Bloomberg Media reports 8 percent revenue increase in first quarter

Bloomberg Media CEO Justin Smith sent out the following announcement to employees on Thursday:

We are hosting a Global Media Town Hall on Tuesday, May 10th – please look out for an invitation to come later this week. At that time, we’ll share a more thorough update of our progress this year, the transformation we are realizing, and more on what’s to come.

Before then, I wanted to share a few recent highlights.

We just received the results for our first quarter revenue performance, and I’m happy to report it was a strong one. Total revenue is up more than 8% across Media, with year-over-year gains from our Global Ad Sales and Bloomberg Content Service teams. In digital ad sales specifically, our team increased revenue by 21% vs. last year on top of a sizeable baseline. US TV bucked industry trends by growing more than 27%. These numbers represent very significant accomplishments in what is an increasingly difficult media environment. Looking forward, Q2 revenues are looking robust as well.

In digital, we just logged another strong traffic month. Per the latest February numbers from comScore, Bloomberg.com traffic grew +38% year-over-year to reach 27.3 million unique visitors, and we maintained our lead against WSJ.com. In digital video, we topped Yahoo! Finance to cement our #1 position in the global business video category, growing 45% year-over-year and recording 20 million unique video viewers. Our growth trend continues due to the investments we’re making in product, distribution, and original digital programming, including series like “Hello World,” which has received positive reception while helping to fuel our growth.

Our global expansion also continues across all platforms, with exciting developments in the past few weeks in two markets specifically. In India, we launched an ambitious partnership to launch Bloomberg Quint, a new venture designed to lead India’s business and financial media across the years to come. Spanning digital, television and live events, Bloomberg Quint marks our first multi-platform partnership in any country. In Japan, we re-launched our Japanese-language news site, Bloomberg.co.jp, to tie it more closely to the rest of our global digital portfolio.

Bloomberg Businessweek held its third annual Design Conference earlier this week in San Francisco, which continues to be a powerful showcase of the kind of creativity and design that makes the magazine unique. The speaker lineup was impressive, including design and technology visionaries like Yves Béhar, Stewart Butterfield and Daniel Libeskind. The Impossible Project, the buzzed-about camera startup, chose to debut its new I-1 camera at the conference, which generated great press for our magazine and the event.

Bloomberg TV has begun airing “best of” weekly recaps of many of our U.S.-based shows, including Best of Bloomberg Businessweek, Best of With All Due Respect, Best of Bloomberg West, and Best of Bloomberg. These hour-long programs are helping fill out our weekend programming globally with interesting and informative weekly recaps of the major news and interviews our colleagues cover each week.

Thanks as always for your hard work across the business. I look forward to seeing you all on May 10th at our Town Hall, and to hearing your thoughts beforehand.

Justin