Good morning, everyone. My name is Benjamin Fass. I cover the broadcasters at Deutsche Bank, and I'm very pleased to be joined this morning by Perry Sook, Nexstar's Chairman and CEO, Lee Ann Gliha, Nexstar's CFO. Thanks for being here.
Thanks for having us.
Just to get started, there's a lot to get into. You reported fourth quarter earnings a couple of weeks ago. Looking back to 2024, what were some of the highlights for Nexstar, and what are your key priorities heading into 2025?
I think, you know, we had record revenue in 2024, which, you know, it's hard to do that in a dying industry, but we've done it now, you know, continue to put points on the board every year after year. I think it just speaks to the uniqueness of our business model and the scale that we have. You know, it was record political revenue for us, as well. We had a number of organic growth initiatives in terms of bringing our sales organization in-house, and, in terms of a lot of technical things we're doing to set the plate to accelerate digital revenue. Those were some of the highlights I think that we saw.
We also did a top-to-bottom look that Lee Ann led, at the operating expense and cost structure of the business and took a substantial, you know, double-digit millions of cost out of the business and eliminated duplicate positions and things like that, which will manifest itself as it rolls through 2025. I mean, I think those were the major initiatives. Anything you'd want to add?
Yeah, no, I think we also just did, took a step forward on the ATSC 3.0 initiative as well by creating the joint venture that we did that basically took a few joint ventures that we had and put them into one. You know, really taking a step forward there as an industry to kind of drive that, that business line.
Great. We'll get into many of those topics in a bit. First, I wanted to ask about cord cutting. Pay TV obviously has experienced elevated cord cutting over the past decade, but we've started to see the pace of subscriber declines actually moderate in the second half of last year. First, what in your view are the main factors driving this moderation? Second, do you think we'll see further improvement in cord cutting this year?
Maybe I'll take that. You know, I think that there are probably three or four different factors that go into the moderation of the rate of cord cutting. I think first and foremost, we've been talking about this for over the course of the last year. We did a little bit of work with a consulting firm called Altman Solon, who has a 15-year history of looking at video subscribers. And what we saw is that if you look back five years ago, the percentage of people that pay for video television is, you know, that don't really care about sports or news, really, that are just interested in entertainment programming was about 14% of the subscriber base. Fast forward to 2023, that number is now 4%.
A large portion of the attrition that we've seen over the last five years is really related to people that are not caring about live sports or live news and have sort of left that ecosystem. We have a very small amount of people that are continuing to be in the Pay TV ecosystem that don't, that could potentially attrit. I think that that has created, you know, a sort of a slowing. I think the second thing is what you've seen is there was sort of this idea of, oh, I can cut the cord and I can then save money. As we've seen over the course of the last few years, we've seen these direct-to-consumer services continue to increase their price.
When you put a bundle together of all of the direct-to-consumer platforms, it does not quite weigh as nicely as a Pay TV package from an MVPD or an MVPD does. I think like the third thing is, you know, you have started to see, you know, some of the MVPDs and satellite companies create better packages for the consumer. You know, you have seen Charter rebundle these direct-to-consumer platforms into their service, which created a really nice value proposition for the consumer. You have seen companies like DirecTV create skinnier bundles that are also nicer for the consumer. These things should all have the impact of potentially reducing the rate of attrition on a go-forward basis.
You know, I think pretty much all the research that I've seen out there shows that that's going to happen, beginning this year and then continuing to reduce over the next few years.
Taking the next step on that, what would a sustained improvement in cord cutting mean for Nexstar's business?
It's great for us, right? Because if we can have a sustained improvement in cord cutting, that just means there's less pressure on our top line, right? As we get paid typically on a per-subscriber basis from our distributors. If that rate of decline is lower, that means that the pressure that we have to increase rate and to really kind of, you know, achieve, achieve things that are really, you know, very high rates of growth are going to be, there's going to be less pressure on that. We're going to have the ability to kind of continue to sustain that revenue.
Great. I wanted to ask next on pricing. You guide to flat growth in distribution revenue in 2025 following a relatively light renewal slate in 2024, but you have 60% of your base renewing later this year. In the past, you've talked about how broadcast fees under-earn relative to the ratings they generate. How do you think about pricing dynamics in general? Do you still see runway to drive pricing that can more than offset subscriber attrition over the medium to long term?
I think that we will continue to demonstrate unit rate growth on the revenue piece of it, and we still are at a place, while the gap has closed, broadcast television in aggregate still takes about a third to 35% of the viewing in a Pay TV home. We are compensated currently on a gross aggregate basis about low 20s, you know, 22-23%, I think, of the distribution revenue that comes out of the bundle. There is still a mismatch. We still have earning potential.
And, you know, I think our distribution team has done a near heroic job growing our top line to be able to outrun the rate of attrition that we're able to project flat, you know, flat revenue, and flat net retrans if you want to keep score that way in a year where we had very few renewals. That's, you know, our intercontract unit rates have robust numbers beside them as well. Distribution revenue generation is a business of scale. I think those that have scale will likely produce better results top and bottom line than those that don't.
Over the past year or two, we've seen reverse compensation growth slow as the networks have shifted focus towards other platforms. How have the network's views of the linear TV ecosystem evolved over the past few years in your view? What does that mean for reverse compensation and net retrans going forward?
I think you should ask the networks how their views have changed. I can tell you that our position is that we pay the networks for the programming and have historically paid for geographic exclusivity so that we're the only one showing that product in that geographic region where we have that network affiliation franchise. We have made the point, I think, in a very linear fashion that to the extent that your programming is less exclusive or not exclusive at all to us, it has materially less value. I think we've been able to make that point in distribution discussions we've had with networks. Again, as evidenced by the fact that, you know, if our top line's not growing and, you know, the bottom line is maintaining, then obviously costs are in control.
2024 was a down year for non-political advertising, both from some crowd out and on an underlying basis. It sounds like you're starting to see some improvement in the first quarter and you guide to positive growth for the year. What are you seeing across the advertising space more broadly? What are the moving pieces for that business in 2025?
I think, I mean, some of it's math, right? Where there, as we get through the year, there'll be more, more crowd out effect from the prior year. The comps will get easier on core advertising. We do predict, you know, an uplift as we go through the year. It's not material, but it's, you know, go from negative to slightly positive. You know, the business for us, even though it's small dollars, where we're seeing nice increases is in our national networks business because in NewsNation and in The CW, we're selling a growth story in a very mature marketplace. We are seeing gains. Again, as contributors to revenue top and also bottom line, neither NewsNation nor The CW are going to change our standard of living today.
Both are showing nice top line increases, which are, quite frankly, a little bit ahead of plan.
You touched maybe a little bit more on the local and national markets. Are there any observations from key category verticals we should be paying attention to?
You know, I don't know that there's a ton that you can learn from the categories. I think we said on the earnings call that we've been seeing a little bit of weakness, continuing in auto for us as well as the insurance category, which, you know, we attribute to the natural disasters that we've seen here in the fourth quarter and the beginning part of the first part of the year. I don't think there was anything necessarily to really look at with respect to overall all categories.
Got it. I wanted to move to regulatory reform. Obviously, very topical. Perry.
We're for it.
You've made some statements to that end, that I would characterize as pretty optimistic. How do you think about the outlook for regulatory reform and what are some of the factors that make you feel encouraged that we could see movement on this in the near future?
I think one thing, one very important thing that probably doesn't get a lot of visibility is that the industry is united behind repealing the national ownership cap and eliminating the duopoly rules in the local marketplaces. That has not been the case to this point, right? There have been different factions. I think that marketplace realities, as well as, I've been in a leadership position at the NAB, both on the television board and the joint board. I think we brought everyone together and, you know, every statement that we've made is unanimous in that we're in support of deregulation of the business. I've been to Washington four different days since the first of the year and, you know, been up on the Hill as well as visiting with those at the regulatory agencies.
No one on either side of the aisle congressionally can look at you and defend the current rules with a straight face, right? That, you know, big tech can reach every screen in America with every kind of content with no restrictions, no boundaries, do not have to disclose who bought their political advertising. We are willing to continue to participate under those regulations, but yet we can only reach 39% of the TV sets in the country or, you know, the population. It makes no sense.
I think that both, under the new administration and on both sides of the aisle, if you position the discussion of local journalism versus big tech, you know, big tech taking, you know, competing for advertisers, competing for dollars, taking our content, appropriating it without compensation, all of those things are, you know, threats against, and I would call them existential threats against local journalism. I have yet to meet somebody on the Hill that doesn't want to project local journalism and local news because they know that those are the folks that put them in front of the viewers that get them elected, right? There is a groundswell of support for protecting local journalism, obviously for reigning in big tech, which is really hard to do, particularly for Congress to do.
We said, well, we'll take the other side of that and free us to compete, at least domestically on a level playing field. That has gotten quite a bit of traction.
Can you help us better understand the process that the industry would need to go through to realize these rule changes? Are there any milestones or next steps that would cue us in on whether things are moving along?
I think the FCC can go a long way, but needs a third commissioner, a third Republican commissioner, to be able to have a three-two majority to be able to move their agenda, not unlike what happens on the Hill. The third commissioner has been nominated. Her paperwork is working its way through the congressional committees. I think when you see a hearing for Olivia and her confirmation, and then ultimately when she's confirmed, I think you could see the FCC move fairly quickly once there was a three-two Republican majority at the commissioner level.
Got it. You have a pretty strong track record with M&A doing large-scale mergers that have created a lot of value for shareholders. What's your philosophy around M&A? What are the important boxes you'd want to look at when evaluating an asset or a deal?
It really hasn't changed. I don't think it's, you know, what is, what is actionable, what is opportunistic, what is synergistic, you know, what acquisitions make sense for the company. Those screen, and it has to be more synergistic, more accretive than buying back our stock and not by an inconsequential margin before we'll risk capital or management time. None of that has changed, you know. Now, what do we do best? We do best of, you know, finding carve-outs of conglomerates, distressed station groups, whole company transactions, private equity dispositions. Again, you know, we have a pretty well-worn and well-used playbook of, you know, how to identify, negotiate, obtain, and then integrate those kinds of assets. I think we would do more of that as those opportunities presented themselves.
Would we like to own TV stations that reach, you know, essentially 100% of America? Sure. Because then you can build your own national platform. You do not have to buy a network. If you chose to program something nationally, you can do it organically, much like we have done with NewsNation and much like we are building out the footprint of the CW. You know, I think we would have aspirations to paint on a larger canvas where the regulations are removed that would allow us to do so.
Can you talk a bit about the duopoly opportunity if those rules were to change?
Sure. You know, I think we've said that, you know, when you can run two newspapers off the same printing press, you know, two local television stations, two different brands, two different news brands, network brands, off of a single fixed cost structure, it is an engine to drive margins. Not only do you have the ability to capture a larger share of the revenues available to you in the marketplace, but you can convert them at a higher margin. That margin could be, you know, 15%-25% higher than a single station depending on the circumstance. Each one is different. It obviously is an opportunity to drive margin and again, allows you to build an infrastructure to support local journalism that can have two outputs, which again is a much more efficient use of capital.
Got it. I wanted to touch on political 2024. As you mentioned before, it was a big year. You captured almost $500 million of political advertising. Could we do a bit of a post-mortem on the election, how it played out relative to your expectations and any notable observations you had there?
Okay. It was a record year for linear television in political, record year for Nexstar. If you take the Georgia runoff, which was an extraordinary event, out, as of election day, it was a record year for us. And, you know, Nexstar took about, I don't know, 13% of every dollar spent in television by politicians this year because of our footprint. There was growth. The largest dollar growth came from connected TV, which grew from something, you know, approaching $200 million to something approaching $1.8 billion, thereabouts, so $1.6 billion of growth, which was interesting. You know, two things I'd say about that. One is those that really leaned into spending on connected TV didn't necessarily get elected. Was that a failed strategy or a bad candidate? You know, time will tell, right?
The other thing is, if you say, "I ran this spot on connected TV," and look at the actual number of people any individual spot generates in terms of impressions, it's tiny. It really isn't an efficient get-out-the-vote mechanism like buying broadcast television, which has the ability to reach every consumer in the marketplace. I continue to believe that broadcast will maintain its position as the largest, you know, silo for revenue to go into in a political cycle. I think the jury will be out on connected TV, you know. Is it a shiny new object or are people realizing, maybe those that spent money in that could have spent it more wisely on local television and got out the vote?
Interesting. I know it's early, but do you have any thoughts on how 2026 or 2028 might compare to 2024?
I have my, I actually call it next Wednesday or actually this Wednesday in New York. I'm sitting down with the head of our ad sales to have our way too early 26, political.
Way, way too early.
Yeah. You're even earlier than the way too early meeting that's later this week. Listen, I look at J.D. Vance's seat in Ohio and we're everywhere in the state of Ohio and that will be highly contested. It just, you know, on and on and on. Rather than, you know, sit here and give you a bunch of anecdotes, let me have my way too early meeting and then we can put a framework around it maybe.
That's fine.
I do not think things get less contentious as time goes on. And so that tends to inspire donors, which tends to drive political ad spend.
It's been a few years since you acquired The CW and you've since revamped the programming strategy for the network in addition to making progress on the cost side. Can you reflect on the importance of The CW to Nexstar and how the moves you've made bring you closer to achieving profitability for that business?
Yeah. I mean, we bought that back in 2022 and it was really a combination of things as to why we bought it. It was both an offensive and a defensive play. An offensive play because it gave us our own network that we could use to grow and control our own destiny. We were also the largest and we still are the largest affiliate of The CW. It was a defensive play to protect our station group and to make sure that we were able to continue to grow the revenues within our CW stations. Since then, you know, it's been great. We've really executed a great playbook. We've gone through, we've systematically reduced the cost by over 50% since we acquired the company.
We really transitioned the entire programming to be something that is more broad-based and more interesting to, you know, the broadcast community. It was a very, you know, had a lot of program ratings that were, you know, not as, as inspiring. What we've done is we've actually increased the amount of programming by over 40% by adding weekend programming. We have changed the composition of the programming to now be something in order of 40% that is sports or sports-related programming. This year we've started to see, you know, some of our key sports programming launch. We have WWE NXT every week and we have NASCAR Xfinity Series racing, and both sporting events have done really well in terms of the ratings in comparison to where they were.
First of all, just only what versus what The CW was doing last year at the same timeframe, but also just in comparison to what those sporting events were doing on cable. It really just shows the power of broadcast. We are excited about that. As we are growing our ratings, we are growing our audience. We have reduced the cost. We are now at this point where we now need to, you know, grow revenue and really benefit from the increased ratings that we are going to have and grow advertising revenue and to really benefit from increased distribution revenue or affiliation fees, getting paid for the investment that we have made. We think it will be a growth opportunity, you know, continuing on a go-forward basis at the network level. Not to mention, you know, we have had great success on the station side as well.
You know, it's been great for our stations to have all of this new sports content that they can sell and new, new sort of persona in the local markets. We've been able to take back about 17 affiliations of The CW and put them back on our stations, which has really been quite an uplift because we do very well with The CW, from an operational perspective on the station side of the ledger. We are looking forward to continuing that march towards profitability on the network side, and to continue to grow our revenues on the station side.
You implemented a new cost takeout plan late last year targeting savings in the low to mid eight-figure range for 2025. Can you talk a bit more about this plan and which areas of the business it's going to focus on?
Yeah. You know, we really implemented that plan mostly in the fourth quarter. So it's, for the most part, there's a little bit that's left over into this year, but most of it was implemented in the fourth quarter, really targeted a few different things. One was, you know, we were able to, as we've continued to own The CW for longer and longer, you can kind of see incremental areas where you can further streamline or consolidate businesses to reduce costs. And so that was part of it. You know, we had our ad sales division we had built up and just given where the national ad market is, we've looked at sort of that infrastructure and were able to kind of streamline some of the middle management that was in there.
On the broadcast side, you know, we kind of went around and looked at some of the efficiencies that we thought we could create throughout our different stations, you know, just operational efficiencies. We put a different type of camera here. It enables us to reduce some costs, things like that, that all kind of added up to, as Perry said, you know, low double-digit millions of dollars of savings that will save us from an operating expense perspective in 2025.
ATSC 3.0 represents one of the more exciting levers for longer-term growth for your business. To that end, you recently announced Edge Beam, a JV with some of your peers. Can you talk about the progress you've made on ATSC to date and how this JV helps you accomplish your goals?
Sure. This JV basically is the combination of two other JVs we were a part of and they were bumping into each other in, you know, lobbies of car manufacturers and things like that. We said, "Let's put this all together." The thing that it does is it Scripps Gray, Sinclair, and Nexstar. We have, excuse me, spectrum now aggregated that reaches in excess of 97% of the U.S. As far as I'm concerned, that's a nationwide or near nationwide footprint. There's real first-mover advantage to that because for some other entities to do that together, we'd have to put together eight or nine companies with, you know, to reach the same, you know, spectrum footprint.
That would take time and governance and, you know, we think that having this established is significant. The JV is in the market, hired Egon Zehnder to find a CEO to run this entity who will then stand up a business development team as well as a sales force to monetize that. We get paid, Nexstar, two ways. One is in the toll or rental of our spectrum for whatever use is identified in the marketplace. Secondly, if the JV makes any money, you know, we are a 25% equal partner with the other participants.
The other thing is, the FCC, the NAB filed a petition for rulemaking asking the FCC to make a rule which would essentially sunset ATSC 1.0, which is our current transmission standard, which would be a huge signal to the set manufacturers that you need to start putting chips in sets. There is a definitive deadline and it's set up now. The request is a two-step process that the top 55 markets would convert from 1.0 to 3.0 in 2026, and then, I'm sorry, 2028. Then the rest of the country would transition, you know, in roughly 2030. It puts a stake in the ground. It would eliminate the simulcast requirement, which would free up more spectrum for use today. Obviously, the complete transition would allow us all of this spectrum.
And again, Lee Ann can make sure I'm, we're sharp on the number here, but the combined, per pop reach of our Edge Beam is what, seven?
7 billion megahertz pops.
7 billion megahertz pops. You can put a value on that if you're trying to in terms of, you know, the asset value. It is, you know, we think it is the biggest single value creation level in our business as we know it today that remains to happen. I, and I've said this for years, living in Texas, it's a lot like shale oil or shale gas. It's always been an asset that's available, but it took 20 years to figure out how to hydraulically frac and horizontally drill to monetize the asset.
I think once the conversion starts to happen, if we're able to convince the FCC to implement this mandate, if you will, for conversion, that when the top 55% of the country, top 55 markets make that conversion, I think you'll see things, you know, move along pretty rapidly in terms of monetization. By that time, our sales team and business development team for Edge Beam will be in place and in the marketplace. They've already have been. The areas that we see that are of most interest are, you know, kind of internet, internet offload, 5G replacement service at a more efficient cost, because there are tons of 5G networks, private 5G networks out there and they're very expensive and very expensive to maintain. GPS, enhanced GPS, which can help, you know, fleet management.
It can help with precision agriculture, which is, you know, a technology that's already in use in Korea using terrestrial-based spectrum. You can do it with satellite technology today. This is an enhanced GPS, much more accurate. We are getting a lot of interest, and even tests from manufacturers, particularly high-end manufacturers, about video in the car, whether it's entertainment to the, you know, screen in the headrest facing the rear seats or it's updating, you know, computer updates, because 80% of those fail because the car is in the garage, the satellite can't penetrate. You know, think about our spectrum. It goes through walls. It's a television signal, right? It goes through walls. It has a blanket radius in terms of its distribution.
We think the, you know, as I said, about the end of this decade when Retrans revenue begins to become an annuity and not a growth vehicle for the business is when I think you'll see spectrum monetization take off. Those with the largest quantum of spectrum assets I think will benefit from that if they take the leadership, as we've tried to do to lean into this opportunity.
We spoke a little bit about M&A before, but can you outline how you think about capital allocation more broadly and in 2025?
Yeah. So we, you know, we've, if you look back at our history as a company, we've really created a lot of shareholder value through acquisitions. You know, we doubled the size of the company in 2017 with the acquisition of Media General. We did it again in 2019 with Tribune Media. Those deals were 40% and 60% accretive. You know, over the last sort of four, four years or five years or so since the Tribune acquisition, there hasn't been a lot of M&A to do. So we've had to sort of re-look at our capital allocation and really kind of reinvest in ourselves by implementing a pretty aggressive stock buyback program. I think on a go-forward basis, you know, we're hopeful that we get to see this derive and we see M&A come towards us.
In 2025, we're just going to try to prepare a little bit for that. The plan for this year is, you know, we'll spend our capital on kind of all of our mandatory obligations, which I, you know, are amortization of our Term Loan A . We have a small amount of incremental pension investments, and then we've got our dividend. Beyond that, I think we will pay down a little bit of incremental debt, not as much as we did last year, but pay down a little bit of incremental debt to kind of sort of prepare the balance sheet for the opportunity for M&A that we see coming forward. The rest of our capital will be used to buy back stock. You know, we still feel like, you know, I talked on our earnings call.
I don't know if you, if you had an opportunity to tune in, but, you know, we still think we're incredibly undervalued. I mean, I think even if you look, you know, if you looked at, you know, I got it, gave, gave us somewhere between a seven and a seven and a half times multiple, you know, our stock should be in the high one nineties. If you looked at just, you know, the impairment valuation that Warner Bros. and Paramount did with the cable networks, they had a negative 3% perpetuity growth at a 10.5% discount rate. If you just applied that to our free cash flow for the average of 2024, 2025, our stock would be $210 a share.
You know, we continue to think buying back our stock is really a good way to go and should be accretive for our shareholders. The lion's share of what we're doing is still going to be stock buyback. Again, we're in a non-political year. It will be a lower amount this year, but still about two-thirds of our free cash flow will go to shareholders.
We're starting to see some changes in the live sports ecosystem where teams and leagues are increasingly looking to broadcast as their preferred TV platform. You've done some of these deals already on the local side and with The CW. Now we have NBA coming to NBC beginning next season. How do you see the landscape for sports rights evolving over time and what could that mean for the business?
We have been in conversations with every one of those leagues and probably two dozen team owners, and they all realize that a successful media plan should include broadcast reach. With all apologies to my cable brethren out there, there seems to be a general disdain for, you know, the wired cable distribution method that was sports stock and trade for many years. I think everyone realizes that in order to get broadcast reach, you may have to sacrifice some short-term dollars.
But then, you know, if you're out in the marketplace, whether it's NASCAR on us, the Lakers on KTLA, I'm sorry, the Clippers on KTLA, the Texas Rangers on our CW affiliate in Dallas, you have the opportunity to expose your product, perhaps sell tickets, sell merchandise, and, you know, get people to come out to, you know, public events that you may have that would highlight, you know, your players as people as opposed to just athletes on a field or a court. I think everybody gets that. It's just finding the right balance. The leagues are involved in all trying, I think, to build national packages, which takes games away from local availability. We have half a dozen of those local packages. I think the largest has 25 games, the smallest has 12 games.
They're interesting and it can enhance, you know, we've actually been offered some packages. We can give you in this market, you know, five hockey and five basketball, not really interesting to us, you know. Again, we're doing it the old-fashioned way. We'll pay you a rights fee. We keep all of the advertising time and that's how we'll monetize it. We're not willing to share distribution revenue increases with you, and we're not willing to just air something without having, you know, commercial availabilities in that our local sales force can monetize. We've walked away from some deals that others have done under terms that were not those to us. Listen, it's an interesting business at the local level. It is not really scalable.
You know, if you look at those that have done them, the deals have been, you know, Gray and ourselves and Sinclair and Scripps and nobody has more than half a dozen of them, right? If everybody had all of them, that would be two dozen of them. You do not have the geographic footprint of stations to be able to do all of that. It is not really a scalable business. We do see increasing opportunity at The CW to add sports programming. I am, you know, we are playing Moneyball there, right? We did not win a bid for any of the NASCAR Cup races, but we did win the bid for the NASCAR Xfinity race, which is the Saturday race, which by the way, we thought had the most growth potential. You know, we have had three races under our belt.
We haven't seen the numbers for Phoenix yet, but all three of them were the best ratings they've had in five years on any of those races. The leagues all pay attention, right? They know now The CW can generate an audience that, you know, peaked over 2 million for the Daytona race and over a million four for the Circuit of the Americas race out of Austin, which was in the middle of the afternoon. There are opportunities for additional college sports and there may be another, you know, big four, big five franchise that we might be able to have a piece of. We're also willing to do co-ventures with either streamers or cable networks to add a broadcast distribution element with The CW. Again, we're playing Moneyball there, right?
That's, we'll continue to be our MO as we build this network out. You know, we're going to crawl, walk, run, and enhance value rather than destroy value through trying to swing for the fences on some big deal.
Got it. You own a cable news network, NewsNation, which in recent years has achieved wide distribution and healthy growth. Can you talk through some of the recent wins for this business and your vision for NewsNation going forward?
Sure. Again, this was looking at the assets we have and figuring out what the highest and best use of them were. You know, NewsNation is the old WGN America. And, you know, it was a, had evolved into a general entertainment-based cable network. When I talk to distributors, they say, we've got 90 of those, literally 90. They're not necessarily differentiated. It's like, you know, we don't care if we carry it or not, but we sure as heck don't want to pay for it. We pivoted to news and information, which, you know, there are only five of those, right? We did it all organically with the exception of the CapEx to build out facilities in Chicago, New York, and DC.
The organic growth as the contracts for programming expired, we just turned around and plowed that money into journalism. We built the network out over four years. It's now 24/7. We have beaten MSNBC since the election, I think a dozen or more times in specific day parts. We have tied Fox, but we've beaten CNN twice, you know, with our programming. When I launched NewsNation as a news product, with a $20 million launch campaign, 11% of America knew what NewsNation was. We're four years in and a couple of months, and now 37% of America in awareness studies knows who NewsNation is. Nice progress. I've made a career of being often pleased but never satisfied. I would put this in that same category.
But that still means at 37% awareness that we've got to go knock on six out of ten doors in America and introduce ourselves. From a distribution standpoint, it's fully distributed. In fact, we have marginally more pay TV households with NewsNation than MSNBC does and about the same, give or take, as CNN. and so, it is fully distributed thanks to our team, both on virtual and traditional pay TV platforms. there is no over-the-top or direct consumer piece at this point. Those are things that, you know, we continue to look at and figure out if there's an opportunity for us there that doesn't cannibalize our existing relationships. but, you know, from our perspective, it's continued, you know, Chris Cuomo interviewed Tucker Carlson last night.
I'm sure when I get the overnights for Monday, it will show that that show did a huge rating and hopefully had some knock-on benefit to Leland Vittert, who followed, and Ashley Banfield, who followed, followed that. You know, people stuck around for Morning in America the next morning. We're building this a piece of the wall. You know, we're in the White House press room now. We had a reporter on Air Force One going back to, you know, going from, from this town back to Washington, D.C. on Sunday night or Monday morning, actually. You know, it's building the reputation. I think that we are totally on brand for unbiased reporting and balanced opinion shows. That's what we plan to build. It's the hardest thing to do, right?
Because those that wanted cable news that, weren't in an echo chamber had abandoned cable news. We are inviting them back one at a time. It is very gratifying and satisfying to see that growth, but it is also a long-tail development process, you know. Again, because of the legacy distribution and distribution revenue of the old WGN America and the fact that we did a pay as you go to build the journalism side of the business, we have been profitable from day one. You know, the network has asset value. You know, success for us would be asset value like CNN or like Fox News, which is a multiple of where we are today. That is also where the goal posts are for us now.
Got it. We're just about at time and that looks like a pretty good place to end it. Thank you both.
Thank you.
Thanks for having us. Appreciate it.
Thank you.