Usa Today TDAY

NYSE TDAY

$6.86 +0.29 (+4.41%)

As of: Nov 9, 2026 · 3:59 PM EST

Usa Today (TDAY) stock price is $6.86, up 4.41% on the day, as of Nov 9, 2026. It has a market cap of $1.00Bn, and is classified in the Publishing industry (Communication Services sector).

Key Stats

Market Cap1.00 Bn

P/E-177.23

FCF (Yr)62.90 Mn

ROA (Yr)0.09

EV to EBIT2.93

Net Income (Yr)1.76 Mn

Enterprise Value670.87 Mn

Add ratio to table…

About

USA TODAY Co., Inc. is a diversified media company with expansive reach at the national and local level dedicated to empowering and enriching communities. The company operates as a media and digital marketing solutions provider, delivering trusted journalism, local content, and digital experiences through its brands, including the USA TODAY NETWORK and Newsquest. It focuses on sustainable growth by expanding audience engagement, diversifying digital revenue streams, and…

USA TODAY Co., Inc. generates revenue primarily through advertising, subscription sales, and digital marketing services across its three reportable segments. Revenue streams include digital advertising, digital marketing services, digital‑only subscriptions, and other digital income such as content syndication, affiliate partnerships, AI collaborations, and licensing. Print revenue derives from advertising, circulation, and commercial printing and distribution activities. The LocaliQ segment contributes exclusively digital marketing solutions sold to small and medium‑sized businesses.

The company operates through the following segments: USA TODAY Media, Newsquest, and LocaliQ.

USA TODAY Media: This segment comprises the USA TODAY NETWORK, which includes the national publication USA TODAY and a network of local properties across the United States, as well as USA TODAY NETWORK Ventures, the company’s events business. It provides digital‑only subscriptions for local brands, USA TODAY, sports, and games, and offers print products through home delivery, single copy, and non‑distribution channels. The segment also produces print materials for third‑party customers using existing assets and generates revenue from advertising, subscription sales, commercial printing, and event sponsorships.
Newsquest: This segment consists of approximately 220 digital news and media brands in the United Kingdom, featuring over 150 daily and weekly newspapers and more than 60 magazines. It delivers digital‑only subscriptions for local brands, magazines, and sports verticals, and provides print products through home delivery, single copy, and non‑daily publications. Revenue is derived from advertising, subscription sales, digital marketing services, and limited commercial printing and distribution activities.
LocaliQ: This segment supplies digital advertising and marketing products and solutions to help local businesses reach customers and grow. Its cloud‑based platform offers marketing automation, AI‑driven advertising optimization, customizable reporting, and a Customer Center powered by Dash® that provides AI‑generated call attributes and interaction insights. LocaliQ serves small and medium‑sized businesses in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the United Kingdom, with the majority of its revenue coming from North America.

Within the industry, USA TODAY Co., Inc. holds a leading position as the largest newspaper publisher in the United States by circulation and possesses the biggest digital audience in the News and Information category, excluding news aggregators, according to Comscore data. The company competes with social media platforms, traditional broadcasters, cable television, magazines, and other digital news outlets, while maintaining competitive advantages through its trusted journalism, extensive local‑national audience network, integrated newsroom, and a sizable sales force that can tailor advertising solutions for both local and national clients.

USA TODAY Co., Inc. serves a broad base of readers and viewers across its USA TODAY Media and Newsquest segments, reaching nearly half of U. S. adults and a substantial weekly audience in the United Kingdom. Its advertising customers include local businesses, national brands, and political campaigns seeking to engage these audiences. The Localiq segment’s client base consists predominantly of small and medium‑sized businesses that rely on its digital marketing tools to enhance online presence, generate leads, and measure campaign performance.

Investment Thesis

▲ Bull case

USA TODAY Co. is positioned at a critical inflection point where its digital transformation is maturing into a self-reinforcing growth engine, driven by three interconnected forces. First, the company has successfully shifted its revenue mix toward higher-margin digital streams, with digital revenues now comprising 47.8% of total revenues—a 400 basis point increase year-over-year—while maintaining improving same-store revenue trends that declined only 1.8% in Q1 FY26 versus over 6% declines in prior quarters. This shift is not merely cyclical but structural, as evidenced by the sustained growth in digital-only subscription revenue (up 6.2% year-over-year) and digital other revenues (up 125.6% year-over-year), which includes AI licensing and affiliate income. Second, the company’s audience scale and engagement metrics are improving despite headwinds from external traffic sources, with 180 million average monthly unique visitors and 1.4 billion monthly page views—both up sequentially—demonstrating resilience against algorithmic changes like those in Google Discover. Management’s deliberate strategy to reduce reliance on any single traffic source by cultivating direct, social, and email referral channels is proving effective, as seen in events like the White House Correspondents’ Dinner where half the audience arrived via non-search avenues. Third, the monetization of this engaged audience is accelerating through innovative product stacking and limited-series offerings, such as the Kentucky Derby front and USA TODAY Style Meter, which drive higher ARPU (up 42.7% year-over-year to $10.30) and improved conversion rates. The stacking initiative, already showing a 20-point improvement in pay-up rates for multi-product subscribers, signals untapped pricing power as the company expands its bundle to include Golfweek and other verticals. Together, these trends suggest the market is underestimating the durability of USA TODAY’s digital revenue acceleration, particularly as AI licensing deals—though lumpy—represent a scalable, high-margin opportunity fueled by daily unique content creation and archived digitization, with management emphasizing that real-time content value will grow over time as AI models require continual refreshment.

USA TODAY Co. is positioned at a critical inflection point where its digital transformation is maturing into a self-reinforcing growth engine, driven by three interconnected forces. First, the company has successfully shifted its revenue mix toward higher-margin digital streams, with digital revenues now comprising 47.8% of total revenues—a 400 basis point increase year-over-year—while maintaining improving same-store revenue trends that declined only 1.8% in Q1 FY26 versus over 6% declines in prior quarters. This shift is not merely cyclical but structural, as evidenced by the sustained growth in digital-only subscription revenue (up 6.2% year-over-year) and digital other revenues (up 125.6% year-over-year), which includes AI licensing and affiliate income. Second, the company’s audience scale and engagement metrics are improving despite headwinds from external traffic sources, with 180 million average monthly unique visitors and 1.4 billion monthly page views—both up sequentially—demonstrating resilience against algorithmic changes like those in Google Discover. Management’s deliberate strategy to reduce reliance on any single traffic source by cultivating direct, social, and email referral channels is proving effective, as seen in events like the White House Correspondents’ Dinner where half the audience arrived via non-search avenues. Third, the monetization of this engaged audience is accelerating through innovative product stacking and limited-series offerings, such as the Kentucky Derby front and USA TODAY Style Meter, which drive higher ARPU (up 42.7% year-over-year to $10.30) and improved conversion rates. The stacking initiative, already showing a 20-point improvement in pay-up rates for multi-product subscribers, signals untapped pricing power as the company expands its bundle to include Golfweek and other verticals. Together, these trends suggest the market is underestimating the durability of USA TODAY’s digital revenue acceleration, particularly as AI licensing deals—though lumpy—represent a scalable, high-margin opportunity fueled by daily unique content creation and archived digitization, with management emphasizing that real-time content value will grow over time as AI models require continual refreshment.

▼ Bear case

Despite encouraging quarterly results, USA TODAY Co. faces significant structural headwinds that the market is overlooking, particularly the fragility of its digital advertising revenue base and the unsustainable reliance on non-recurring income streams to prop up profitability. Digital advertising revenues declined 3% year-over-year in Q1 FY26 due to softer page views and programmatic softness, a trend management attributed to reduced Google Discover referrals and deliberate paywall optimization—a trade-off that may be sacrificing long-term audience growth for short-term monetization gains. While the company highlights new business signings and stabilizing retention as future catalysts, the absence of concrete timelines for DMS-driven advertising recovery in the back half of the year raises concerns about whether these improvements are merely aspirational, especially given that LocaliQ’s core platform ARPU remains near record highs at ~$2,800 while customer count stagnates around 11,900, suggesting limited upside in its core SMB marketing solutions business. More critically, the explosive growth in digital other revenues—up 125.6% year-over-year driven by $18.8 million in AI licensing and affiliate income—is inherently lumpy and non-recurring, with management acknowledging timing variability in recognition; this creates a dependency on deal flow that could reverse if AI partners shift to in-house content generation or if archived content utilization diminishes post-initial training phases. Furthermore, the company’s balance sheet remains strained, with net debt at $903.1 million and first lien net leverage only improved to 2.3x—still above the 2x target management has cited—despite Q1 free cash flow of just $6.4 million, which pales in comparison to the $27.2 million year-over-year net income increase driven largely by non-operational items and cost-cutting benefits from the 2025 program. The market may be misinterpreting margin expansion (adjusted EBITDA margin up to 13.3% from 8.8%) as operational excellence when it is significantly bolstered by one-time licensing windfalls and aggressive expense reductions that may not be repeatable, leaving the company vulnerable to revenue deterioration if digital subscription volume stabilization fails to materialize or if AI licensing momentum proves transient rather than transformative.

Despite encouraging quarterly results, USA TODAY Co. faces significant structural headwinds that the market is overlooking, particularly the fragility of its digital advertising revenue base and the unsustainable reliance on non-recurring income streams to prop up profitability. Digital advertising revenues declined 3% year-over-year in Q1 FY26 due to softer page views and programmatic softness, a trend management attributed to reduced Google Discover referrals and deliberate paywall optimization—a trade-off that may be sacrificing long-term audience growth for short-term monetization gains. While the company highlights new business signings and stabilizing retention as future catalysts, the absence of concrete timelines for DMS-driven advertising recovery in the back half of the year raises concerns about whether these improvements are merely aspirational, especially given that LocaliQ’s core platform ARPU remains near record highs at ~$2,800 while customer count stagnates around 11,900, suggesting limited upside in its core SMB marketing solutions business. More critically, the explosive growth in digital other revenues—up 125.6% year-over-year driven by $18.8 million in AI licensing and affiliate income—is inherently lumpy and non-recurring, with management acknowledging timing variability in recognition; this creates a dependency on deal flow that could reverse if AI partners shift to in-house content generation or if archived content utilization diminishes post-initial training phases. Furthermore, the company’s balance sheet remains strained, with net debt at $903.1 million and first lien net leverage only improved to 2.3x—still above the 2x target management has cited—despite Q1 free cash flow of just $6.4 million, which pales in comparison to the $27.2 million year-over-year net income increase driven largely by non-operational items and cost-cutting benefits from the 2025 program. The market may be misinterpreting margin expansion (adjusted EBITDA margin up to 13.3% from 8.8%) as operational excellence when it is significantly bolstered by one-time licensing windfalls and aggressive expense reductions that may not be repeatable, leaving the company vulnerable to revenue deterioration if digital subscription volume stabilization fails to materialize or if AI licensing momentum proves transient rather than transformative.

Product and Service Breakdown of Revenue (2025)

History

Segments Breakdown of Revenue (2025)

History

Peer percentiles

How Usa Today ranks

Ranked against the 62 companies in Advertising and Media58 metrics · as of Nov 6, 2026

Valuation

12 metrics · Lower multiples rank higher; a negative multiple ranks last

P/ENegative earnings −160xMedian 14.0x 53^rd
P/FCF 14.9xMedian 8.01x 58^th
P/Operating cash flow 7.89xMedian 7.12x 59^th
P/S 0.41xMedian 0.53x 58^th
P/B 6.16xMedian 1.60x 8^th
P/Tangible bookNegative tangible equity −5.67xMedian 1.90x Not meaningful —
EV/EBITDA 4.25xMedian 9.57x 95^th
EV/EBIT 6.68xMedian 15.4x 95^th
EV/Revenue 0.70xMedian 1.25x 78^th
EV/FCF 25.2xMedian 16.6x 57^th
EV/Operating cash flow 13.3xMedian 12.9x 57^th
PEG (3Y EPS CAGR)Negative earnings 5.34Median 0.40 Not meaningful —

Growth

14 metrics · Year-on-year growth and three-year compound annual growth

Revenue growth (1Y) −6.4%Median −0.4% 31^st
Revenue CAGR (3Y) −7.0%Median −2.1% 30^th
Gross profit growth (1Y) −4.5%Median 1.4% 34^th
Gross profit CAGR (3Y) −5.0%Median −1.9% 42^nd
Operating income growth (1Y) 121%Median 6.2% 95^th
Operating income CAGR (3Y) 40.2%Median 10.8% 94^th
Net income growth (1Y) −106%Median 22.3% 19^th
Net income CAGR (3Y) −30.1%Median 2.4% 18^th
EPS growth (1Y) −106%Median 26.1% 17^th
EPS CAGR (3Y) −29.9%Median 14.2% 22^nd
Operating cash flow growth (1Y) 43.3%Median −15.7% 81^st
Operating cash flow CAGR (3Y) 12.2%Median 1.5% 70^th
Free cash flow growth (1Y) 115%Median −15.0% 93^rd
Free cash flow CAGR (3Y) 13.1%Median 4.8% 68^th

Profitability

14 metrics · Margins, returns on capital and the quality of earnings

Gross margin 39.0%Median 48.3% 28^th
EBITDA margin 16.5%Median 7.3% 69^th
Operating margin 10.5%Median 2.3% 70^th
Pretax margin 3.8%Median −1.4% 64^th
Net margin −0.3%Median −0.9% 52^nd
FCF margin 2.8%Median 2.2% 52^nd
Operating cash flow margin 5.2%Median 4.0% 52^nd
Return on equity −3.8%Median 3.0% 33^rd
Return on assets −0.3%Median −0.3% 46^th
Return on invested capital 0.0%Median 2.5% 27^th
Return on capital employed 17.9%Median 2.9% 92^nd
Asset turnover 1.23xMedian 0.63x 93^rd
Cash conversion (OCF / net income)Net income is not positive −20.3xMedian 1.71x Not meaningful —
Stock comp / revenue 0.4%Median 1.1% 79^th

Financial Health

11 metrics · Leverage, liquidity and solvency; less debt ranks higher

Debt / assets 39.4%Median 28.7% 38^th
Debt / equity 4.72xMedian 1.06x 10^th
Net debt / EBITDA 1.74xMedian 4.10x 72^nd
Debt / FCF 11.4xMedian 7.31x 33^rd
Liabilities / assets 91.7%Median 74.6% 23^rd
Equity / assets 8.3%Median 25.4% 23^rd
Interest coverage 2.67xMedian 0.30x 82^nd
Current ratio 0.73xMedian 1.30x 14^th
Quick ratio 0.56xMedian 0.97x 29^th
Cash ratio 0.14xMedian 0.20x 31^st
Altman Z-score 1.10Median 1.23 45^th

Peer group

Peer Comparison

Companies in the Publishing

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S.No.	Ticker	Company	Market Cap	P/E	P/S	Total Debt (Qtr)
1	FOXA	Fox Corp	28.62 Bn	14.11	1.59	6.61 Bn
2	OMC	Omnicom Group Inc.	24.31 Bn	34.49	0.98	19.92 Bn
3	NWSA	News Corp	14.78 Bn	25.79	1.64	1.99 Bn
4	NYT	New York Times Co	11.62 Bn	28.43	3.81	-
5	PSO	Pearson Plc	11.19 Bn	25.80	2.36	1.99 Bn
6	SIRI	Sirius Xm Holdings Inc.	11.05 Bn	12.27	1.28	9.32 Bn
7	SKYD	Skydance Corp	9.62 Bn	-	-	13.66 Bn
8	TDAY	USA TODAY Co., Inc.	1.00 Bn	-177.23	0.46	0.69 Bn