Revenue Diversification, Commerce Expansion and Disciplined Operations Continue to Fuel Growth and Scale in Face of Industry Volatility

The Arena Group Holdings, Inc. (NYSE American: AREN) (“The Arena Group” or “Arena”), a brand, data, and IP company home to many of the nation's most recognizable brands, including Parade, TheStreet, Men’s Journal, Athlon Sports, ShopHQ and the Adventure Network (including Surfer, Powder, Bike Magazine and more), today announced financial results for the three months ending December 31, 2025 (“Q4 2025”) and the year ended December 31, 2025 (“FY 2025”).

Financial Highlights for Q4 2025:

• Fourth quarter revenue was $28.2 million, compared to $36.2 million in Q4 2024. Despite this reduction in revenue, gross margin was a robust 43.6% in Q4 2025, compared to 52.8% in Q4 2024, demonstrating the resilience of Arena’s variable cost structure.
• Net income was $5.3 million, or 18.8%, compared to $6.9 million, or 19.1%, in Q4 2024, underscoring Arena’s commitment to operational discipline and cost management through margin optimization.
• Adjusted EBITDA for Q4 2025 was $10.1 million compared to Adjusted EBITDA of $13.0 million in Q4 2024. Adjusted EBITDA margin of 35.8% in Q4 2025 represents a minimal variance from 35.9%, in Q4 2024, highlighting Arena’s ability to sustain high-level profitability in a dynamic macro environment.
• Reduced outstanding debt load by 12% during Q4 2025 via a $13.0 million principal repayment, underscoring Arena’s commitment to a leaner, more efficient capital structure.

Financial Highlights for FY 2025:

• Full year revenue increased to $134.8 million in 2025 from $125.9 million in 2024 as a result of growth in Arena’s non-advertising revenue streams. Publisher revenue increased $11.6 million over 2024 and performance marketing revenue increased $8.7 million over 2024 as a result of its continued focus on reducing its reliance on external traffic referral sources. Advertising revenue represented just 64% of total revenue in 2025 compared to 74% in 2024.
• Full year gross margin significantly expanded to 50.7% in 2025 compared to 44.2% in 2024. This margin expansion highlights the structural efficiency and scalability of Arena’s Entrepreneurial Publishing model, as well as growth in its high-margin non-advertising revenue streams.
• Income from continuing operations for 2025 was $28.6 million, up from a loss of $7.7 million in 2024. This improvement validates the successful implementation of Arena’s Entrepreneurial Publishing model and cost structure optimization efforts.
• Net income was $124.9 million in 2025, including income from discontinued operations of $96.3 million, compared to a net loss of $100.7 million in 2024, including loss from discontinued operations of $93.0 million.
• Adjusted EBITDA improved to $51.5 million, or 38.2% in 2025 compared to $27.0 million, or 21.4% in 2024 signaling a fundamental shift in Arena’s profitability profile and the high-margin scalability of our operating model.
• Completed a strategic retirement of $23.5 million of outstanding debt, reducing Arena’s leverage by 57.8% from 4.5x in 2024 to 1.89x in 2025 while growing its cash balance by nearly $6.0 million. These balance sheet improvements underscore its powerful cash generation and disciplined approach to capital management.

“In 2025, we have transformed The Arena Group into a leaner, more resilient organization by innovating and scaling our Entrepreneurial Publishing model, aggressively paying down debt and maintaining strict cost controls,” Paul Edmondson, CEO of The Arena Group. “We believe our expansion into video and syndication (publisher revenue), alongside our commerce initiatives, provides the diversification necessary to navigate major algorithmic shifts and evolution of the media landscape. While the challenges of the industry will continue, we are confident that we’re better positioned with the ability to adapt in real-time, and we expect this strategic flexibility to drive positive cash from operations for the full year 2026.”

Operational Highlights for FY 2025:

• Proven Scalability of the Entrepreneurial Publishing Model: Successfully expanded the EP from Athlon Sports to flagship brands Parade, Men’s Journal, TheStreet and Autoblog, driving record audience engagement and high-margin growth while maintaining a flexible, variable cost structure.
• Strategic Content-to-Commerce Transformation: Completed the acquisition and relaunch of ShopHQ, transforming it from a broadcast-heavy model into a high-margin, drop-ship commerce platform that leverages Arena’s 100M+ monthly users.
• Diversified Revenue Streams: Achieved a significant shift in revenue mix, with non-advertising revenue (commerce, performance marketing, and syndication) growing triple-digits year-over-year, reducing Arena’s reliance on industry-wide traffic volatility and algorithmic search changes.
• Operational Discipline and Balance Sheet Strengthening: Successfully restructured operations and strengthened balance sheet through aggressive debt repayment and reduction of fixed costs, resulting in a transition to what The Arena Group believes will be consistent, repeatable profitability and a significantly improved net leverage position.
• Launch of Encore: Moved the Encore AI platform into full production, unifying first-party data across all 40+ brands to connect user behavior directly to commerce outcomes and provide advertisers with high-conversion, brand-safe inventory.

About The Arena Group

The Arena Group Holdings, Inc (NYSE American: AREN) is a brand, data and IP company that builds, acquires and scales high-performing digital assets. We combine technology, storytelling and entrepreneurship to create deep content verticals that engage passionate audiences across sports & leisure, lifestyle and finance. Through our portfolio of owned and operated brands including Parade, TheStreet, Men’s Journal, Athlon Sports, ShopHQ and the Adventure Network (Surfer, Powder, Bike Magazine and more), we deliver trusted content and meaningful experiences to millions of users each month. Visit us at thearenagroup.net to learn more.

Use of Non-GAAP Financial Measures

We report our financial results in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles in the United States of America (“GAAP”); however, management believes that certain non-GAAP financial measures provide users of our financial information with useful supplemental information that enables a better comparison of our performance across periods. We believe Adjusted EBITDA provides visibility to the underlying continuing operating performance by excluding the impact of certain items that are noncash in nature or not related to our core business operations. We calculate Adjusted EBITDA as net (income) loss as adjusted for income (loss) from discontinued operations, with additional adjustments for (i) interest expense (net), (ii) income taxes, (iii) depreciation and amortization, (iv) stock-based compensation, (v) change in valuation of contingent consideration, (vi) liquidated damages, (vii) loss on impairment of assets, and (viii) employee restructuring payments. Our non-GAAP measure may not be comparable to similarly titled measures used by other companies, have limitations as an analytical tool, and should not be considered in isolation, or as a substitute for analysis of our operating results as reported under GAAP. Additionally, we do not consider our non-GAAP measures as superior to, or a substitute for, the equivalent measure calculated and presented in accordance with GAAP. Some of the limitations are that our non-GAAP measure:

• does not reflect interest expense and financing fees, or the cash required to service our debt, which reduces cash available to us;
• does not reflect income tax provision or benefit, which is a noncash income or expense;
• does not reflect depreciation and amortization expense and, although this is a noncash expense, the assets being depreciated may have to be replaced in the future, increasing our cash requirements;
• does not reflect stock-based compensation and, therefore, does not include all of our compensation costs;
• does not reflect the change in valuation of contingent consideration and, although this is a noncash income or expense, the change in the valuations each reporting period are not impacted by our actual business operations but is instead strongly tied to the change in the market value of our common stock;
• does not reflect liquidated damages and, therefore, does not include future cash requirements if we repay the liquidated damages in cash instead of shares of our common stock (which the investor would need to agree to);
• does not reflect any losses from the impairment of assets, which is a noncash operating expense;
• does not reflect payments related to employee severance and employee restructuring changes for our former executives; and
• may not reflect proper non direct cost allocations.

The following table presents a reconciliation of Adjusted EBITDA to net income (loss), which is the most directly comparable GAAP measure, for the periods indicated:

Forward-Looking Statements

This Press Release of The Arena Group Holdings, Inc. (the “Company,” “we,” “our,” and “us”) contains certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the “Securities Act”), and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (the “Exchange Act”). Forward-looking statements relate to future events or future performance and include, without limitation, statements concerning our business strategy, future revenues and income from continuing operations, cost reductions, market growth, capital requirements, product introductions, expansion plans, our stock price relative to our peers and our share repurchase program (as disclosed in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025 filed with the SEC on March 16, 2026 (the “2025 10-K”) and in our other SEC filings and publicly available documents). Other statements contained in this Press Release that are not historical facts are also forward-looking statements. We have tried, wherever possible, to identify forward-looking statements by terminology such as “may,” “will,” “could,” “should,” “expects,” “anticipates,” “intends,” “plans,” “believes,” “seeks,” “estimates,” and other stylistic variants denoting forward-looking statements.

We caution investors that any forward-looking statements presented in this Press Release, or that we may make orally or in writing from time to time, are based on information currently available, as well as our beliefs and assumptions. The actual outcome related to forward-looking statements will be affected by known and unknown risks, trends, uncertainties, and factors that are beyond our control or ability to predict. Although we believe that our assumptions are reasonable, they are not guarantees of future performance, and some will inevitably prove to be incorrect. As a result, our actual future results can be expected to differ from our expectations, and those differences may be material. Accordingly, investors should use caution in relying on forward-looking statements, which are based only on known results and trends at the time they are made, to anticipate future results or trends. We detail other risks in our public filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”), including in Part I, Item 1A, Risk Factors, in the 2025 10-K. The discussion in this Press Release should be read in conjunction with the consolidated financial statements and notes thereto included in Part II, Item 8 in the 2025 10-K.

This Press Release and all subsequent written and oral forward-looking statements attributable to us or any person acting on our behalf are expressly qualified in their entirety by the cautionary statements contained or referred to in this section. We do not undertake any obligation to release publicly any revisions to our forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this Press Release except as may be required by law.

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