Your Media Company Has a Data Business Hidden Inside It

Key Takeaways

• S&P Global bought With Intelligence for $1.8 bn, 13.8× 2025 revenue.
• Data products can command 12‑15× EBITDA versus 4‑7× for digital media.
• 67 Bricks helped IWSR boost new users 40% and double‑digit growth.
• Publishers can monetize existing editorial data without building full platforms.

Pulse Analysis

The recent S&P Global acquisition of With Intelligence underscores a broader market shift: investors are rewarding data‑centric business models far more generously than classic ad‑driven media. A $1.8 billion price tag—nearly fourteen times projected revenue—illustrates how data products, when packaged as recurring subscriptions, can command EBITDA multiples in the low‑teens, compared with the single‑digit ranges typical for digital publishing. This premium stems from contractual revenue streams, high gross renewal rates and the ability to embed data into customers’ daily workflows.

For traditional B2B publishers, the opportunity lies in mining the latent data already generated by journalists, editors and event teams. Companies like the Economist Intelligence Unit and IWSR have partnered with 67 Bricks to transform articles, transaction logs and conference transcripts into structured datasets that clients pay to access. The result is not only a new revenue line but also stronger customer retention—EUI now enjoys 95 % gross revenue retention—while IWSR reported a 40 % increase in new users from existing accounts, fueling double‑digit growth.

Launching a data business does not require a full‑scale engineering effort. The recommended approach starts with customer discovery, manual data collection, and rapid prototyping to validate demand before investing in platforms or analytics teams. By focusing on outward‑facing development—building what customers explicitly need—publishers can avoid costly missteps and quickly iterate toward a defensible, scalable product. As more media firms adopt this model, the line between content and data will blur, creating a new class of high‑margin, subscription‑based information enterprises.