Susan Panuccio
Chief Financial Officer at News
Thank you, Robert, and good afternoon to everyone. As Robert highlighted, our transformation of News Corp continues a pace. We have materially grown recurring in digital revenues at an incremental high margin licensing revenues and focused our reinvestment plans primarily around the core pillars of Book Publishing, Digital Real Estate Services and Dow Jones, where we expect the highest rate of returns and shareholder value creation. We continue to deliver cost efficiencies to mitigate inflationary pressures, but more importantly to allow for investment in growth initiatives across our businesses. This disciplined approach has allowed us to deliver our second best year on record and our strongest ever fiscal fourth quarter profitability.
For today's discussion, I will focus on the fourth quarter performance. Fourth quarter total revenues were almost $2.6 billion, up 6% year-over-year and Total Segment EBITDA was $380 million, up 11% year-over-year. Margins improved by 70 basis points to 14.7%. Our core pillars accounted for 87% of News Corp's profits and grew at a robust 28%.
Fourth quarter adjusted revenues rose 6% compared to the prior year, while Adjusted Total Segment EBITDA rose 13% versus the prior year. For the quarter, we reported earnings per share of $0.09, compared to a $0.01 loss in the prior year. Adjusted earnings per share was $0.17 in the quarter, compared to $0.14 in the prior year.
Moving on to the results, for the individual segments. Starting with Digital Real Estate Services. Segment revenues were $448 million, up 21% versus the prior year on both the reported and adjusted basis. Segment EBITDA was $135 million, up 25% as higher profit contribution from the REA Group was partly offset by approximately $11 million of higher costs at Move, a similar increase to the third quarter. Adjusted segment EBITDA grew 28%.
REA had another outstanding quarter with revenues rising 37% year-on-year. Growth was driven by a combination of residential yield increases and improved growth in national listings, favorable geographic mix and customer contract upgrades. New buy listings rose approximately 16% with Sydney, up 26% and Melbourne, up 32%.
In addition, REA saw strong growth at Financial Services, which benefited from the absence of a negative valuation adjustment in the prior year and some improvement in settlements, together with higher revenue at REA India. Please refer to REA's earnings release and their conference call for more details.
Move's revenues for the quarter of $143 million were down just 2% compared to the prior year as declines continued to moderate from last year. For the quarter, real estate revenues fell 2%, driven by lower referral and lead generation revenues, reflective of the broader macro trends and lower transaction volumes. Lead volume was flat, still constrained by higher mortgage rates, while average monthly unique users for the quarter were also flat versus the prior year at $74 million, but up sequentially 3%. And it is worth noting that we have been able to maintain market share according to the MACOM score data.
Encouragingly, we are continuing to have notable success diversifying our revenue base with accelerating performance from our sell-side offerings, rentals, which includes our newly formed partnership with Zillow and New Homes. Collectively, those businesses accounted for 19% of revenues in the quarter and grew substantially versus the prior year.
As we communicated last quarter, we are focused on best positioning Realtor.com for a housing recovery. Our key strategic focus areas remain the same as we head into the new financial year and include modernizing our technology stack, investing in content for our product offerings, which most recently included the release of a new dynamic mapping feature and leveraging News Corp's network to drive audience share.
Turning to the Subscription Video Services segment. Revenues for the quarter were $506 million, up 1% compared to the prior year. On an adjusted basis, revenues rose 2% versus the prior year. Streaming revenues accounted for 32% of circulation and subscription revenues versus 29% in the prior year. Total closing paid subscribers across the Foxtel Group were nearly 4.7 million at quarter end, up 1% from the prior year.
Total paid streaming subscribers reached a record 3.2 million, increasing 5% versus the prior year and accounting for nearly 70% of the total paying subscriber base. With Kayo adding 108,000 subscribers and BINGE adding 76,000 compared to the prior quarter. This speaks to the success of our winter sports codes and strong entertainment content.
Foxtel ended the quarter with over 1.2 million residential broadcast subscribers, down 10% year-over-year. Broadcast churn was 11.7% versus 11.1% in the prior year, but down from over 13% last quarter, while broadcast ARPU rose 6% to AUD90, benefiting from new pricing and packaging plans implemented in March. As a result, broadcast revenues declined at the lowest rate in constant currency in over five years.
Segment EBITDA in the quarter of $74 million was down only $4 million or 5% versus the prior year, despite including approximately $28 million of costs related to Hubbl for devices and marketing. Excluding the Hubbl investment, Foxtel's profitability would have been higher for the quarter. For the quarter, Adjusted Segment EBITDA fell 4%.
Moving on to Dow Jones. Fourth quarter results were again strong at Dow Jones with revenues of $566 million, up 4% year-over-year with digital revenue accounting for 81% of total revenues this quarter, up 2 percentage points from last year. Circulation and subscription-based revenues represented 79% of total revenues, again reinforcing the stability and recurring nature of the revenue base.
We continue to see strong growth at PIB with revenues rising 8% year-over-year, including 12% growth at Risk & Compliance to $76 million and 14% growth at Dow Jones Energy to $65 million. At Risk & Compliance, demand remains strong from new and existing customers with notable success in new products, including advanced media screening and financial instruments.
From a customer mix perspective, corporate customers remain the fastest growth segment, growing over 20% and accounting for 45% of our customer base. At Dow Jones Energy, revenue in the quarter continued to benefit from the pricing review together with the launch of a number of new products and benchmarks. Overall, retention remains strong at approximately 90%.
Within the Dow Jones consumer business, Circulation revenues rose 1% versus the prior year, with digital-only subscriptions improving by 16% year-over-year and higher by 158,000 sequentially. Bundling accounted for approximately 40% of the sequential digital-only volume growth in Q4. ARPU was stable sequentially as the introductory pricing is starting to rise and the subscribers acquired over the past year have started to migrate to higher pricing.
Advertising revenues increased 2% to $102 million, marking the first quarter of year-over-year growth since the first quarter of fiscal 2023. Digital advertising improved 12%, and that marked the strongest growth since the fourth quarter of fiscal 2022, principally due to a rebound in the technology category. Print remained challenged down 13% and broadly consistent with recent quarters. Digital represented 66% of advertising revenues, up from 60% last year.
Dow Jones Segment EBITDA for the quarter grew 3% to $137 million and was again the largest Segment EBITDA contributor across the company. As expected, expenses were higher this quarter, reflective of the phasing of marketing and higher employee costs, which includes a retro payment related to the ratification of a new union agreement.
The Dow Jones segment finished as the highest contributor to full year company revenue in financial year '24 for the first time and the highest contributor to Total Segment EBITDA for the second consecutive year. At Book Publishing, the fourth quarter delivered very strong results and kept a robust turnaround for the full year at HarperCollins, which benefited from normalization of customer demand, strong Amazon sales, moderating inflationary pressure and upswing in digital revenues and much lower return rates.
Revenues were $512 million, up 15%, while Segment EBITDA improved over 250% to $57 million, driven by strong top line growth, coupled with easy comparisons in the prior year. That said, HarperCollins nearly matched its highest fourth quarter revenue on record and achieved its highest fourth quarter profitability since 2018 underscoring that the performance clearly wasn't just a function of easy comparisons.
The backlist contributed 62% of consumer revenues, up from 59% last year, while digital sales rose 12%, reaching 24% of consumer sales. Audiobooks rose 28% in part helped by the recent Spotify partnership at increased promotions from Audible, which led to audiobooks exceeding e-books for the first time this quarter.
Turning to News Media, performance was mixed with News UK posting an improved performance for the quarter, which was more than offset by challenging conditions at News Corp Australia. Revenues for the quarter were $545 million, down 5% versus the prior year, while adjusted revenues fell 4%. Circulation and subscription revenue fell 3% on a reported and constant currency basis due to lower print volumes in the absence of Meta revenues in Australia, which more than offset cover price increases and digital subscriber growth.
Advertising was down 5% on a reported basis and 4% in constant currency, with UK digital advertising more challenged due to the continued impact from platform algorithm changes. As our News Media businesses face ongoing print challenges, they continue to focus on their transition to digital revenues and ongoing cost efficiencies. Segment EBITDA of $28 million declined $17 million, or 38%, which was attributed to challenges at News Australia, including higher newsprint prices. Adjusted segment EBITDA declined 38%.
Turning to the outlook. Market trends remain mixed geographically. However, we exited the fiscal fourth quarter with total segment EBITDA growth, and we hope to see improvements going in fiscal 2025. Some themes across each of our segments. At Digital Real Estate, Australian residential new buy listings for July are up 12%, although the listing volume increase benefited from two additional working days. REA should benefit from an average 10% price increase in Premier Plus that has been successfully implemented. Year-over-year growth rates for fiscal 2025 will reflect strong prior period listing volumes, particularly for Melbourne and Sydney.
Move plans to continue with their investment strategy focused on technology improvements and enhanced content and product offerings. We hope to see some revenue improvements given expected interest rate cuts and continued growth from adjacencies. We will be closely monitoring the impact from the implementation of the new buyer agent rules, but we believe we are well placed to benefit from the expected market recovery given the scale of our audience, the quality of our leads and expansion of our adjacencies.
At subscription video services, we plan to continue to scale streaming products, while retaining high-value broadcast customers through improved ARPU and churn measures. While we anticipate the rate of investment at Hubbl to be lower in fiscal 2025, we do expect modestly higher programming costs related to sports rights escalators.
At Dow Jones, we will remain focused on B2B growth, including upselling and new products across Risk & Compliance and Dow Jones Energy. We expect to see improved circulation revenue growth through digital subscription step-up pricing, and we'll be monitoring those trends very closely. While we expect the rate of expenses to be moderately higher year-over-year due to investment, notably in B2B, we will continue to focus on cost efficiencies to drive growth.
At Book Publishing, we have seen strong momentum from the backlist in July, including a resurgence from JD Vance's Hillbilly Elegy and are very pleased with the partnership with Spotify, which is driving increased competition in audiobooks. We hope to see further profit improvements in 2025, albeit likely at a much more modest rate given more normalized prior year comparisons.
At News Media, the advertising market remains challenging, and the businesses will continue to focus on enhancing first-party data offerings with an emphasis on video to drive higher-quality advertising. We expect the segment to benefit from lower TalkTV costs together with savings associated with the new commercial printing joint venture in the UK and ongoing operational efficiencies will remain a focus.
We will see new revenue from our OpenAI partnerships in fiscal 2025 reflected in the Dow Jones and News Media segments. We expect capex in fiscal 2025 to be moderately higher than in fiscal 2024, primarily due to digital reinvestment in our growth pillars.
With that, let me hand it over to the operator for Q&A.
