Future double acquisition boosts insight and gaming

Publishing group Future, the company behind Homes & Gardens, Country Life, Marie Claire, Total Guitar and Four Four Two, is beefing up its operations with the double acquisition of a data insight start-up and gaming and entertainment specialist in a move designed to diversify its revenue streams.

Data insight company Waive claims to use advanced machine learning to identify and predict trending social topics, across platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Reddit.

The platform is aimed at empowering Future’s editorial teams to forecast trends, informing the creation of engaging content focused on what audiences will care about tomorrow.

It will sit alongside Future’s audience data platform, Aperture, which gives advertisers access to its first-party data, captured across its portfolio of brands.

It is claimed platform gives advertisers a transparent, privacy compliant and future-proof solution, with access to audience segments and new targeting capabilities across more than 180 of Future’s digital brands.

Meanwhile, the second acquisition, WhatCulture, is a UK-based brand that produces YouTube content for gaming and entertainment audiences.

Founded in 2006, the business brings YouTube advertising experience, designed to strengthened Future’s position in video; with 11 YouTube channels that represent WhatCulture’s core method of monetisation, attracting more than 8 million subscribers and driving over 4 billion views.

The brand, which attracts 70% of its revenue from the US, complements Future’s existing portfolio of entertainment content, including CinemaBlend, which has become the third highest ranked title in Comscore’s Entertainment – Movies* category, since its acquisition in 2021.

WhatCulture will also benefit from Future’s proprietary technology, which will empower greater monetisation of its websites and bring efficiencies to its operating model.

Future chief executive Zillah Byng-Thorne said: “We are delighted to welcome both WhatCulture and Waive to Future. We look forward to working with WhatCulture to further diversify our content and revenue streams, and are particularly excited about the video monetisation expertise and data insight capabilities that Waive will bring to the group respectively.”