How Industry Dive Built a Repeatable B2B Media Model

In 2012, three former colleagues from B2B publisher FierceMarkets started a media company in Washington, D.C. Sean Griffey became chief executive, with Eli Dickinson as chief technology officer and Ryan Willumson as chief revenue officer. They called the business Industry Dive, worked from a former convenience store furnished with leftover IKEA desks, and started with less than $1 million in early angel and seed funding. On launch day, they released five newsletters covering construction, education, marketing, utilities, and waste. Ten years later, Informa agreed to acquire the company in a transaction valued at up to $525 million.

Most newsletter businesses begin with a single title and expand only after it has found an audience. Industry Dive launched five publications together. Each vertical had a mobile-friendly website, a concise email newsletter, and a standardized editorial workflow. In the beginning, the three founders worked with a handful of freelancers, writing newsletters in the mornings before turning to the rest of the business.

The newsletters were kept deliberately short because many readers checked them on their phones during brief gaps in the workday. Griffey believed much of B2B publishing was poorly adapted for mobile, giving a new publication room to stand out with a simpler reading experience. The company spent only about $500 to $1,000 a month on advertising in its early years, grew mostly through organic channels, and became profitable roughly two years after launch. From there, new titles were financed with operating cash flow. By late 2021, Industry Dive operated 25 titles across 22 sectors, including Retail Dive, Banking Dive, and Waste Dive.

Industry Dive kept its journalism free. As more B2B publishers introduced paid subscriptions during the 2010s, Griffey argued that an advertising-supported model could still work when the audience itself was valuable enough. The publications served narrow groups of senior managers and decision-makers who were otherwise difficult for marketers to reach.

Revenue came from advertising, sponsored content, lead generation, and related marketing products. The standardized structure also helped commercially. Similar formats and ad products could be sold across the portfolio, so each new Dive added audience and inventory without a new commercial infrastructure. By 2021, the company employed roughly 100 journalists, reported an audience of more than 11 million executives, and expected around $80 million in revenue at a profit margin of roughly 30%.

In September 2019, Falfurrias Capital Partners acquired a majority stake, the company's first major outside investment. Terms were not disclosed, though Flashes & Flames reported the deal was believed to value Industry Dive at roughly $70 million. In July 2020, Industry Dive acquired NewsCred's content marketing studio and services business, combined it with its own Brand Studio, and relaunched the group as studioID, with around 40 former NewsCred employees joining under Jane Qin Medeiros. The publications showed what executives in each industry were reading, and studioID applied that insight to clients' branded content and marketing programs. The company also bought CFO.com in December 2020, followed by Mobile Payments Today, PharmaVOICE, and Ladders News during 2021.

In July 2022, Informa announced an agreement to acquire Industry Dive. The deal included $389 million in initial cash, with an earn-out tied to growth that could have increased the total to $525 million by 2024. Informa projected that Industry Dive would generate approximately $110 million in revenue and about $34 million in EBITDA that year, putting the initial payment at roughly 11.4 times expected EBITDA. At the time of the announcement, Industry Dive operated 27 Dives across 24 specialist markets, published more than 70 newsletters, and had roughly 13 million engaged readers and about 380 employees. At the time, BuzzFeed's market value was only slightly more than half of Industry Dive's enterprise value, despite BuzzFeed having raised hundreds of millions in venture funding.

Trade magazines had long built businesses around owning concentrated professional audiences and selling marketers access to them. Industry Dive applied the same logic to email newsletters, mobile websites, and shared publishing infrastructure. 

Industry Dive is a reminder that scale can come from building strong publications in narrow professional markets where readers are valuable, and advertisers have few efficient ways to reach them. By the time Informa acquired the company in 2022, those specialist audiences had grown into a business generating more than $100 million in annual revenue.

Scaling becomes easier when the business is designed to be repeatable. A publication that relies on a unique format, a specific founder, or a completely different sales process each time it expands is difficult to grow beyond its initial audience.

Industry Dive was built around shared infrastructure. New titles used similar editorial formats, technology, audience-development methods, and commercial products. That gave the company a way to enter additional markets without having to rebuild the business from scratch each time.

Think beyond the performance of a single publication. The more important question is whether the systems behind it can support a second title, a third audience, or a new product without adding the same amount of complexity. That is where a media property becomes a media business. See you next week.

If you liked this edition of Growth Curve, forward it to a founder or marketer who needs to stop renting their audience — and start owning it.