Nexstar Media Group, Inc. (NXST) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone. My name is Benjamin Soff. 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.

So 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?

Well, I think 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, continue to put points on the board every year after year. And I think it just speaks to the uniqueness of our business model and the scale that we have. 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 play to accelerate digital revenue. And so those were some of the highlights 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 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. So I mean, I think those are the major initiatives. Anything you'd want to add, Lee?

Yes. No, I think we also just took a step forward on the ATSC 3.0 initiative as well by creating the joint venture that we did that basically took a -- a few joint ventures that we had and put them into one. So really taking a step forward there as an industry to kind of drive that business line.

Great. And we'll get into many of those topics in a bit. But first, I wanted to ask about cord cutting. Pay TV obviously has experienced elevated cord cutting over the past decade. But we started to see the pace of subscriber declines actually moderate in the second half of last year. So first, what in your view are the main factors driving this moderation? And second, do you think we'll see further improvement in cord cutting this year?

Maybe I'll take that. I think that there are probably 3 or 4 different factors that go into the moderation of the rate of cord cutting. I think first and foremost, we've been talking about this over the course of the last year. We did a little bit of work with the consulting firm called Altman Solon, who has a 15-year history of looking at video subscribers. And what we saw is that the -- if you look back 5 years ago, the percentage of people that pay for video television is -- 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%. So a large portion of the attrition that we've seen over the last 5 years is really related to people that are not caring about live sports or live news and have sort of left that ecosystem. So 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. So I think that, that has created somewhat 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". Well, 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. And so when you put a bundle together of all of the direct-to-consumer platforms, it doesn't quite weigh as nicely as a pay TV package from a vMVPD or an MVPD does. And then I think like the third thing is you start to see some of the MVPDs and satellite companies create better packages for the consumer. You've seen Charter rebundle these direct-to-consumer platforms into their service, which created a really nice value proposition for the consumer. You've seen companies like DirecTV create skinnier bundles that are also nicer for the consumer. So these things should all have the impact of potentially reducing the rate of attrition on a go-forward basis. And 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?

Well, 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. And if that rate of decline is lower, that means that the pressure that we have to increase rate and to really kind of achieve things that are really very high rates of growth are going to be -- there's going to be less pressure on that. And we're going to have the ability to kind of continue to sustain that revenue.

Great. I wanted to ask next on pricing. You guided to flat growth in distribution revenue in '25, following a relatively light renewal slate in '24, but you have 60% of your base renewing later this year. In the past, you've talked about how broadcast fees underearn relative to the ratings they generate. So how do you think about pricing dynamics in general? And do you still see runway to drive pricing that can more than offset subscriber attrition over the medium to long term?

Well, I think that we will continue to demonstrate unit rate growth on the revenue piece of it. And we still are at a place where the gap has closed. Broadcast television in aggregate still takes about 1/3 to 35% of the viewing in a pay TV home and we're compensated currently on a gross aggregate basis, about low 20s, 22%, 23%, I think, of the distribution revenue that comes out of the bundle. So there's still a mismatch. We still have earnings potential. And 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 revenue and flat net retrans, if you want to keep score that way, in a year where we had very few renewals. So that's -- our intercontract unit rates have robust numbers beside them as well. But distribution revenue generation is a business of scale. And so 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 2, we've seen reverse compensation growth slow as the networks have shifted focus towards other platforms. How have the network views of the linear TV ecosystem evolved over the past few years in your view? And what does that mean for reverse compensation and net retrans going forward?

Well, I think you should ask the networks how their views have changed. But 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. And 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. And I think we've been able to make that point in distribution discussions we've had with networks. And again, as evidenced by the fact that if our top line is not growing and the bottom line is maintaining, then obviously, costs are in control.

2024 was a down year for nonpolitical advertising, both from some crowd out and on an underlying basis, but it sounds like you're starting to see some improvement in the first quarter, and you've got a positive growth for the year. What are you seeing across the advertising space more broadly? And what are the moving pieces for that business in 2025?

Well, I mean, some of it is math, right? As we get through the year, there'll be more crowd out effect from the prior year. So the comps will get easier on core advertising. We do predict an uplift as we go through the year. It's not material, but it'll go from negative to slightly positive. And 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. So we are seeing gains. And again, as contributors to revenue, top and also bottom line EBITDA, neither NewsNation nor the CW are going to change our standard of living today. But both are showing nice top line increases, which are, quite frankly, a little bit ahead of plan.

Can you touch maybe a little bit more on the local and national markets? And are there any observations from key category verticals we should be paying attention to?

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 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. So 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...

Go for it.

You 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?

Well, I think 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. And 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've brought everyone together and every statement that we've made is unanimous in that we're in support of deregulation of the business. And so I've been to Washington 4 different days since the 1st of the year and been up on the Hill as well as visiting with those of the regulatory agencies. And no one on either side of the aisle congressionally can look at you and defend the current rules with a straight face, right, that big tech can reach every screen in America with every kind of content with no restrictions, no boundaries, don't have to disclose who bought the 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 the population. And so it makes no sense. And so 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, big tech competing for advertisers, competing for dollars, taking our content, appropriating it without compensation, all of those things are threats against, and I would call them existential threats against local journalism. And so I have yet to meet somebody on the Hill that doesn't want to protect 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? And so there is a groundswell of support for protecting local journalism, obviously, for reining in big tech, which is really hard to do, particularly for Congress to do. And so we said, we'll take the other side of that and free us to compete at least domestically on a level playing field, and that's 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? And are there any milestones or next steps that would cue us in on whether things are moving along?

Well, I think the FCC can go a long way, but needs a third commissioner, a third Republican commissioner, to be able to have a 3:2 majority to be able to move their agenda, not unlike what happens on the Hill. And so 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 3:2 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?

Well, it really hasn't changed. I don't think it's -- what is actionable, what is opportunistic, what is synergistic, what acquisitions make sense for the company. And so those screen -- and it has to be more synergistic, more accretive than buying back our stock and not buy an inconsequential margin before we risk capital or management time. So none of that has changed. What do we do best? We do best of finding carve-outs of conglomerates, distressed station groups, whole company transactions, private equity dispositions. And again, we have a pretty well-worn and well-used playbook of how to identify, negotiate, obtain and then integrate those kinds of assets. So I think we would do more of that as those opportunities presented themselves. And would we like to own TV stations that reach essentially 100% of America? Sure. Because then you can build your own national platform. You don't have to buy a network. If you chose to program something nationally, you can do it organically, much like we've done with NewsNation and much like we're building out the footprint of the CW. So I think we'd have aspirations to paint on a larger canvas were the regulations removed that would allow us to do so.

Can you talk a bit about the duopoly opportunity if those rules were to change?

Sure. I think we've said that when you can run 2 newspapers off the same printing press, 2 local television stations, 2 different brands, 2 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. And that margin can be 15% to 25% higher than a single station depending on the circumstance, and each one is different. But it obviously is an opportunity to drive margin and, again, allows you to build an infrastructure to support local journalism that can have 2 outputs, which, again, is a much more efficient use of capital.

Got it. I wanted to touch on political. 2024, as you mentioned before, was a big year. You captured almost $500 million of political advertising. Could we do a bit of a postmortem on the election, how it played out relative to your expectations and any notable observations you had there?

Okay. Well, 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 Nexstar took about, I don't know, 13% of every dollar spent in television by politicians this year, because of our footprint. So there was growth. The largest dollar growth came from connected TV, which grew from something approaching $200 million to something approaching $1.8 billion, thereabouts, so $1.6 billion of growth, which was interesting. But 2 things I'd say about that. One is those that really leaned into spending on connected TV didn't necessarily get elected. So was that a failed strategy or a bad candidate, time will tell, right? But 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. So 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. So I continue to believe that broadcast will maintain its position as the largest silo for revenue to go into in a political cycle. And I think the jury will be out on connected TV. Is it a shiny new object or people realizing, well, 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 -- 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 -- yes. So you're even earlier than the way too early meeting that's later this week. But 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. And it's just on and on and on. Rather than 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. But listen, 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?

Yes. 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. So 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, 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 the broadcast community. It was a very -- had a lot of ratings that were not as inspiring. And so what we've done is we've actually increased the amount of programming by over 40% by adding weekend programming. And we've 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 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 versus what CW was doing last year at the same time frame, but also just in comparison to what those sporting events were doing on cable. It really just shows the power of broadcast. So we're excited about that. As we're growing our ratings, we're growing our audience. We've reduced the cost. We're now at this point where we now need to grow revenue and really benefit from the increased ratings that we're 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've made. And so we think it will be a growth opportunity continuing on a go-forward basis at the network level. And not to mention, we've had great success on the station side as well. It's been great for our stations to have all of this new sports content that they can sell, a new sort of persona in the local markets. And then 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. So we're 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-8 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?

Yes. We really implemented that plan mostly in the fourth quarter. So 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. It really targeted a few different things. One was 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. 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. We're able to kind of streamline some of the middle management that was in there. On the broadcast side, we kind of went around and looked at some of the efficiencies that we thought we could create throughout our different stations, 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, 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 EdgeBeam, 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 2 other JVs we were part of, and they were bumping into each other in lobbies of car manufacturers and things like that. And we said, let's put this all together. The thing that it does is so it scripts Gray, Sinclair and Nexstar. And we have spectrum now aggregated that reaches in excess of 97% of the U.S. So as far as I'm concerned, that's a nationwide or near-nationwide footprint. And there's real first-mover advantage to that because for some other entities to do that together, you have to put together 8 or 9 companies to reach the same spectrum footprint. And that would take time and governance. And so 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. And so we get paid, Nexstar, 2 ways. One is in the toll or rental of our spectrum for whatever use is identified in the marketplace. And then secondly, if the JV makes any money, we're a 25% equal partner with the other participants. But 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 2-step process that the top 55 markets would convert from 1.0 to 3.0 in 2026 and then -- I'm sorry, 2028, and then the rest of the country would transition roughly in 2030. So it puts a stake in the ground. It would eliminate the simulcast requirement, which would free up more spectrum for use today. And then obviously, the complete transition would allow us all of this spectrum. And again, Lee Ann can make sure we're sharp on the number here, but the combined per POP reach of our EdgeBeam is what, 7?

7 billion megahertz POPs.

7 billion megahertz POPs. So you can put a value on that, if you're trying to, in terms of the asset value. But we think it is the biggest single value creation level in our business as we know it today that remains to happen. And I've said this for years, living in Texas, it's a lot like shale oil or shale gas has 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 move along pretty rapidly in terms of monetization. And by that time, our sales team and business development team for EdgeBeam will be in place and in the marketplace, and they already have been. And the areas that we see that are of most interest are kind of 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. Enhanced GPS, which can help fleet management. It can help with precision agriculture, which is a technology that's already in use in Korea using terrestrial-based spectrum. You can do it with satellite technology today, but this is an enhanced GPS, much more accurate. And then we're 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 screen and the headrest facing the rear seats, or it's updating computer updates because 80% of those fail because the car is in the garage, the satellite can't penetrate. And 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. So we think the -- 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, and 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.

Yes. So we, if you look back at our history as a company, we've really created a lot of shareholder value through acquisitions. 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. Over the last sort of 4 years or 5 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 relook 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, we're hopeful that we get to see the dereg and we see M&A come towards us. So in '25, we're just going to try to prepare a little bit for that. And so the plan for this year is we'll spend our capital on kind of all of our mandatory obligations, which I -- our amortization of our Term Loan A. We have a small amount of incremental pension investments, and then we've got our dividend. And then 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. And then the rest of our capital will be used to buy back stock. We still feel like -- I talked on our earnings call, I don't know if you had an opportunity to tune in, but we still think we're incredibly undervalued. I mean, I think even if you looked at -- gave us somewhere between a 7x and 7.5x multiple, our stock should be in the high 190s. If you looked at just 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 apply that to our free cash flow for the average of '24, '25, our stock would be $210 a share. So we continue to think buying back our stock is really a good way to go and should be accretive for our shareholders. So the lion's share of what we're doing is still going to be stock buyback. But again, we're just -- we're in a nonpolitical year. It will be a lower amount this year, but still about 2/3 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. And 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?

Well, we've been in conversations with every one of those leagues and probably 2 dozen team owners, and they all realize that a successful media plan should include broadcast reach. And with all apologies to my cable brethren out there, there seems to be a general disdain for the wired cable distribution method that was sports stock and trade for many years. And I think everyone realizes that in order to get broadcast reach, you may have to sacrifice some short-term dollars. But then 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, that you have the opportunity to expose your product, perhaps sell tickets, sell merchandise and get people to come out to public events that you may have that would highlight your players as people as opposed to just athletes on a field or a court. And so I think everybody gets that. It's just finding the right balance. The leagues are involved and all trying, I think, to build national packages, which takes games away from local availability. And we have half a dozen of those local packages. And I think the largest has 25 games, the smallest has 12 games. And they're interesting and I think can enhance. We've actually been offered some packages, we can give you in this market, 5 hockey and 5 basketball, not really interesting to us. And 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 commercial availabilities in that our local sales force can monetize. And so we've walked away from some deals that others have done under terms that were not those to us. And so listen, it's an interesting business at the local level. It is not really scalable. If you look at those that have done deals, they've been Gray and ourselves and Sinclair and Scripps, and nobody has more than half a dozen of them, right? So if everybody had all of them, that'd be 2 dozen of them, but you don't have the geographic footprint of stations to be able to do all of that. So it's not really a scalable business. We do see increasing opportunity at the CW to add sports programming. And we're playing moneyball there, right? We didn't 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. And we've had 3 races under our belt. We haven't seen the numbers from Phoenix yet, but all 3 of them were the best ratings they've had in 5 years on any of those races. And so the leagues all pay attention, right? And they know now the CW can generate an audience that peaked over 2 million for the Daytona race and over 1.4 million for the Circuit of the America race out of Austin, which was in the middle of the afternoon. So there are opportunities from additional college sports, and there may be another big 4 or big 5 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. And again, we're playing moneyball there, right? And so that will continue to be our MO as we build this network out. 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. Well, again, this was looking at the assets we have and figuring out what the highest and best use of them were. NewsNation is the old WGN America. And it had evolved into a general entertainment basic cable network. And when I talk to distributors, they say, we've got 90 of those, literally 90. And they're not necessarily differentiated. And it's like we don't care if we carry it or not, but we sure as heck don't want to pay for it. And so we pivoted to news and information, which there are only 5 of those, right? And so we did it all organically with the exception of the CapEx to build out facilities in Chicago, New York and D.C. But the organic growth, as the contracts for programming expired, we just turned around and plowed that money into journalism. So we built the network out over 4 years. It's now 24/7. We have beaten MSNBC since the election, I think, a dozen or more times in specific day parts, and we've beaten FOX -- I'm sorry, we have tied FOX, but we've beaten CNN twice with our programming. So when I launched NewsNation as a news product with a $20 million launch campaign, 11% of America knew what NewsNation was. We're 4 years in, in 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, and I would put this in that same category. But that still means at 37% awareness that we've got to go knock on 6 out of 10 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-to-consumer piece at this point. Those are things that we continue to look at and figure out if there's an opportunity for us there that doesn't cannibalize our existing relationships. But from our perspective, it's continued -- 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 Ashleigh Banfield, who followed that, and then people stuck around for Morning in America the next morning. And so we're building this a piece of the wall. We're in the White House press room now, and we had a report on Air Force One going back to -- from this town back to D.C. on Sunday night or Monday morning, actually. So it's building a reputation. I think that we are totally on brand for unbiased reporting and balanced opinion shows. And so that's what we plan to build. And 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. So we're inviting them back one at a time. And it's very gratifying and satisfying to see that growth, but also it's a long-tail development for us. But 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've been profitable from day 1. And the network has asset value. And now success for us would be asset value like CNN or like FOX News, which is a multiple of where we are today, but that's also where the goalposts are for us now.

Got it. Well, we're just about at time, and that looks like a pretty good place to end it. So thank you both.

Thank you.

Thank you for having us. Appreciate it.