Iheartmedia shares fell 65.0% on 2026-11-10, to $0.62 from a previous close of $1.77, the session after the company's third-quarter revenue missed Wall Street's consensus estimate and its guidance for the fourth quarter implied a profit range at or below the quarter it had just reported.
A revenue miss smaller than the market's reaction
Third-quarter revenue of $1.0 billion rose 3.3% from a year earlier, matching the 3.3% increase the company reported, but it fell 2.2% short of the analysts' consensus estimate of $1.1 billion. A miss of roughly two percentage points against consensus is not, on its own, a result that typically moves a share price by double digits.
Guidance implies a softer fourth quarter
For the fourth quarter, iHeartMedia guided to consolidated Adjusted EBITDA of $135 million to $185 million, a range whose midpoint sits below the $170.5 million the company reported for the third quarter just completed, and it set full-year Adjusted EBITDA guidance of $550 million to $600 million with free cash flow of about $50 million for 2026. The company also said it expects to generate approximately $400 million of total programmatic revenue in 2027 and plans to report podcasting as a separate segment beginning in 2027, changes framed around the view, in Chief Operating Officer Rich Bressler's words from the release, that "many of our revenue challenges are addressable."
Profitability improved even as shares fell
Several measures in the same quarter moved in the other direction, which makes the size of the decline harder to square with the filing alone. GAAP operating income swung to a positive $73.0 million from a $116.3 million loss in the same quarter of 2025, pushing the operating margin up 18.8 percentage points to 7.1%. Diluted GAAP earnings per share came in at −0.06, a narrower loss than the −0.43 posted a year before. Free cash flow was down −$10.4 million for the quarter, an improvement on being down −$32.8 million in the same period of 2025, as cash from operating activities turned positive at $13.7 million compared with being down −$9.5 million a year earlier.
The decline is unusual even by iHeartMedia's own volatile history. Shares of other covered broadcasting companies fell a median 1.3% that same session, and the S&P 500 fell 0.4%, which rules out a market-wide or sector-wide move as the explanation.
What the free cash flow guidance means for value
iHeartMedia's full-year guidance of about $50 million in free cash flow for 2026 would require a sharp fourth-quarter turnaround after a nine-month outflow of $78.9 million. These are model values under stated assumptions, not a comparison with the share price.
The next test of whether this reaction holds is iHeartMedia's fourth-quarter report, when the guided $135 million-to-$185 million Adjusted EBITDA range and the roughly $50 million full-year free-cash-flow target will be measured against actual results. For the company's wider financial history, see Fundamentalytics' iHeartMedia page.