Robert Thomson
Chief Executive Officer at News
Thank you, Mike. In a world replete with uncertainty, News Corp is proud to report rising revenues and increased profitability in the first quarter of fiscal 2024. These distinctly positive results come despite inauspicious macroeconomic conditions, including steep interest rates and unfavorable foreign exchange fluctuations. The potential for even greater profitability should be even more pronounced when we return to economic equilibrium. These results follow the three most profitable years since the creation of the new News Corp and our digital transformation has continued apace. And in our view, these results certainly highlight the disparity between the value of our company and our share price, which we believe does not reflect our present profitability yet alone the potential of our incomparable growing businesses.
We are acutely focused on enhancing long-term value for all of our investors, and in that quest, have the patent advantage of prized assets whose value we believe is increasing. We are also assiduously reviewing our structure in the quest to optimize that value. Our first quarter revenues rose modestly to $2.5 billion, while profitability rose 4%, marking the second consecutive quarter of profit growth in these challenging conditions. We believe these positive results are a harbinger of our potential in the medium and long term. We expect to continue to drive our digital growth, the scale of which has been transformative over the past decade. It is worth noting a couple of metrics for context and to highlight the intrinsic value of our company.
In 2014, print-related advertising accounted for 39% of our revenue, and now it is trending at less than 5%, while digital revenues exceeded 50% of revenues last year, up almost 300%. Our loyal investors understand the inherent value of our assets and the scale of our dramatic transition, but we believe the market has yet to fully comprehend the magnitude of the metamorphosis or the future potential of our platform. We have been and expect to continue to generate significant free cash flow this fiscal year. And we have a $1 billion buyback plan well underway, and ample opportunity to be opportunistic. That opportunistic efficacy we've shown in our purchases of OPIS and CMA for Dow Jones, two high-margin digital businesses with recurring revenues, which have added much profitable prowess.
Their impact means that we are at a pivotal point at our Dow Jones business. The B2B segment at Dow Jones is now outpacing the B2C segment in contributing to profit and at a far higher margin. The net result is that we expect both Dow Jones and News Corporation are becoming more profitable, more digital, and even less dependent on the ebb and flow of advertising. That is why we are highlighting the Dow Jones results today and expect to be providing increasing visibility over the coming year so that potential investors can appreciate the full glory of our valuable assets, while we intensify our institutional introspection on structure. As a reminder, Dow Jones profitability has more than doubled since we resegmented in fiscal 2020, generating close to $500 million in segment EBITDA last year with strong growth prospects ahead.
And the EBITDA margin has been utterly transformed. In Q1 fiscal '18, it was approximately 9%. In Q1 fiscal '20, it was 12.8%, and in Q1 this fiscal year, 23.1%. We certainly agree with the perceptive commentators and analysts who suggest that News Corp is undervalued and its asset quality underappreciated. Our Board, our leaders, and our teams deserve much credit for skillfully navigating the turbulent media waters of the past decade, waters, which have proven treacherous for many media companies. As always, we remain focused on maximizing that value to the benefit of all shareholders. We are also looking to the future in maximizing the value of our premium content for AI. We are in advanced discussions with a range of digital companies that we anticipate will bring significant revenue in return for the use of our unmatched content sets.
Generative AI engines are only sophisticated as their inputs and need constant replenishing to remain relevant, and we are proud to partner with responsible purveyors of AI products and their prescient leaders. One observation about generative AI. We often hear about misinformation and disinformation to the point where the very words have become politicized and polluted. The potential for the proselytizing of the perverse will become ever more real with the inevitable inexorable rise of artificial intelligence. But however, artful the artificial intelligence, it is no match for great reporting and for genuine journalistic nos [Phonetic]. On the subject of journalism, I would like to pay tribute to our reporters in the Middle East and in Ukraine, who are each day taking calculated risks to bring insight and intelligence to readers around the world, during a period of unpredictable turbulence.
And I would like to highlight the fate of Evan Gerskovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter who has been unjustly incarcerated in Russia for more than seven months merely for doing his job as a journalist. Let me begin the more detailed exegesis with the increasingly valuable POS Dow Jones, where revenues rose 4% in Q1 despite the volatility of the ad market, while segment EBITDA was lifted by an impressive 10% as revenue and profit contribution continued to expand in the professional information business. Dow Jones offers a unique set of services and products for global business users and readers. As a result, many of our customers encounter Dow Jones products several times each day, not just the Wall Street Journal, Barron's, MarketWatch and Dow Jones Newswires, but also risk and compliance, Dow Jones Energy and Factiva.
Risk and Compliance revenues surged 23%, thanks to increased demand from the financial and corporate sectors seeking to minimize risk and maximize compliance. I trust all of the institutions on the call today aspire to those two worthy goals. R&C has expanded revenues by over 600%. Let me repeat that number, over 600% since we relaunched News in 2013. It's worth emphasizing that the business is fully digital and has retention rates of over 90%. Dow Jones Energy, which includes both OPIS and CMA continues to see excellent double-digit revenue growth driven in part by higher pricing and is exceeding our initial expectations, thanks to the global energy transition and opportunities emerging in renewable energy, along with continued reinvestment. Our customer base is growing as we launch compelling products and create critical pricing benchmarks.
We are genuinely impressed by the vitality and drive an initiative among our new colleagues at both OPIS and CMA. Factiva is benefiting from its innovative partnership with Cision. And Factiva should be an important building block in the AI future given that it has a database of 33,000 sources in 32 languages from more than 200 countries and territories. That impressive content collection complements our contemporaneous news offerings as we seek to serve corporate, professional, and consumer audiences. Across Dow Jones, subscription volume remained strong with digital subscriptions reaching 4.6 million, up 12%, while total subscriptions reached 5.3 million, up 8%. Our teams are focused on reducing churn and maximizing the lifetime value of each and every subscriber. As for advertising, we saw a particular improvement in trends with the declines of past quarters abating and digital advertising down only 2%.
In digital real estate, it was a tale of two markets during the quarter with the Australian property market improving and the U.S. market still bearing the burden of particularly high mortgage rates, which obviously suppressed demand. But it is fair to say that the revenue rebound in the Australian market certainly surpassed the sluggishness in the U.S. market. REA reported strong growth in listing volumes in the two key markets of Sydney and Melbourne, and our valued clients were keen to subscribe to premium products, thus improving yield. We also saw resounding top line performance and volumes remained strong in October. REA India is the number one property portal in a country with a rapidly expanding middle class and both its audience and revenue continued to surge during the quarter.
As REA has disclosed, the total audience in India in the quarter was up 16% year-over-year, while revenue during the quarter was 25% higher than a year ago. Given a relative political stability in India and ongoing economic growth, REA India is a jewel in the crown. In the U.S., Realtor.com, like the industry at large, was affected by the unusually high interest rates, which do appear to have plateaued and are expected to ease over the coming year. But these short-term conditions do not change our long-term optimism for Realtor to capitalize on the increasing digitization of the world's largest property market. It is easier to buy transient traffic in the short term, but that is merely a sugar high that leads to digital diabetes. We have a long-term commitment to all Americans who are buying and selling a home and to real estate professionals.
We also have the ability to leverage our unique media platform from wsj.com to the New York Post, among many others, who had a combined monthly audience of over 200 million uniques in September. These are verified authenticated numbers, not a cocktail of cockamamie. Under Damian Eales' energetic decisive leadership, Realtor is building on the gains of his predecessors and focusing on developing core markets, core clients, and core profitability. The Realtor team is working ever more closely with REA executives in ways that are benefiting both businesses with the sharing of software, marketing mechanics, and AI insights. The script for our publishing business was completely rewritten in the first quarter. After a few difficult quarters, segment EBITDA at HarperCollins lipped 67%.
Revenues posted a healthy 8% increase, and that growth, combined with cost initiatives undertaken over the past year and an easing of supply chain inflationary impacts recalibrated the performance at HarperCollins. The logistical upheaval at Amazon has passed, returned rates are far lower, and both the frontlist and backlist notched gains during the quarter. Among the many and varied strong sellers were Tom Lake by Ann Patchett, Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsover, The Collector by Daniel Silva, and Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby VanPelt. We saw particular strength in our Christian books business, including Rebar McEntire's Not That Fancy. Rebar was clearly not describing the HarperCollins performance. And speaking of Christian Books, we look forward to publishing a new book by His Holiness Pope Francis next spring.
I would like to highlight our new partnership with Spotify to broaden the reach of audio books. This is a project we have discussed for some time with the [Indecipherable] Daniel Ek, with whom I share a passion for books and for the Arsenal Football Club. The new partnership has begun with the U.K. and Australia and in the U.S. announced yesterday. And we are genuinely confident that it will be positive for both companies for authors and for those who love to read and to listen to books. This market has needed a strong new entrant and Daniel and his team are among the most skillful players on the pitch. At Subscription Video Services, revenues were up in constant currency for the seventh consecutive quarter. As expected, the decline in EBITDA was mainly due to sports right costs and ForEx fluctuations.
But we have no doubt that our streaming strategy has been successful at a time when other companies in other markets are struggling. Overall, paid streaming subscriptions rose 8% on the same quarter last year, while broadcast churn was down from 14.2% to 11.4%, showing that the two products are undoubtedly complementary. But the team at Foxtel is far from complacent. And so we are on the cusp of launching our new streaming aggregation product, Hubbl, which will greatly simplify the search for fascinating entertainment and sports from our own companies and from those of our cherished partners to the benefit of all in particular, to the benefit of viewers. The News Media segment faced macroeconomic headwinds and volatility caused by algorithmic changes at the large platform, but these trends are more ephemeral than eternal.
Subscriptions continue to increase at The Times and Sunday Times, which reported an 8% rise and at News Corp Australia, where we saw a 4% increase in digital subs. As I mentioned earlier, we are increasingly less reliant on advertising, which is now a smaller fraction of our overall revenue focused on digital recurring revenue streams. We saw strong performance at Wireless in the U.K., which had a record 45 million listening hours over the April to September period, up 17% from the prior year, according to RAJAR, led by sports and news. Our teams in the U.K. and Australia were also acutely cost conscious, and we are retooling the infrastructure to reflect the contemporary and future initiatives, including printing operations, advertising networks, and back office expenses.
Rebekah and her teams in the U.K. have been leaders in creating programmatic ad partnerships, which enable all to increase yield and harvest valuable data. This was in another way and historic quarter. Our Executive Chair, Rupert Murdoch, announced that he will be transitioning to Chairman Emeritus next week at our AGM. I can personally assure you that there has been no change in his heightened levels of curiosity and energy since the announcement and his vast experience will be an important ongoing resource for the company.
All of us at News Corp stand on the shoulders of a giant. And I genuinely look forward to Lachlan becoming sole chair next week. His thoughtful engagement with our teams already enhances the business each working day. And his passion for principal journalism is obvious to all who work with him. There is no doubt that Lachlan's multidisciplinary expertise and his philosophical integrity will be invaluable as we continue the next phase of our crucial journey.
And now our esteem CFO, Susan Panuccio, will provide more financial granularity.
