Business-to-business media is about connecting buyers and sellers but increasingly publishers are embracing the wider corporate trend of social purpose—standing for something bigger than just the business objectives.

After several years of rampant M&A in the B2B media space, which included the $5 billion sale of UBM to Informa, the estimated $180 million sale of Questex to MidOcean and the acquisition and merger of Hanley Wood into Meyers Group (also under MidOcean), M&A has slowed considerably in 2019--and not just in B2B. The $29 billion merger of Refinitiv and London Stock Exchange notwithstanding, the number of deals across data and information services, consumer media, events and even software and technology have plummeted.

Last week MediaRadar released a free report on B2B Advertising in 2018: In Print | Online | Elsewhere.

The 2017 Business Information Network report looks a little different this year, with significantly larger overall revenue estimates for the B2B media and information category as a whole and for the Data and Paid Content category in particular. Working with our partner Outsell, we’ve recast the Data and Paid Content category to expand beyond just B2B media publishers to be more representative of the greater paid content universe that Connectiv now represents (including companies such as Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg BNA, Reed Tech, Lexis Nexis and more). For the BIN report, Outsell is tracking a number of verticals including Commercial Information, Credit & Finance, Legal, Science Technology & Healthcare and Human Capital Management.

The U.S. B2B media and information industry saw a slow start to the first half of 2016, inching up 2.2 percent to $14.7 billion, compared to $14.3 billion in the first half of 2015, thanks to slowdowns in some key verticals, market uncertainties surrounding the presidential election, Brexit, and continued market corrections with digital advertising.