All Other Publishers (U.S.) — NAICS 513199

An investor's primer. Written for both public-market and private investors.

NAICS = North American Industry Classification System, the federal standard for sorting businesses by activity.

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1. Overview

"All Other Publishers" is the federal statistical system's catch-all bin for publishing that does not fit the named buckets — newspapers, magazines, books, directories, greeting cards, music, or software. What actually lives here is a grab-bag of durable niche products: school yearbooks, wall and desk calendars, planners and diaries, art prints and posters, maps and atlases, mail-order catalogs, coloring books, patterns, and assorted online content that publishes work in print or electronic form, including exclusively on the internet.[1]

Why it is worth understanding: this is a small but sticky corner of media. The glamour is gone from some of it (paper maps lost to smartphone navigation, catalogs pressured by e-commerce), yet several pockets throw off high, recurring cash flows — school yearbooks in particular are a near-annuity business, which is exactly why private-equity firms keep buying and re-buying the companies that dominate it.

A useful lens cuts across every pocket: the businesses worth owning here tend to have proprietary or licensed intellectual property (IP), recurring revenue, or a direct relationship with their audience. The commodity print corners without those traits are the ones being eroded.

Ways in differ sharply by pocket:

• Public markets: there is essentially no pure-play public company in this code. Exposure is indirect, through diversified names such as ACCO Brands (planner and calendar brands) that are classified as manufacturers, not publishers.
• Private markets: this is overwhelmingly a private and private-equity-owned industry. The most valuable assets here — Jostens, Herff Jones, Andrews McMeel, Trends International — are held by buyout funds or founding families, not by public shareholders.

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2. What it is, and what it excludes

In scope (NAICS 513199). The Census Bureau defines it as establishments "generally known as publishers" other than the named categories, publishing in print or electronic form.[1] Illustrative products and index entries include: art publishers and art-print publishers; calendar publishers; catalog (mail-order and store-merchandise) publishers; yearbook publishers; pattern and plan publishers (e.g., clothing patterns); plus posters, postcards, diaries, coupons, coloring books, maps, and racing forms.[1]

The defining act is publishing — commissioning, licensing, editing, designing, and bringing a work to market and bearing the commercial risk — not the physical printing. A publisher may own the underlying rights or obtain them from authors, artists, institutions, or other publishers, and can earn money from physical products, digital access, advertising, licensing, syndication, subscriptions, and custom publishing.[1]

Explicitly excluded (and where those activities are counted instead):[1]

• Newspaper publishers → 513110
• Periodical/magazine publishers → 513120
• Book publishers → 513130
• Directory and mailing-list publishers → 513140
• Greeting-card publishers → 513191 (a separate sibling code — greeting cards are not here)
• Music publishers → 512230
• Software publishers → 513210
• Commercial printing (the physical print run, if that's all a firm does) → 323111
• Yearbook production support services to schools → can fall under educational support, 611710

A NAICS-2022 wrinkle that matters. In the 2022 revision, the government reorganized the old "Publishing Industries (except Internet)" subsector (511) and folded internet-only publishers into the publishing codes by type of content, creating the new subsector 513.[2][3] Practically, that means 513199 now also absorbs miscellaneous internet-only publishers whose content doesn't map to news, magazines, books, or directories. This reshuffle is still working its way through the various federal surveys, which do not all count the industry the same way yet.[3]

Ownership mix. A barbell. At one end, a handful of large, professionally managed, mostly PE-owned (private-equity-owned) or family-owned firms in yearbooks, licensed posters/calendars, and catalogs. At the other, a very long tail of tiny niche and solo publishers — an independent calendar line, a regional map house, a poster shop, an online hobby publisher. Federal data (below) show an average of about five employees per establishment, which tells you how small the typical operator is.[5]

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3. How big it is

Two different federal programs measure this industry, and — importantly — they do not reconcile cleanly, so treat the numbers as a range, not a point.

From the 2022 Economic Census (firm-and-revenue view):[4]

• Receipts: about $14.5 billion ($14,520 million).
• Firms: 2,984.
• That implies roughly $4.9 million in average revenue per firm — but the average hides everything, because the top firms are large and the tail is minuscule.

From County Business Patterns, 2023 (employer-establishment view):[5]

• Establishments: 1,243.
• Paid employees: 6,221.
• Annual payroll: about $509 million (first-quarter payroll about $123 million).
• That works out to roughly 5 employees and $82,000 of payroll per employee at the average establishment.

Read the mismatch honestly. The Economic Census counts more firms (2,984) than County Business Patterns counts establishments (1,243), and the $14.5 billion revenue figure divided by ~6,200 employees implies an improbable ~$2.3 million of revenue per worker for a labor-based publishing business. Both signals point the same way: the true footprint is undercounted and unsettled. Two forces are at work. First, a large tail of nonemployer and micro-operators (self-publishers, one-person calendar and map lines, online hobby publishers) that employer-based statistics miss — County Business Patterns only counts establishments with paid employees, so businesses without payroll fall out.[5] Second, this is a residual catch-all still migrating under NAICS 2022 — the internet-publisher fold-in and reclassifications have not fully propagated across every survey, which the Census Bureau says will continue for several years.[3] So: the industry is bigger and more numerous than the employer count suggests, but exactly how much is genuinely fuzzy in the federal record. The supplied federal file contains no separate nonemployer or public-sector estimate, so none is stated here.

One more undercount to flag. The best-known "513199" brands earn most of their money outside this code. Jostens and Herff Jones sell class rings, caps, gowns and diplomas (jewelry and manufacturing), and they run their own presses (commercial printing, 323111). Only the yearbook-publishing slice properly belongs here. So the code simultaneously overstates the tail's importance and understates the economic muscle of its biggest players.

Size-standard note. The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) size standard for 513199 is 1,000 employees.[6] Since the largest firms in the code employ only a few thousand people across all their businesses, essentially every operator here qualifies as a "small business" for federal contracting and lending purposes.

The federal file provides no industry-wide gross margin, EBITDA margin, cash-flow, recurring-revenue, or return-rate figure. Those must be obtained company by company.

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4. The investable universe

Public companies: no clean way in. There is no publicly traded pure-play "other publisher." The closest listed exposures are diversified consumer/office-products firms that happen to own calendar and planner brands, and are themselves classified outside this code.

Bottom line for public investors: you cannot own this industry directly on an exchange. The listed names give you a sliver of calendar/planner exposure wrapped inside much larger, differently-driven businesses.

Broader "publishing" proxies (adjacent, not this code). Investors who want listed exposure to the wider publishing and information economy sometimes point to Thomson Reuters (NYSE/TSX: TRI), RELX (LSE/NYSE: RELX), Wolters Kluwer (AMS: WKL), Informa (LSE: INF), News Corp (NASDAQ: NWSA), Pearson (LSE: PSON), and McGraw Hill (NYSE: MH). These are real, high-quality businesses, but they sit in adjacent NAICS codes — professional and periodical information, news (513110), books (513130), directories (513140), and education/software (513130/513210) — not 513199. Treat them as proxies for publishing broadly, not for this residual code.

Private and PE-owned leaders: where the real assets are. This is a private industry. The notable owners:

The yearbook segment alone was already a ~$500 million business two decades ago and remains the industry's cash engine; Jostens is estimated to hold roughly half of it.[7] For scale reference, the broader private publishing ecosystem also includes giants such as Bertelsmann (parent of Penguin Random House — books, adjacent) and Hallmark (greeting cards — explicitly excluded under 513191), which sit next to this code rather than in it.

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5. How the money works

Because this code is a bundle of unlike products, "unit economics" — units sold × price per unit, minus content, paper/print, and fulfillment cost — is the right lens, and it plays out differently in each pocket. The single question that separates good assets from bad here is whether revenue repeats or must be recreated with every new title, edition, or campaign.

Yearbooks — the annuity. The best economics in the code. A publisher signs a school to a multi-year contract, and the books are effectively pre-sold: students and parents pay up front, so the publisher prints to order with little inventory risk and negative working capital. Revenue recurs every spring; a captive sales-rep network and switching costs (schools rarely change vendors) make the customer base sticky, and the yearbook naturally cross-sells class rings and graduation products. The result is high, predictable margins — Jostens reportedly runs EBITDA margins above 25% (EBITDA = earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, a proxy for cash operating profit).[9] The core drivers to watch are contract renewal rates, price per book, and the share of students who buy (participation).

Calendars, posters, and art prints — hit-driven and licensed. Economics here revolve around IP licensing: a publisher pays a royalty (commonly a mid-teens percentage of wholesale) to a sports league, film studio, or artist, prints an edition, and sells it wholesale to retailers. Two risks define the pocket. It is seasonal — most calendars sell in a short fourth-quarter/January window, and unsold units are near-worthless once the year turns, forcing markdowns. And it is hit-driven — profitability depends on backing the licenses consumers actually want. Key metrics: sell-through rate, return rate, royalty load, and revenue per title.

Catalogs — a marketing medium, not a newsstand product. Mail-order catalogs are usually funded by the retail sales they generate, so the economics are those of direct marketing: cost per catalog against response rate and revenue per recipient. The single biggest line item is postage — more than 65% of a catalog's cost is U.S. Postal Service (USPS) postage, with printing, paper, list rental, and creative splitting the rest.[16] That makes catalog publishers acutely sensitive to postal rates.

Maps/atlases and digital-content publishers. Maps are a declining print annuity displaced by free navigation apps. The internet-only publishers now folded into this code monetize the media way — advertising plus subscriptions — with low marginal cost per additional reader but intense competition for attention. For these, retention, churn, and recurring revenue matter more than units printed; for physical publishers, inventory and returns can absorb cash even when reported revenue looks strong.

Across all pockets, the levers that decide returns are the same: scale (to absorb fixed design/plate costs), licensing cost discipline, the print-versus-digital mix, and control of paper and postage input inflation.

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6. What drives demand

• School enrollment and yearbook participation. Yearbook revenue tracks K-12 (kindergarten through 12th grade) and college enrollment and, more importantly, the share of students who still buy a printed book — a figure under slow pressure as social media absorbs the "memory-keeping" instinct.
• Consumer discretionary spending and gifting. Calendars, planners, and art prints are gift and impulse purchases; they rise and fall with household confidence and the fourth-quarter holiday season.
• Corporate promotional budgets. Branded wall calendars remain a cheap, year-round advertising surface; corporate gifting is a meaningful, recession-sensitive demand source.[14]
• The "analog revival." Wellness, journaling, and bullet-journal culture have revived premium planners and paper calendars among younger buyers even as smartphone penetration cuts the low end — personalization and customization now drive a large share of calendar purchases.[14]
• Licensed IP cycles. Poster and calendar demand piggybacks on whatever is culturally hot — a hit film, a winning team, a breakout musician.
• Retail marketing economics. Catalog demand is counter-cyclical to digital ad prices: when online customer-acquisition costs spike, retailers (J. Crew, IKEA, even Amazon) revive print catalogs as a cheaper attention channel.[16]
• Home décor and print-on-demand. Art prints and posters ride the broader wall-décor and print-on-demand boom, a fast-growing adjacent market.[15]
• AI in content workflows. For the internet-folded-in and information pockets, artificial intelligence (AI) is a double-edged driver: it lowers production and discovery costs, but it can also substitute for undifferentiated content and weaken a publisher's bargaining power.

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7. Regulation

This is a lightly regulated, First-Amendment-protected industry with no dedicated federal regulator. The rules that actually bite are cross-cutting:

• Copyright and trademark (the central one). Calendars, posters, and art prints are built on licensed content; the business lives or dies on securing rights and paying royalties correctly, and on not infringing others' IP. A clean chain of title — clear proof of who owns each work and license — is the core diligence item. Rights disputes are the industry's characteristic legal risk.[20]
• AI and copyright (emerging). The U.S. Copyright Office is actively examining the copyrightability of AI-generated works and the use of copyrighted works to train AI systems — a live source of both licensing opportunity and litigation risk for any publisher whose catalog can be scraped or synthesized.[21]
• Postal regulation. For catalog and mail-order publishers, USPS rate decisions (overseen by the Postal Regulatory Commission) are effectively industry regulation — a rate hike is a direct cost shock.[17]
• Marketing and consumer-protection law. Direct-mail and coupon publishers must observe Federal Trade Commission (FTC) advertising and endorsement rules, and email/data practices fall under CAN-SPAM (the federal anti-spam law) and state privacy laws.[22]
• Children's and student privacy. Online publishers of kids' content are subject to the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) for personal data collected from children under 13,[23] and yearbook/school vendors handle student records under education-privacy rules such as FERPA (the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act).
• Antitrust and merger review. Given the steady deal flow, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and FTC can review acquisitions under the 2023 Merger Guidelines for effects on consumers, creators, and competitors — relevant mainly to the largest roll-ups.[24]

Regulatory risk is low relative to media peers — there is no licensing regime, content mandate, or price control — but postage policy is the one lever government pulls that can reprice a whole sub-segment overnight.

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8. Competitive dynamics and consolidation

The federal concentration data capture the barbell precisely. The top four firms hold 38.1% of revenue, the top eight 51.8%, the top twenty 66.7%, and the top fifty 76.8%; yet the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) is just 497.7 — well below the 1,500 threshold that antitrust agencies treat as "unconcentrated."[4] In plain terms: a few large players dominate specific pockets (yearbooks, licensed posters, calendars) while the remaining ~2,900 firms fight over a fragmented tail, so the overall index looks competitive even though individual niches are quite consolidated. Because 513199 lumps together unlike product markets, its HHI should not be read as a measure of competition in any single niche.

Competition here depends less on printing capacity than on exclusive or differentiated IP, audience trust and brand, creator and author relationships, distribution reach, retail/search visibility, and the ability to reuse content across formats.

Where consolidation has happened:

• Yearbooks/scholastic products are the most bought-and-sold. Jostens has passed through DLJ, KKR, Jarden, Newell, and now Platinum Equity;[8] Herff Jones was split in 2023–24, its yearbooks landing under KKR (via Varsity Brands) and its graduation products under Atlas Holdings.[10][11] The steady presence of top-tier buyout firms tells you these are prized, cash-generative assets.
• Posters/wall art consolidated when Trends International rolled up the category and absorbed the former online leaders Art.com and AllPosters.com in 2023.[13]
• Calendars remain led by family-owned Andrews McMeel, with a fringe of independents.[12]

The competitive backdrop is digital substitution. Free navigation apps gutted the atlas business; smartphones eroded the low-end wall calendar; e-commerce hollowed out the general-merchandise catalog. The winners have responded by moving up-market (premium/personalized/licensed print, corporate gifting) and by leaning on switching costs and exclusive contracts (yearbooks) that the internet can't easily disrupt. The most attractive consolidation targets are small businesses with loyal audiences but underdeveloped digital or licensing channels.

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9. Risks

• Secular digital substitution. The existential risk for the print-heavy pockets. Maps are largely gone; general catalogs and low-end calendars keep shrinking. Ongoing, not one-time.
• Generative-AI substitution. For internet-content, art-print, and information pockets, cheap AI-generated substitutes can undercut undifferentiated work and compress pricing power — the flip side of the AI opportunity.
• Input-cost inflation. Paper, ink, and especially postage are volatile and largely outside operators' control; USPS raised rates repeatedly in 2024–2025 (some marketing-mail tiers up double digits), directly squeezing catalog economics.[17]
• School-enrollment and participation decline. The yearbook annuity weakens if fewer students enroll or fewer buy a book.
• Customer and channel concentration. Yearbook publishers depend on school contracts; calendar/poster publishers depend on a few big retailers whose shelf and return decisions swing a season.
• Seasonality and inventory risk. Calendars and posters have a short selling window and become unsellable if mistimed — a hit-driven, markdown-prone model.
• Licensing dependence. Rising royalty costs, lost licenses, or IP disputes can erase a product line's economics; weak rights documentation compounds the risk.
• Financial leverage. The marquee assets are private-equity-owned and often carry meaningful debt (KKR's Varsity Brands deal alone was financed with billions in new borrowing[10]) — refinancing risk that lives with the sponsors rather than public shareholders, but a real one.
• Scale/margin fragility in the tail. The thousands of micro-publishers have little pricing power against input-cost and postage shocks.
• Statistical opacity. Federal data understate nonemployer and tiny-operator activity, so any top-down sizing of the code is inherently imprecise.

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10. How to invest, and the outlook

Public-market routes (limited and indirect). You cannot buy this industry cleanly on an exchange. The practical options:

• ACCO Brands (NYSE: ACCO) for a minority read on calendars and planners, understanding it is a broader office-products company.[18]
• Cimpress (NASDAQ: CMPR) for personalized-print exposure that overlaps the customization trend, though it is a printer, not a publisher.
• The diversified information-services names in Section 4 (Thomson Reuters, RELX, Wolters Kluwer, etc.) for the broader publishing economy — but remember they sit in adjacent codes, not 513199.
• When sizing any of these, the metrics that matter are recurring-versus-transactional revenue mix, renewal/churn and pricing power, proprietary rights ownership, digital-conversion and customer-acquisition cost, free-cash-flow (FCF) conversion, and segment-level (not consolidated) margins. Standard valuation tools — enterprise value to EBITDA (EV/EBITDA), price-to-earnings (P/E), FCF yield — apply, but normalize for seasonality, acquisitions, and content investment first. Treat any listed exposure to this specific code as incidental.

Private-market routes (where the industry actually trades). Ownership changes hands through private-equity control deals (the repeated Jostens and Herff Jones transactions), family-business successions (Walsworth, Andrews McMeel), and niche roll-ups (Trends International in posters). For private and institutional investors, the attractive targets are the recurring, contract-based cash generators — yearbooks above all — and the licensed, brand-driven calendar/poster franchises; the fragmented tail offers roll-up opportunities but thin individual margins. Diligence should verify, at minimum: chain of title and renewal rights; revenue split by customer, product, channel, and creator; subscriber retention and cohort behavior; retailer/platform dependence; inventory and return history; owner dependence; working-capital needs; and debt capacity against realistic exit options.

Near-term drivers and outlook. Reported conditions: catalog volumes fell in 2023 and 2024 under postage inflation, even as some retailers deliberately revived print as a marketing channel;[16] the premium planner/analog-revival and licensed-décor niches continued to grow.[14][15] Looking forward — and this is judgment, not settled fact — the industry looks set to keep bifurcating: the commodity print pockets (general catalogs, low-end calendars, maps) should keep eroding, while defensible, high-margin niches (yearbooks, licensed and personalized products, premium planners, corporate promotional calendars) should hold up and remain magnets for private capital. The swing factors to watch are USPS postal rates, paper costs, school-enrollment and participation trends, and whether the analog-revival demand among younger consumers proves durable or faddish. Net: a low-growth, cash-generative, consolidation-driven industry — unexciting on the public tape, but with genuinely valuable private franchises inside a misleadingly sleepy federal statistical code. No official industry forecast is provided in the federal statistics; underwrite the specific rights, audience, and cash generation of each business rather than the NAICS code.

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Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 NAICS Definition — 513199 All Other Publishers, 2022. https://www.census.gov/naics/?chart=2022&details=513199&input=513199
2. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Reconstruction of CES time series: implementing the NAICS 2022 redefinitions (Monthly Labor Review), 2024. https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2024/article/reconstruction-of-ces-time-series-implementing-the-naics-2022-redefinitions.htm
3. U.S. Census Bureau, NAICS Changes Will Begin to Be Reflected in Census Bureau's Economic Surveys and Programs, 2024. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2024/11/naics-changes.html
4. U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census — Concentration and receipts by industry (NAICS 513199), 2022. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/economic-census.html
5. U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns 2023 (NAICS 513199), 2023. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html
6. U.S. Small Business Administration, Table of Small Business Size Standards (NAICS 513199), 2023. https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
7. Education Week, Preserving Student Memories: A $500 Million Industry, 2001. https://www.edweek.org/leadership/preserving-student-memories-a-500-million-industry/2001/05
8. Twin Cities Business, Championship Rings, Yearbooks Maker Jostens Sold to Platinum Equity for $1.3B, 2018. https://tcbmag.com/championship-rings-yearbooks-maker-jostens-sold-to-platinum-equity-for-1-3b/
9. Platinum Equity / Who Own Companies, Jostens — ownership and ~$800M 2024 revenue, 2024. https://whoowncompanies.com/who-owns-jostens/
10. Yahoo Finance, KKR closes $4.75bn acquisition of Varsity Brands (parent of Herff Jones yearbooks), 2024. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/kkr-closes-4-75bn-acquisition-095630170.html
11. PR Newswire / Atlas Holdings, Atlas Holdings Acquires Herff Jones Graduation Business from Varsity Brands, 2023. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/atlas-holdings-acquires-herff-jones-graduation-business-from-varsity-brands-301944926.html
12. Wikipedia / Publishers Weekly, Andrews McMeel Publishing — nation's top calendar publisher, 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrews_McMeel_Publishing
13. PR Newswire, Trends International Acquires Art.com and AllPosters.com, 2023. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/a-perfect-match-for-your-wall--trends-international-acquires-artcom-and-allposterscom-301761678.html
14. 360 Research Reports, Wall Calendar Market Size, Growth & Trends (third-party market-research estimate, ~$2.9B 2024), 2024. https://www.360researchreports.com/market-reports/wall-calendar-market-202916
15. OpenPR, Posters and Artwork Market (third-party market-research estimate, ~$6.5B 2024), 2024. https://www.openpr.com/news/4152688/posters-and-artwork-market-is-booming-worldwide-major-giants
16. Total Retail, The Case for Rolling Back Postage Prices for Catalogs and Direct Mail (postage ~65% of catalog cost; 2023–24 volume drop), 2024. https://www.mytotalretail.com/article/the-case-for-rolling-back-postage-prices-for-catalogs-and-direct-mail/
17. Modern Litho, 2025 USPS Postal Rate Changes: What Catalog, Publication, and Direct Mail Buyers Need to Know, 2025. https://modernlitho.com/resources/july-2025-postal-rate-changes
18. ACCO Brands Corporation, Investor Relations — brands (AT-A-GLANCE, Mead, Five Star, Day-Timer) and results, 2024. https://ir.accobrands.com/overview/default.aspx
19. Wikipedia, Franklin Planner / FranklinCovey, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Planner
20. U.S. Copyright Office, What Is Copyright?, 2026. https://www.copyright.gov/what-is-copyright/
21. U.S. Copyright Office, Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, 2025. https://www.copyright.gov/ai/
22. Federal Trade Commission, The FTC's Endorsement Guides: What People Are Asking, 2023. https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/ftcs-endorsement-guides-what-people-are-asking
23. Federal Trade Commission, Complying with COPPA: Frequently Asked Questions, 2020. https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/complying-coppa-frequently-asked-questions
24. U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission, 2023 Merger Guidelines, 2023. https://www.justice.gov/atr/merger-guidelines