What the Puck?

If Puck can close its latest fundraising round from RedBird Capital Partners, it’ll be worth approximately $250 million, which is up from $75 million three years ago.

According to Reuters:

The deal with RedBird, a well-known investor in media and entertainment, will value Puck at around $250 million and involve the company’s existing institutional investors selling to RedBird. This will give RedBird a significant stake in the platform, according to people familiar ​with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Dan Primack over at Axios further reported that the bulk of the money is going to “buy out VC backers, but employees will get some liquidity via deal,” should one transpire.

Let’s say that the deal does happen. Is the company worth $250 million?

Three years ago, . At the time, I estimated that the business was generating $12 million to $14 million in total revenue. Fast forward three years and we’ve got better data to help inform the above answer.

First, Reuters reports that there are 50,000 paid subscribers for Puck and then an additional 50,000 subscribers for AirMail.

Puck has three annual products: Puck at $120, Puck+Air Mail at $150 and an Insider’s Circle at $250. The bundle is the newest product, so I’m going to assume it’s a pretty small percentage of the total offering. So, if we assume 80% is the base product and 10% each to the other two products, you’re looking at approximately $6.8 million in subscription revenue.

On the Air Mail side, if we assume 25% of subscribers take the monthly $9.99 and the rest take the $80 per year offer, you’re looking at $4.5 million.

So, from a subscription perspective, you’re at $11.3 million, base case.

Puck actually makes more money from ads than from subs. I spoke with a person familiar with the financials who said advertising was the “majority” of revenue and Puck generated $11.5 million in advertising revenue in 2024. The 2025 target was over $20 million in advertising, but “they finished way short.”

This translates to public numbers CEO Sarah Personette told The Verge earlier this year. She said:

On the acquisition side—well, one on the growth side, I think it’s just good to state. For growth, total revenue, we grew at 40% last year. Ads, we grew at over 35%; sub-revenue, we grew at over 50%. And when we look at our fixed cost to recurring revenue, we’re in a really solid place.

If we start at $11.5 million in 2024 advertising revenue, grow 35%, then you finish at $15.5 million in advertising revenue. With the $6.8 million in 2025 subscription revenue, you’re looking at $22.3 million in total revenue for Puck.

Air Mail is trickier to nail down on the advertising side. In 2021, Air Mail founder Graydon Carter told Business Insider 60% of its revenue was advertising. If that held up, you’re looking at $6.75 million (since subs were $4.5 million). That would bring the Air Mail business to $11.25 million.

However, Air Mail had to sell for half the amount of money that it raised, which implies the business wasn’t doing well. Is it possible that the advertising business didn’t continue growing in lock step with the subscription business? If it were only 40% of the business, you’re looking at $3 million in ad revenue, which materially impacts the final numbers.

Red Bird declined to comment and Puck didn’t respond to requests for comment.

These are all variables (and it’s also trying to merge revenue numbers for what were two separate companies for a while), but it matters as we project to 2026. Let’s use $30 million as our number because Air Mail’s sale was clearly a firesale. What might Puck/Air Mail have projected for 2026?

Projecting 2026 Numbers

First things first, the original Puck’s growth is absolutely slowing down. When Personette was on The Verge, she said that 45,000 paid subscribers was a 2024 number. Now they’ve got 50,000 for Puck. That’s about 6% annual growth. We don’t have Air Mail’s numbers, but if the combined entity’s subscription revenue is $11.3 million and it grows by 6%, you’re looking at ~$12 million in subscription revenue.

On the advertising side, if 2026 grows at a somewhat reduced double digit percent increase of 20% (instead of 35%), you’ve got $22.4 million.

Combined, that’s a business generating $34.4 million in 2026 revenue. And as of April, it’s not profitable.

So, if we assume a $250 million post-money valuation and $34.4 million in 2026 revenue, we get a simple 7.3x revenue multiple, which for a media company is incredibly high..

One option is that there is some sort of a preferred return on the investment for RedBird. Puck gets to say that it is worth $250 million while RedBird gets to guarantee a return—insomuch as any return can be guaranteed. The mechanics are simple: if RedBird invested $125 million to take out the other investors and there was a 2x preferred, RedBird would have to get $250 million back before any other shareholder saw a penny. It also allows RedBird to model on a revenue multiple lower than 7.3x.

But most deals aren’t done to stand still. RedBird is writing a nine figure check because it has a plan to grow and here’s where I’d focus.

What I’d do next…

So, if RedBird closes this deal and is now the majority investor, what should they do next?

I’ve long believed—and have written about—that Puck should move more aggressively into the events space. And it should look to Semafor for inspiration.

Earlier this year, Semafor raised at a $330 million valuation. Part of the reason it was able to pull that off is because it generated $20 million from its “live-journalism events” with its annual World Economy event becoming a major part of its portfolio. We wrote all about it here and why it might not be the craziest valuation.

Puck should figure out how to do the same thing and my instinct remains that it should try to build this decade’s Code Conference—the Kara Swisher event that Vox bought, Swisher dumped and quickly died. That said, the numbers were pretty interesting.

In 2022, Axios reported that “only 20% of the 4,000 tech executives that apply to attend are accepted and pay a registration fee of $7,000–$9,500.” That’s $5.6 million in ticket revenue on the low end. Could sponsorship be another $5.6 million or even more? With the caliber of attendee that would attend, I see no reason why not.

Hell, Puck is a predominately sponsorship-led business, so it’s very possible that its event could generate materially more than $5.6 million in sponsorship revenue.

Puck’s got the talent to draw people in across Hollywood, Wall Street, media and more. That’s the whole thesis behind a talent-led media business like Puck. Put those people on stage, have them interview top executives, and you’ve got a legitimate, high-quality, high-touch event.

There’s a reason every media business is looking at events. Investors like them, sponsors like them and attendees like to be in the room with like-minded people. As subscription and digital advertising revenue slows—and the numbers point to that being the case—this could be a major unlock for revenue acceleration.

The $250 million headline is about what RedBird is buying, but the real question is what could they build.

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