NYT Nears $330M Letterboxd Deal as Fox Closes $22B Roku Acquisition

By Tom Whitfield

The New York Times is in exclusive talks to buy Letterboxd, the film review and fan community, at a valuation of roughly $330 million, according to a report in The New York Times itself. Rumors of a Letterboxd acquisition have circulated all year.

The numbers explain why this deal raises eyebrows. Letterboxd is reportedly on pace to earn only $15 million this year, meaning the Times would pay about 20 times annual earnings — at a moment when web publisher valuations sit at their lowest point in years.

What does the Times get for 20x earnings?

First, advertising. The deal would put Letterboxd's ad sales under the NYT, which should improve earnings. The acquisition also brings a paid subscription tier, a quick infusion of new subscribers for the Times, as the NYT notes.

The acquisition fits a deliberate pattern. The Times has pushed into new verticals through purchase before: product reviews (Wirecutter), cooking, games (Wordle) and sports (The Athletic).

But one asset often missed in Letterboxd deal talk is its AI data licensing value. Letterboxd is an authenticated forum holding a massive library of unique human writing — banter, recommendations, drama, culture. In plain terms, it is a rich repository for training large language models, and the Times will be more effective at monetizing that asset too.

Why did Fox's Roku deal close so fast?

Fox Corporation completed its $22 billion acquisition of Roku on Friday. The timing surprised the industry. The result did not.

CEO Lachlan Murdoch told investors on last Monday's earnings call he expected the deal to close "as soon as possible." Semafor reported the Department of Justice was about to clear the deal under a consent decree — even though the DOJ had asked both companies for additional information as recently as September.

Fox declined to comment to AdExchanger. But the DOJ's Antitrust Division released a statement Friday saying the merged company "would suffer monetary and reputational harm if it attempted to use the Roku platform to harm Fox's content rivals," and that consumers could easily switch to other connected TV platforms if dissatisfied.

Fox now owns the top two most popular free streaming services in the US: The Roku Channel, a FAST service, and Tubi, an AVOD streamer. It also gains Roku's ad tech capabilities and first-party data, letting the company scale its connected TV advertising business massively. Integrating Roku's household graph with Tubi's ad sales would be a particular benefit, since Tubi is already beating Fox's expectations.

How did Google destabilize open web video?

Apple leads the industry in surprise rug-pulls, but Google can still send the sector reeling — sometimes by accident. Since roughly October 26, CPMs, fill rates and demand proxies for open web video inventory have dropped, as Alan Ronis documents at Medium.

The cascade had three steps:

• October 1: DV360 removed brand safety controls, driving away advertisers who relied on finer-grain settings.
• October 22: AdSense began restricting more web video inventory based on accompanying content.
• October 26: Google retired the video line item for mCPV (maximum cost-per-view) campaigns — the big whammy.

Google communicated the deadline, but publishers and ad tech firms did not upgrade, and many preset campaigns simply failed to serve. Prebid faced a parallel problem this year when publishers failed to update video ad delivery setups by Microsoft's deadline for paying to cache all Prebid video ads.

What else happened this week?

• OpenAI is building a tool that will show brands how often they are mentioned in ChatGPT conversations.
• Online publication consortium Valnet agreed to a $2 million settlement in a class action alleging misclassification and exploitation of freelance writers, per TheWrap.
• Meta reversed course and will not require business account holders to allow AI training on linked websites, per Ars Technica.
• Instagram's new push into long-form content has not yet convinced creators, per Digiday.
• Liam Parker was appointed US CEO of The Ogilvy Group.

The through-line for marketers: legacy media buyers are consolidating audiences and first-party data at record scale, while platforms keep rewriting ad-tech rules with little warning.