Versant Shares Surge Premarket as Company Beats Wall Street Expectations

Versant is home to cable channels that include CNBC. - Lev Radin/ZUMA Press

Versant Media Group reported lower revenue and profit in its first quarter on Thursday, the company’s second earnings report since being spun off from Comcast earlier this year.

Versant, which is home to cable networks including CNBC, MS NOW and E!, reported $1.69 billion in revenue, down 1.1% from a year earlier. Net income declined 22% to $286 million. The company’s revenue and profit beat expectations of analysts polled by FactSet.

Most Read from The Wall Street Journal

Hedge Funds Are Making a Killing in the ‘Golden Age’ of AI Hardware China’s Best and Brightest Tech Talent Is Going Back to China Nvidia Rally Propels Stocks to New Records How Eight Tumultuous Years Pushed Jerome Powell and the Fed to the Limit Anthropic Was Behind. Now It’s the AI Boom’s Front-Runner.

Versant shares rose as much as 16% in premarket trading before retreating to around a 10% gain.

Comcast greenlighted the spinoff of its NBCUniversal cable networks in late 2024, an acknowledgment that it would be better off without a business that was once its crown jewel but which suffered after years of cord-cutting.

Versant became an independent, publicly traded company in January.

Versant said the revenue it receives from pay-TV distributors fell by 7.3% to $1.01 billion, because of subscriber declines, and advertising revenue decreased by 5.2%, to $368 million. The company said that decline was an improvement from the dip in the first quarter of 2025, when advertising revenue was down 12%.

The company’s stated long-term goal is to become less reliant on the pay-TV business, moving toward a model where half of revenue comes from traditional TV and the other half from digital, subscription and other businesses.

Revenue from the platforms business, which includes review site Rotten Tomatoes, ticketing service Fandango and tee-time marketplace GolfNow, rose by more than 9%, to $192 million.

Versant also said it would repurchase an additional $100 million of shares in the second quarter of 2026. The company repurchased around $100 million of stock in the first quarter.

Write to Isabella Simonetti at [email protected]

Most Read from The Wall Street Journal

GLP-1 Users Are Taking a Bite Out of the Restaurant Business The Tech Jobs That Are Safe From AI The More You Know About This Private-Credit Fund, the Less You Understand How Allison Ellsworth Turned a Drink Made in Her Kitchen Into a Billion-Dollar Brand How the U.S. Became the World’s Greatest Energy Exporter

View Comments