TIME CEO Jessica Sibley Announces First-Half 2025 Progress and Shares Strategic Outlook on AI Innovation
TIME Chief Executive Officer Jessica Sibley sent the following memo to staff on Monday:
Team,
As we near the halfway point of 2025, I'm proud to share that TIME is delivering across the board: advancing our mission to be a strong and commercially viable company, harnessing the best of our history while working each and everyday to build the best version of TIME. We are achieving this through our high impact journalism and our ability to engage audiences globally with exclusive reporting as we embrace new ways of storytelling.
Our strategic pivot to a B2B-focused model is being realized, through our focused go-to-market approach with integrated partnerships, a rapidly growing global live journalism and events business, and leveraging new platforms and innovations in technology. We continue to remain diligent with our cost management initiatives, as cash-flow positivity remains our number-one business goal. We have improved the cash needs of the business by 83% since 2022. Today, we are forecasting a 24% advertising revenue growth in the first half of 2025 and are currently pacing 39% ahead of 2024's year-to-date bookings.
Here are some highlights from the first half of the year:
TIME Journalism
TIME's newsroom has delivered powerful, agenda-setting journalism to our audience worldwide, including exclusive interviews with global leaders in government such as President Donald Trump on his first 100 days in office, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on social media ban for people under 16, and dozens of prominent Democrats on the party's reboot; we have covered major discoveries and advancements in science and technology, including interviews with Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, Eli Lilly CEO David Ricks, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Ben Lamm, CEO of Colossal, the company behind the revival of the dire wolf. We've delivered exclusive profiles in culture and sports, including recent interviews with author Taylor Jenkins Reid, Audra McDonald, Lewis Hamilton and many more.
In May, we announced the expansion of our health and science vertical with TIME Longevity, a new editorial platform dedicated to exploring how and why people are living longer, and what this means for individuals, institutions, and the future of society.
TIME's reporting drove real-world change—notably, a new ethics law passed in Maryland last month following our coverage of Larry Hogan. The editorial team delivered impactful reporting across formats with breaking news stories like the LA fires, the death of Pope Francis and the appointment of Pope Leo. We published ' F ive Years Later: America Looks for a Way Forward After George Floyd,' produced in collaboration with the Center for Policing Equity, and hosted the TIME Impact Dinner: The Road to Justice.
TIME Events also reached new heights this year, with 20 events hosted globally in the first half of 2025. Highlights include our biggest-ever TIME100 Gala and Summit in New York; our fourth annual TIME100 Impact Awards in Dubai; our first-ever combined Women of the Year Gala and Leadership Forum in Los Angeles; and our inaugural TIME100 Philanthropy event in New York City. These gatherings—featuring participants such as Serena Williams, Ed Sheeran, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, David Beckham, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Citadel CEO Ken Griffin, and Nicole Kidman, among others—continue to elevate TIME's journalism and community, expanding our reach and impact in meaningful ways.
TIME Studios
In May, TIME Studios debuted UNTOLD: The Fall of Favre with Netflix, a documentary exploring Brett Favre's controversial career, the dark side of sports stardom and the scandals that marred his legacy. The documentary quickly reached the #1 spot on Netflix's most-viewed movies in the U.S.
We also partnered with immersive studio TARGO to release D-Day: The Camera Soldier, a groundbreaking mixed-reality documentary for Apple Vision Pro timed to the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. The experience reimagines historical storytelling through spatial video, AI-restored archives, and interactive elements.
TIME AI
Just as we're expanding our impact through premium film and immersive experiences, we're also harnessing the power of AI to bring TIME's trusted journalism to a wider audience.
TIME is helping shape the direction of AI in our industry through more than a dozen partnerships by unlocking new opportunities for content distribution, product development, and enterprise productivity. This strategy strengthens our position as a global leader in trusted journalism amid rapid industry change.
As any reader of TIME's reporting knows, there are few transformations changing how we live and work today as AI is. We know that the media business is no exception.
Here's how we're thinking about AI today.
We'd rather be in the room shaping the future than learning about it from a podcast.
We are partnering with leading AI platforms; OpenAI, Perplexity, ProRata, and Amazon Alexa to stay at the center of transformation. These partnerships give us direct access to executives, product leaders and early insight into the future of AI-powered media and advertising. This includes OpenAI's recent Media Partner day where we saw early data on the growth of ChatGPT Search and concepts around its soon to-be-released publisher agent toolkit.
We are focused on product innovation with the goal of continuing to make our journalism more accessible.
We launched the first AI Toolbar on TIME.com in collaboration with Scale AI, OpenAI, and ElevenLabs for Person of the Year. Now, we're expanding on this theme:
Upcoming launch: An on-demand podcast built in partnership with Scale AI, featuring two AI hosts summarizing four top stories from The Brief newsletter.
Later this summer: A redesigned Homepage launch will include a podcast module with player, debuting the above-mentioned AI-generated podcast experience to the full audience.
This fall: A major upgrade to the AI experience will enable multilingual, personalized AI interactions including AI search, chat, translation and an experiences across the site.
As consumers choose AI experiences to access information, we believe TIME increases its reach and relevancy by providing innovative experiences for them within our own website as well.
We're building tools that unlock the full value of our archive starting with consumers and scaling to agents.
We're building an infrastructure for the AI era:
Blockchain authentication of our content via Verify by Fox.
Real-time bot tracking via TollBit and ScalePost.
OpenAI is now a top 10 traffic referral source.
We want to free our teams to focus on impact, not repetition.
We've deployed Glean, Perplexity Pro, ChatGPT Pro, Otter.ai and Notion AI across departments integrating with our systems to reduce repetitive tasks and elevate strategic work. Legal now uses GC AI, an AI product built specifically for lawyers, with other departments piloting their own vertical tools.
We have always gone where the audience is. AI is just the next frontier.
With less than 15% of our core business's revenue tied to webpage traffic, TIME is positioned for resilience as distribution continues to fragment, supported by 1 million print subscribers, nearly 2 million newsletter subscribers, and more than 60 million social followers.
The bottom line: We're building the best version of TIME and see AI as a tool to help us do that.
AI enhances distribution, personalization, and access, while our journalism remains created by our staff and contributors, mission-aligned, and deeply trusted.
These efforts are the result of close collaboration across departments, and we're committed to equipping every team member to help shape what's ahead.
Thank you for your continued dedication as we build the future of TIME together. As I wrote in TIME last month, I feel very privileged to work with you all at this extraordinary moment for our industry. I'm excited about everything we've accomplished and even more energized about what's to come.
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