Nexstar Media Acquires The Hill
Nexstar Media has acquired The Hill for $130 million (plus working capital adjustments), reports TVNewsCheck, in a transaction that Nexstar said “is expected to be immediately accretive to Nexstar’s operating results.”
The Hill is a national independent, political digital media platform based in D.C. The acquisition marks a continuation of Nexstar’s content-first strategy, focused primarily on news, designed to further leverage and monetize its expansive digital reach.
According to TVNewsCheck, Nexstar said The Hill has 48 million average monthly users and 2.2 billion total pageviews in 2020 according to Comscore; it attracted more than 4 million followers and 914 million video views on Twitter and received five times more Facebook interactions than other political news websites.”
The acquisition of The Hill, Nexstar said, “complements Nexstar’s leading digital platform, which delivered record growth and audience engagement in 2020, ranking No. 1 in local news for every month of the year and reaching record key performance indicators, including average monthly users of 91 million and 7.8 billion pageviews according to Comscore. Combined, The Hill and Nexstar are used by a third of all U.S. digital media viewers.”
With more than 100 journalists who cover political news and events and provide a wide variety of engaging content to its users, The Hill’s business model is primarily advertising supported by direct, programmatic and licensing revenue.
According to Wikipedia:
In 2019, The Hill was ranked second among all US news sites for political readership, second to CNN, and ahead of Capitol Hill competitors such as Politico.
In 2020, it was again ranked second for online politics readership across all news sites, behind only CNN. It remained ahead of Politico, Fox News, NBCNews.com and MSNBC TV.
As of 2020, the newspaper claims to have more than 22,000 print readers. The Hill is distributed for free in newspaper boxes around the U.S. Capitol building, and mailed directly to all congressional offices.
