping customers manage these challenges. And I'll share our ambitious plans for growth.
Here's a video to set the scene.
Regulation. For businesses, it's getting more and more complicated, But fail to comply and you could go from the business pages to the front page. How does this happen? You overlook a suspicious transaction and you're inadvertently facilitating forced labor. You start trading with a new supplier who you didn't know was on the sanctions list or you sign a new partner without realizing they're laundering the proceeds of organized crime.
What do these things cost you? A $1,000,000,000 fine will take its toll, but the reputational damage could be 10 times worse. There could even be jail time. Dow Jones helps customers stay on the right side of the law by providing data, tools and expertise to help companies around the globe manage risk and stay compliant. How do we do this?
Over 20 years, we have built an extensive database of over 3,000,000 companies and individuals. Every day, we take in more than a day, we take in more than a 1000000 articles from our own publications and 33,000 other sources, supplementing these with government lists, public records and other trusted publicly available sources. Our global research team, speaking 60 different languages, expertly tag and structure that data, so it can be searched and packaged for business use, helping our 4 1,000 loyal customers, including 20 out of 25 of the world's top banks, think twice about who they're doing business with. This isn't optional. It's essential.
Our customers look to us to offer the same journalistic rigor we bring to exposing truth to help them tackle some of the most pressing issues of our time, so they can make smart decisions and stay on the right side of the law.
So that gives you a good idea of who we are and what we do. But I imagine many of you will be asking, why is risk and compliance important? And why does it warrant a slot in the Dow Jones Investor Day? Well, today I'm going to show you that, firstly, in the last 10 years, risk and compliance has grown fast and profitably secondly, that our growth is exceptionally high quality and is therefore of significant value and finally, we still have huge opportunity ahead of us and a clear plan to exploit opportunity. So let's start with a look at what we do and how we've grown.
If Dow Jones' mission is to be the source of truth and insight for decision makers, risk and compliance is perhaps where Dow Jones is closest to its mission, especially where that truth is in the service of good ends. We do that by providing data, technology and services to help our customers manage risk and stay compliant, so that they can avoid huge financial and reputational penalties and gain competitive advantage. Perhaps more importantly, the facts we provide help our customers to do the right thing. This is important for business and society because dirty money is often the product of appalling wrongdoing, including organized crime, terrorism, drug trafficking and modern slavery. In essence, what we do is interpret complex and changing regulations from regulators around the globe.
This allows us to provide our customers with the data they need to stay compliant with anti money laundering, anti bribery and corruption, sanctions and trade regulation. Our expert researchers in tandem with cutting edge technologies distill a vast range of trusted sources as well as Dow Jones' own publications so that we can identify high risk people and companies. For example, we sift through over 1,000,000 new news articles from approximately 33,000 sources from our Factiva database every day. Our online tools help customers manage complex compliance and supply chain workflows from the beginning to the end. For when our customers need more support, we also offer a range of training and custom research as well as professional and managed services.
Rising demand for our products and services has led to fast and profitable growth. Quarter 4 financial year 2020 is the 20th consecutive quarter that we have seen double digit revenue growth year over year. That's brought us to a new milestone of approximately $160,000,000 in total annual revenues this past fiscal year. It's worth noting at the time of the News Corp spin off in 2014, FY2013 annual revenues for risk and compliance were only 31,000,000 We therefore think, as Robert Thompson highlighted on our FY 2020 earnings call, that we are a highly undervalued part of a highly undervalued company. We differentiate ourselves on quality.
Our customers understand that the same rigorous standards that drive trust in The Wall Street Journal and Barron's apply equally to Dow Jones risk and compliance. This is important because compliance is not the place where our customers want to cut corners. They therefore buy on quality, not just price. Secondly, we're fortunate to run a business where our customers are obligated by their regulators to buy products and services such as ours. As a result, we've developed strong partnerships
with
a community of over 4,000 loyal customers. 20 out of the top 25 banks trust our data to power their compliance programs. We have exceptionally strong connections to the compliance community, and as I'll highlight later, deepening these connections to this tightly defined community will be a key pillar of our future growth. Our customers are also highly diversified both by industry type and geography, something we've been particularly grateful for during the COVID-nineteen pandemic. Over 75% of our revenues now come from outside the U.
S. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, 95% of our revenues come from long term contracts with over 90% renewal rates. Long term contracts mean real partnerships with our customers at a time when they need us more than ever. They also give us the resilience and predictability that we need to invest in further growth. So we've built a strong and valuable foundation with high quality products, a diversified and loyal customer base and growing predictable recurring revenue.
But there's still huge opportunity ahead for Dow Jones. This is a unique moment in time as we continue to benefit from powerful tailwinds. We're in a position of strength from which to take full advantage of these favorable market trends. Regulation and enforcement action is on the rise. It's becoming more complex and more critical for our customers.
For example, in a time of heightened geopolitical tensions, particularly between the U. S. And China, sanctions and trade regulation are increasingly being used as a foreign policy tool. Our customers are relying on us to help them navigate the new and ever changing regulatory environment. This is a trend not only impacting international trade compliance, but our other specialisms too.
More and more industries are subject to anti money laundering and counterterrorism financing regulation. See the recent regulation of crypto assets and currencies, or the increased enforcement around the world for real estate, professional services and high value goods dealers. We also see new bribery and corruption regulation around the world as well as increased cross border enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act by the U. S. Department of Justice.
This brings us to the next trend. Compliance is going mainstream. Financial services customers aren't the only ones feeling the pressure. Regulators are turning their attention to corporates as well, forcing all companies to embark on the kind of compliance programs the banks started decades ago. We're at the eve of mass compliance, where the imperative to do the right thing goes beyond just regulation.
People and companies are embracing risk management without direct pressure from regulators. To help solve more problems for a wider range of customers, we will invest to create a step change in the scale of our offering. When I joined Dow Jones 2 years ago, I canvassed a lot of heads of compliance with our customers to ask about their future priorities, and one of them summed up their requirements very succinctly. He said, We don't want data vendors, we want problem solvers. To date, the success of our business has been built on financial crime compliance information.
We will now expand and enhance our offering by adding complementary technologies and services to become not just a data vendor, but to be able to act as our customers' compliance team. We will also leapfrog our competitors by moving into immediately adjacent governance, risk and compliance segments. In order to achieve this, we have to continue to super skill our people. That means continuing to invest in engineers and data scientists to build the next generation of technologies we need to gather, analyze and distribute the information our customers need. We also recognize that in such a fast growing market, we have to move quickly.
We'll therefore look to partnerships and select reinvestment opportunities to accelerate the delivery of our strategy. So in summary, we've grown fast and profitably. That growth has been of extremely high quality and is therefore of significant value. And finally, we still have huge opportunity ahead of us and a strong plan to exploit it. As compliance officers around the world are being asked to comply with more and more regulation, more and more uncertainty, we're seeing a flight quality.
Dow Jones, as the trust driven compliance partner, has the power to not only help decision makers raise compliance standards, but to help them cut costs, gain competitive advantage, and do the right thing. Thank you. I'll now pass you to Christina, our CFO.
Thanks, Guy. I'm Christina Van Tassel, Chief Financial Officer at Dow Jones. You've seen from my colleagues that we have a track record of strong growth across a number of areas and you've heard our plans for continuing that growth. I'm now going to bring it all together for you and show you how the numbers back up our extraordinary potential. It's been several years since Dow Jones has been in front of you.
So I'm excited to tell you more about how we've evolved and how we're investing for growth. Over the years, we've become a more diversified and global business. Our portfolio helps decision makers in both B2C and B2B communities. We have 3 franchises. We have Wall Street Journal, we have Barron's Group and we have Professional Information Business, which includes Risk and Compliance, Factiva and Newswires.
With our 3 primary revenue streams from circulation, advertising and professional information business, we are well placed to face headwinds and seize opportunities. The impact of COVID has been a recent example of this. As Susie mentioned, we have seen an unprecedented level of traffic as more people are looking to us for trusted news, data and analysis. Despite COVID, you saw our last quarter results. We've expanded our membership base.
We've improved our offerings in digital ad growth areas and we created specialized data products for our corporate customers. So not only do we have a diversified business, but we also have a global and ever expanding community. We have nearly 3,800,000 subscriptions to our consumer products across 182 countries. We have 10,000 corporate customers across 162 countries and we have 4,400 excellent employees supporting us across 36 countries. Being diversified and global gives us the ability to serve and connect with our readers and customers everywhere.
It gives us the resilience we need to achieve further growth. Being more predictable, profitable and productive is also enabling us to grow. Our strong foundation has enabled Dow Jones to deliver 3 years of consecutive growth from top to bottom. Our revenue hit $1,600,000,000 last year and that translates into a 13% increase year over year in segment EBITDA at $236,000,000 We delivered a 15% EBITDA margin on that revenue and we believe we have opportunities to do better. We saw record performance last year and here's what it looked like.
As Susie mentioned, digital audiences reached 152,000,000 in Q4. That's double the prior year level. We saw member subscriptions reach 3,800,000 and this is really exciting. Digital revenues surpassed $1,000,000,000 for the very first time. Plus, risk and compliance revenue continued to grow, nearly reaching $160,000,000 as Guy mentioned, which is a 24% CAGR since 2014, something we're really proud of.
At the heart of our success has been our ongoing transition to a predominantly digital business. In fact, 2 thirds of our revenue is now digital and that number has been growing. How did we get here? Well, we actually overtook print over time. Total digital revenue first exceeded print revenues back in fiscal year 'sixteen.
For digital circulation, digital revenue surpassed the 50% mark in fiscal year 'eighteen. And for advertising revenue, digital beat print for the very first time this past quarter. As you can see, our digital revenue journey continues to serve us well. As well as being more digital, our revenue streams at Dow Jones are becoming more predictable with recurring revenue now accounting for 3 quarters of total revenue. More predictable means more resilient and in turn more valuable.
And that strong foundation along with focused investment in key assets as well as streamlined operations has allowed us to generate incremental revenue and EBITDA in an increasingly efficient way. As I mentioned earlier, we've expanded our profit margin to 15%. That is 1.4 percentage points up from prior year. In fact, over the last 3 years, our profit has grown at a faster rate than our revenue. While we have focused on driving margin growth and transforming revenue, we've also improved how we deploy our capital.
Over the last 6 years, we have worked to create a much more efficient business. We've retired costly legacy systems reducing our tech debt and we're optimizing our real estate footprint. This has allowed us to nearly double the amount of investment we dedicate to growth areas from 27% to 48%. And we listen to our customers, which means we continue to invest in our data capabilities. For example, we enhanced Wall Street Journal features and tools.
We've developed proprietary ad tech and we've expanded our risk and compliance products just to name a few. Collectively, this has helped us drive greater product differentiation, engagement, efficiency and yield creating a unique position for Dow Jones in the marketplace. We've done this while maintaining a relatively flat level of CapEx of 59,000,000 dollars That's less than a 3% CAGR increase since 2014. These initiatives along with our relentless focus on cost management allow for more investment in our key assets which I'm going to touch on next. As Almar said, we're doing this by focusing our efforts around 4 priorities to ensure future growth, scale, connect, accelerate and super skill.
And with that in mind, we'll continue to invest in our key assets that supports this mission. We choose to invest in technology that will enable us to become lighter, faster and more flexible in the ways we work and operate as a company. We are benefiting from news core platforms allowing us to increase our efficiency and effectiveness all around and we're accelerating building innovative products that increase community engagement and excite our customers. And personalization of our content is leading to better digital experiences for our audiences. Matt has already talked about content, where we're focusing and expanding our coverage.
In addition, we have access to unique data sources and how we deploy and optimize across the business is what differentiates us from our competitors. Whether it be used for asset creation, to enhance our capabilities, to power our machine learning models or to allow cross pollinization across our brands, data delivers incremental value. So let's put this in context. Factiva offers content from approximately 33,000 global news and information sources from over 200 countries in 28 languages. Newswires delivers real time business news, information analysis and on average publishes over 16,000 news items each and every day.
Our proprietary risk and compliance database includes over 3,000,000 profiles and we continue to capture 1st party data in a safe and secure way. In the future, we will continue to prioritize our data and content investments. Our most valuable asset is, of course, our team and we're actively investing in their development. We are readying ourselves for the future state of work and this means more flexibility, more productivity and more access to global talent. We fundamentally value diversity and inclusion at Dow Jones.
Embedding inclusion in communities is a long term sustainable growth strategy. This helps us engage meaningfully with our customers, employees and society. And we believe this fosters a culture of impact. We have a huge opportunity and a strong plan to win and this translates into opportunities for News Corp Investors. We will continue our focused investments in products.
We're leaning into a simplified and agile operating model and we commit to strong results with growth in profit delivered through responsible revenues and increased transparency. This is our time. We are a business in growth with strong fundamentals. We are increasingly predictable, profitable and productive. And we know our mission, to be the source of truth for decision makers in business, finance and life.
We are seizing the opportunities in front of us and investing smartly. This is what creates value. And now back to Almar.
Thank you, Christina. Thank you everyone for listening. I hope you learned a few things about Dow Jones and share our excitement about our future. As one of the legendary leaders of The Wall Street Journal like to say, everything can be improved. We take that to heart.
So this is just the beginning. So with that, let's open up to your questions. You can submit them via the question tab on the right hand side of the page. So let's get going. Thanks.
Thank you, Alomar. I'm Mike Florin, Senior Vice President and Head of Investor Relations at News Corp. I'll be monitoring today's Q and A session. Our first question comes from Ray David at Schroders. Ray asked, could you elaborate on the long term aspirations of doubling digital membership?
Will that come from lower priced ARPU packages?
Thanks, Mike, and thanks, Ray, for that question. First off, I want to acknowledge that it was a rough day on the markets. We happen to have the editor of The Wall Street Journal here with us, Matt Murray, who can offer a few thoughts.
Thanks, Almar. Thanks all of you for being with us today. As Almar said, it was a rough day here. It was an unusual day when you had stocks, oil and gold all falling at the same time. The Dow was off more than 500, oil 4.5%, gold at its lowest since July now off 2.6% and 10 of the 11 secondtors of the S and P were down, which is pretty bad, led by materials and industrials.
And look, a few things are happening here in the U. S. At the same time. The prospects for a stimulus deal, which we're already looking low, or as someone told us today, as close to 0 as it can be now that we've got a court fight ahead of us in the coming weeks. We don't just have a court fight, of course, we have a count fight.
Concern continues to surround the election. Wisconsin today extended the deadline for counting votes until 6 days after the election, which makes the vote itself look like it's going to be messier and continued uncertainty around the U. S. And China relationship, trying to impact the TikTok deal today, where there was some open quarreling about what the deal meant between the two sides. So there's a lot happening right now.
I should say it's moments like this that people turn to us, which is why we've got about a half a dozen reporters filing right now and why markets are leading the Wall Street Journal, Barron's and MarketWatch. And I'm sure you'll continue to see stories and analysis now throughout the night.
Thanks for that, Matt. Always great to get a little bit of live analysis from The Wall Street Journal. So now on to Ray's question. We feel comfortable that we can double digital membership on the long term. The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones are both part of the fabric of U.
S. And global business. And so we are encouraged, but not surprised to see that our TAM is 90,000,000 plus in the U. S. Alone.
And that's not even counting international. Dow Jones is unique in a market really on its own because of its unique quality journalism that you heard Matt put on display just now, because of the nature of our audience with its focused attention and its high net asset value, because of the interplay between B2C and B2B inside of Dow Jones. We are also, as you heard, I was alluded to in the presentation, planning to launch new products with different ARPU points, new price points, both at the entry level and at a premium level. Then there is also our experience in this arena. We have double digital membership before at The Wall Street Journal.
We've seen significant digital growth at the Barron's Group over the past 4 years that I was there and led that digitization. But we have a playbook. I would like Susie to share a few more thoughts on this very important question.
Thank you. I'd like to first talk about TAM and the opportunity and then we'll touch on ARPU. From a TAM perspective, as we talked about during the presentation, we see this 90,000,000 people in the U. S. Alone who have an interest in Dow Jones and our type of news, so general news, but also as we talked about, finance, investing technology.
And we really wanted to make sure that we could delve deeper into that to look at who was willing to pay. And we established that there were 56,000,000 people in the U. S. Who were willing to pay. But we definitely wanted to go deeper and understand who was willing to commit to pay and look to subscribe.
And that's where we established this 12,000,000 prospect pool in addition to our 3,800,000 existing members who had a propensity to subscribe and a likelihood to subscribe. And we're really excited about that for a number of reasons. 1, because that 12,000,000 prospect pool had actually got bigger since the last time we did this research, which shows that our model of moving people down the subscription funnel and warming them up to the idea of subscribing has been working. So that's really encouraging news. But also, when we look deeper into who those 12,000,000 prospects were, we found that over half of them were under the age of 44, which is also incredibly exciting for us.
And we also found that they had a propensity to be more interested in content areas such as investing, which is obviously a really sweet spot for us and our products. I think the other thing to mention just on this is around lifetime value and how we think about both the unique assets that we have across Dow Jones. Because in addition to the Wall Street Journal, we obviously have Barron's, now MarketWatch, but also our professional services and our professional information services. So when we think about how we use that prospect pool, we want to obviously get them to subscribe potentially to a new MarketWatch subscription and then move them up the value chain to a Wall Street Journal or Barron subscription, but then into professional memberships and cross sell them into other professional information services. So the combination of the addressable market opportunity and the unique model that we have across Dow Jones with this portfolio of products is really exciting.
And it's becoming increasingly easy to move people through that customer journey now that 75% of our membership is digital. So in terms of our ARPU, as Omar mentioned, we really see the opportunity to grow definitely our core premium price products like The Wall Street Journal, but also to introduce new products such as the MarketWatch subscription, which will be a lower price entry point, but also additional memberships potentially around our C suite franchises, which are more expensive than the Wall Street Journal membership.
Thanks, Susie and Ray, for your question. Enter Rakowski at Credit Suisse asks, what is the global membership opportunity? And how does that compare with the $12,000,000 prospect pool in the U. S?
Thanks for that. Today, we are focused on the opportunity in the U. S, but we have a global mindset and we know that there is a strong global opportunity. Only 10% of the membership base is outside the U. S.
At the moment and we know that we will have reached far bigger than that. We haven't yet set our TAM for that, but I really want to underscore that there is a global opportunity on top of the one in the U. S. In addition, we have a long standing and unique commitment to coverage of international developments traditionally with The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones. Personally, I spend significant time in Asia Pacific and in Europe working for Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal, lived in many different locations for Dow Jones.
So I personally firsthand know that there is global demand for reliable factual news and analysis for decision makers. Right now, perhaps more so than in a long time, there's also a hunger for news from the U. S. Outside the borders of the U. S.
And a hunger for fair news synthesizing global trends. Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal can most certainly serve these communities. We will set out to do so. We'd love for Susie to follow-up a little bit on all of this.
Thanks, Almar. I will just give you a bit of context around that growth. So as Almar said, 10% of the membership base today coming from outside of the U. S. And growing.
And it's growing for a couple of reasons. Firstly, we're beginning to understand more about pricing differently by geography, and we've seen success with that in growing digital subscriptions. But also, our digital model really allows us to make use of the scale that we can get both inside and outside of the U. S. What I mean by that is with our dynamic paywall, we can use that scale and translate it into subscriptions by again back to the subscription funnel, moving people down the funnel and warming them up to the idea of subscription by promoting our journalism and getting them to keep coming back to our products and our sites.
In addition, we're understanding more about our digital products and how we can increase engagement in order to reduce churn. And that's something that both in the U. S. And internationally is really crucial. I might just throw over to Matt as well, who I know will want to talk about international.
Yes. Thanks, Susie. I'll just make a couple of points, which Almar sort of touched on. It's worth keeping in mind that we have the largest international staff, reporting staff of major U. S.
Media companies. At a time when organizations have been pulling back, we've remained committed to covering the world robustly. Our readers expect us to do that. They need to understand the world. But also as Almar said, it's worth noting when we talk about decision makers that many decision makers around the world are in our readership today.
And they look to us for coverage, not just in their regions or of companies, but of the U. S. They want to understand politics. They want to understand the economy here. And we bring our good work about the United States overseas as well.
So there's a lot of opportunity, I think, that really sets us apart. You don't have to look very far in U. S. Media to understand how thin international reporting has gotten here or similarly some of the reporting that's done overseas.
Thank you. Fraser McLeish from MST Marquis. Fraser calculates the digital ARPU to be around $17.60 Can you please explain the difference between the ARPU and the headline price point?
This one for Susie.
Thank you. I mean, firstly, I'd say it's a net positive, right? We're growing both our subscriber and membership volumes and our revenues. And you see that reflected in our 75% of the base being digital and almost 60% of our circulation revenue being driven by digital. What I would add to that is that we really think about 3 different growth engines.
I touched on this before that today we have the Wall Street Journal and Barron's. In the future, we also will have MarketWatch. So when we think about the total ARPU, it's calculation across different products. We also take a very flexible approach to pricing, thinking not just about different prices by geography, which I touched on earlier, but also by audience. So it's probably no surprise that products like the Wall Street Journal have high institutional sales.
And we also think about pricing differently for entry points to subscriptions. But overall, we expect the growth to come from a mix of both continuing to grow our core products at our premium price. We're seeing fantastic momentum there, bringing people in at longer term discounted offers, but then gradually migrating them up to higher prices and then also introducing new products and services that can attract new audiences. And, as Amol mentioned, also going further up the chain and thinking about how we can create additionally priced products and services, particularly for those decision makers that we touched on during the presentation.
Kane Hannan at Goldman Sachs wants to know, as we think about the propensity to pay for the prospect pool, do we expect them to come at a lower price point given the fact that they aren't existing subscribers today?
I can jump in there. I think it's a great follow on question to the one that we just had, which is we do expect the growth to come from a mix of both expanding our core products at that premium price. The Wall Street Journal is priced premium versus other titles in the market. We've continued to actually increase our price over the last couple of years in digital. So we'll continue to grow that, and that's what we're seeing, great momentum.
But we also want to make sure that we innovate and take a very flexible approach to pricing to introduce new audiences and to really take advantage of that 12,000,000 prospect pool that we can see because we know that across all the different products that we have within Dow Jones, we've got this opportunity to move them up the value chain over time.
Kane Hannan has a follow-up question. You've mentioned increased investment in risk and compliance and also in your tech platforms, but you're also going to benefit from the group's shared service program in fiscal 2022. How should we think about the margin outlook for Dow Jones longer term? Is there upside from here?
Yes. Thanks for that question. Yes, indeed, we are planning to invest further in risk and compliance as well as in our technology capability to help our digital membership business. But there will certainly be scope to improve our EBITDA margins. I'm going to ask Christina Van Tassel to highlight that a little bit more.
Thanks, Elmore. Thanks for the question, Kane. Yes, we are very focused on increasing our efficiency in our operating model. We are benefiting from having a diverse portfolio. So that means we can pull levers when we need to.
And we're just really shifting to be more agile in our operating leverage. I think a good example of that was last week, our announcements moving our print operations out of the Bronx. So, and finally, you mentioned it in your question, we're very engaged with News Corp on the shared service program and do believe in its yield. So, and we also are very excited by our scale. And so for all those reasons, we do think that there is scope to improve our margins over the next few years and we're really excited about it.
Frasier, Bocletian, MST as a follow-up along similar lines. Can you talk about cost growth? It's been low single digits for the last 2 years. Can that be sustained at that level? And where does that go going forward?
Yes, I'll take that as well. That's a good follow-up. The short answer is yes. For all the reasons I just mentioned, with our increasing cost efficiency programs, with our agility, we do believe we can maintain it. We also believe that we have really because we are agile even in situations like we had in Q4.
And when COVID hit, we were able to pull those levers and adjust our cost base to continue to deliver 13% EBITDA growth in Q4 as well as for the year. So we do believe that we are on it. We know how to invest and how to maintain our margins appropriately.
Kate Hanna at Goldman Sachs asked, you noted 95% of risk and compliance revenues are in long term contracts. Can you talk a little bit more about what these contracts typically look like, what their average length is and whether or not there are escalators or pay per use contracts?
Thanks, Kane. And this question is all yours, Guy.
Thanks, Elmer. So clearly, there's no one size fits all risk and compliance contract, particularly as we start to expand our business away from our well, away from core data, including more technology, more services. But what I will say is that those contracts typically tend to be multi year. They're often there's an element of volume pricing in there as well. So as our customers' compliance needs grow, our revenues grow with them.
We talked about the strong retention rates and clearly that's the foundation for those strong retention rates is the quality of our products themselves. But it's also worth noting that we are deeply integrated into our customers' compliance processes themselves. And that leads also to those strong renewal rates. And I guess the final thing I'd say about those contracts is they're often very hard fought. Getting through the procurement processes at some of the big banks represented on these calls today is often hard.
So our key strategic pillar to expand and enhance our offering, having those 4,000 loyal customers already under contract is a key part of delivering on that strategy.
Andrew Ricasi at Credit Suisse asked, how material are the revenues and earnings from Apple News and Facebook? And what are you expecting in terms of timing and reaching a similar deal with Google? Is your preference to reach a global deal with all News Corp. Properties, which covers Australia
and
the U. K. As well?
Well, this is an exciting and also important question. And I'm going to toss it to Robert, who has been on a 10 year quest to make sure that content providers, high quality content providers like ourselves, can extract the right value from platforms. And so, Robert?
Thanks, Elmer. The fact that we're even talking about deals and whether they're local deals or global deals tells us itself how much the terms of trade have changed in the world of digital. The landscape is completely altered. And what it does mean is that on the content side, there is a hierarchy of content based on quality. That's why The Wall Street Journal was the first to do a deal with Facebook in the U.
S. Because clearly it's at the very height of that hierarchy. That's why our news products around the world are in discussion with the various digital companies. I can't go into any detail at the moment other than to say that it's fair to assume that the talks are going on. It's also fair to assume that the result of those talks will be meaningful and material.
There's another component to that content on one side. The other is the changing nature of the advertising market. As you're well aware, there are various investigations going on in different cities around the world, particularly in the U. S. With 50 state attorneys general looking at the ad market.
We believe too on the ad side in the longer term that there's going to be a recalibrating of revenue and that we will be a beneficiary in that regard as well. So we're at an early stage of the digital denouement, but we are getting close to a point where there's recognition both for the content itself and proper yield on our advertising and both combined will make a positive difference.
Thanks, Robert. Lev Margolin at L1 Capital has a similar question to what we've heard before. Do EBITDA margins expand significantly in the next few years as growth comes from digital and professional services? And is there sort of a medium term target?
Thanks for the question. I'll grab it. So we do have a varied profile in our product mix and that's what makes us really strong and you've heard our digital story. I also want to call out on the strength of our professional information business. We delivered $450,000,000 in revenue last year and it has higher margins relative to the rest of the business, which obviously yields a strong profitability profile.
So while we don't give guidance, we are quite excited about the opportunity going forward.
Brian Hann at Morningstar asked, do the risk and compliance business ultimately get into environmental, social and governmental research industries?
Why don't I take that one, Mike? So we have a number of priorities for the future growth of the business. And 1st and foremost, we have to continue to deliver more for our customers in the financial crime space. And as I said earlier in the presentation, that means adding complementary technologies that allow them to analyze the data that we have today and then to add complementary services that really move us from being just a data vendor to be able to act as our customers' compliance teams. But another key pillar of that strategy is very much to expand into adjacent governance, risk and compliance segments, of which ESG is clearly a very close adjacency, particularly given the core competency that we have around structuring vast amounts of unstructured information from trusted sources around the world.
But we will put that alongside other segments such as fraud, ID. There are a number of opportunities that we will pursue.
Kane Hannan from Goldman has a follow-up. Can you talk about your strategies to grow Dow Jones revenues through non text delivery, such as audiobooks, video? Or is text really the key growth going forward?
Well, of course, we want to be where our customers and users are and we are available on multiple platforms and we've seen that growth in audio, for example, has really picked up in the past year and we expect that to continue. Similarly, for example, on television, we've also seen a pickup for revenue in revenue for Dow Jones and for The Wall Street Journal with the Barron's TV show. And we're going to look beyond that and invest in audio, build out those products even more. Matt Murray, who runs the newsroom, can give you a glimpse of all the platforms that we're on right now outside of text.
Sure. Omar mentioned 2 of the biggest, but let me add another, which is events. We have built a large events business inside Dow Jones in recent years. And in the last 6 months during quarantine, we've seen that COVID is going to offer us, we think COVID has shown us we have new opportunities to get into virtual events. We are doing 3 or 4 things a week sometimes.
And we're getting massive audiences and bringing in all kinds of new customers. We had a for the first time ever, we had a summit about jobs in a challenging market full of advice, a day full of seminars with people. We had 5,000 people come to see us on wsa.com, 20,000 come to us on Twitter and 1,400,000 so far have visited that site on Apple News. That's really exciting and something completely different than where we'd come from. And that's really emerged as its own platform as well.
One thing I'll add is, I think if we look across News Corp, for instance, if we look at HarperCollins, I think there are some partnership opportunities we can take advantage of across News Corp that could also help us move in new directions in the years to come.
And we're up at
sorry, Robert?
Yes. If I could just supplement Matt's answer there. We have teams in place that show that as a company, we have a comparative competitive advantage on audio products. He referenced the communication and cooperation between HarperCollins and Dow Jones. There's also communication cooperation on a very, very regular organized basis between U.
K. Radio stations, Harper Collins and our news properties around the world. So news properties like The Wall Street Journal are getting an insight into audiobook trends, what people are listening to, how long they're listening to, when do they stop listening, when does something get boring, what time of day do they listen, what sort of professional voices you need to get the most impact and combine that with radio facilities, particularly in the UK, so that we have the quality that really in the news business is setting new standards that enable us to get the most impact for our great journalism.
We're up at about 9:30 a. M. In Australia. So we'll just take about 2 or 3 other questions, if that's okay. We've got Andrew Rakowski from Credit Suisse.
If that's okay. We've got Entre Rakowski from Credit Suisse who asked, can you talk about subscriber acquisition costs now? And also, I think, touch on churn at The Wall Street Journal and other Dow Jones properties.
Sure. I'll jump in on that one. We have a really fantastic team that have developed a market leading digital growth engine powered by our propensity led paywall. And what that's resulted in is that our SAC has come down each year for the last couple of years. And that's a combination of both the move, obviously, from off line to online digital acquisition, but also powered by this propensity led paywall.
And just to touch a bit more deeply on that, it really is powered by our journalism. We have the most amazing asset. And every day, we can choose stories to promote and bring people back to our products. And what that means is where we used to spend money really only at the very bottom of the acquisition funnel using direct response messaging around price, now we're able to spend far higher up the model promoting our journalism and warming up people to the idea of subscription. So we really focus on how we can move prospects from cold prospects to warm prospects to hot prospects using the power of our power of our journalism.
And that's delivering fantastic growth for us. The other thing to say is that because as we get increasingly efficient of that, whilst we've managed to maintain our premium price, we're seeing a great return on investment that we put into that model. In terms of churn, we benchmark ourselves against other digital businesses, and we're increasingly moving our churn heading in the right direction, reducing it year on year. And that's coming from a real focus on understanding our customers and how they use our products. We understand very much the correlation between engagement and daily habits to reduce churn.
So we understand the leading indicators and we can now impact those. And that's where we look at how customers use our products. So I talked about during the presentation how we onboard them to our products and make them come back every day. And we're doing that increasingly by thinking about tailored products, personalization, automated comms that can really be then rolled out at scale in order to impact and bring down churn.
Thank you, Susie. Brian Hann at Morningsizer question. You made reference to the New York Times in the presentation. Why do you think the market is valuing their digital transformation and strategy more than Dow Jones?
Well, that's what a day like today serves, to share our enthusiasm for the upside that exists within Dow Jones. We have a unique and diverse Dow Jones ecosystem and we hope we gave you some insights into that today. I want to emphasize our diverse growth engines, 3 for membership alone and a phenomenal B2B machine. Unique advantage with a very focused high net worth audience, coverage strength that has a global appeal and an international market that we haven't tapped into yet. So altogether, a unique and perhaps largely untold growth story that lies ahead of us and that I would like Christina Van Tassel to comment on a little bit more in terms of stats that we can provide.
Sure. We have a very strong growth trajectory and that's shown quarter after quarter. We have a higher we have our high EBITDA in terms of absolutes and also our profit margin. We have premier pricing on our products, which has served us well and we think that will continue into the future. And also we have this diversity that Almar mentioned that we have on the consumer side as well as the professional side.
So that just leads to abilities to cross pollinate and execute as we go forward. So we would feel really well situated to continue in the future, educate all of you and have increased transparency. We think that will in turn show good valuation.
Our last question for today's session comes from Mike Younger of Super Investment Management. Can you please comment on how well integrated Dow Jones is with News Corp and how the organization everyone in the organization learns from each other?
Being part of News Corp. Is being part of a very smart family. And so we share with each other knowledge on subscription subscriber acquisition, on technology, on content and on every aspect of the business. And sometimes that takes the shape of a partnership or joint initiatives. We do so where sensible, but it's a very fruitful and I would say accretive relationship between Dow Jones and the rest of News Corp.
Well, thank you all for your interest today. Thank you all for your great questions. I'm going to hand it now over to Almar for some closing comments.
Well, thank you all for taking time out on what is proving to be a difficult day on the markets. I hope that you have learned a few things about Dow Jones today and that you share our enthusiasm going forward. Please don't hesitate to reach out to us if you have further questions and we look forward to talking to you again soon. I'm now going to hand it to Robert Thompson.
Thank you, Omar, and thank you, team. Look, we appreciated the opportunity to tell the Dow Jones story and to highlight the company's undoubted unrealized potential. And I hope that you have come to appreciate how energetic, how creative, how savvy, how sapient Elmar and the Dow Jones team are. Look, if you have any further questions, we'll be prepared to grapple with them in coming days. So in the meantime, please be sage and be safe.