The $800M Line Between Media and Intelligence

What happens when your legacy is as a media company, but you’ve actually turned into a data business? We saw that play out last week with the announcement of CoStar Group, a commercial real estate data analytics company, completing its $800 million acquisition for Zonda’s data platform.

What went relatively unreported is that, the day prior to this deal closing, all of Zonda’s traditional publications—Architect, Journal of Light Construction and approximately ten other titles—were sold separately to 526 Media Group, a B2B media company covering building materials and construction, for an undisclosed sum.

In 2018, Hanley Wood, a B2B media company, was merged with Meyers Research and then the combined entity was rebranded as Zonda in 2020 as its PE owner pushed it into more of a data business. This sale represents one of the outcomes of a media business that evolves to become a data business, but still carries some of the legacy assets. And it has a meaningful impact on valuation because of the massive gap in valuation between data businesses and media assets.

Consider the $800 million price tag. According to the announcement, Zonda’s data assets were generating $39 million of EBITDA on $170 million in revenue, implying a 20x trailing twelve month EBITDA multiple. While terms of the media assets deal were undisclosed, Collingwood’s 2025 Market Report found digital media companies with $1 to $3 million in EBITDA generated multiples of 5-8x.

It’s not clear what the media assets were generating from an EBITDA perspective, but even at more scale, Collingwood’s data finds only another 1-2 multiple turns, so the delta between the data side and the media side is dramatic.

And frankly, I suspect 526 Media didn’t pay anywhere close to that. CoStar is a data business, not a media one—it was unlikely to want anything to do with those Zonda titles. MidOcean Partners, Zonda’s PE owner, wouldn’t have wanted to run a rump business either. The timing of the two deals suggests CoStar was waiting to close until MidOcean sold the media assets.

Patrick Adams, CEO of 526 Media Group noted plans to ‘bring the inactive titles back to market,’ which tells you something about the state of what 526 was buying. All of which means 526 had leverage, and these assets likely traded at a depressed valuation.

This is a very real outcome for media businesses that start to build out data assets and there have been examples before.

In 2024, Firecrown, the media holding company owned by Craig Fuller, , the media and data business Fuller launched in 2017, leaving SONAR—the data business—as a standalone.

At the time, we wrote:

Regarding the former, Fuller explained that the universe of strategic or private equity buyers interested in a co-mingled media and data business is small. “It’s not non-existent, but it’s small,” he said. “Ultimately, the reality is that what a buyer wants is a pure-play business that they can benchmark to other businesses.”

Last October, S&P Global acquired With Intelligence for $1.8 billion, which was a 13.8x revenue multiple—an absolute slam dunk for the team. What made this so interesting is that, while it was a premium data subscription business, it wasn’t always that.

When founder Charlie Kerr started the company in the late 90s, it monetized like a traditional media business—advertising, events, etc. But as time went on, they moved away from that. Instead, they built a platform and workflow tools that finance professionals would pay a lot of money for access to. No media business generating $130 million in revenue is worth $1.8 billion, but a data business powered by journalists? That’s a unique proposition.

It’s the difference between proprietary data sourced directly from allocators and fund managers, embedded in workflow tools that finance professionals used to make investment decisions and content they read and moved on from.

This is an inherent challenge for most media companies. While they might be profitable, the real growth potential is on the data side. As media companies build out data offerings and those data businesses start to command the majority of the value, there’s a growing incentive to spin off the media assets when it comes time for a major transaction.

To some extent, this is how scale gets built on the media side of these splits. In 2019, Endeavor B2B acquired a number of legacy print and digital titles from Informa that likely didn’t fit the company’s strategy. For Endeavor, it was a way to generate scale from a buyer wanting to get out of a business. That’s the same playbook 526 is theoretically running in construction: pick up the titles that don’t fit the acquirer’s thesis, consolidate them under shared infrastructure and run them profitably at a lower cost basis.

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