The New York Times Passes 10 Million Subscribers
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The New York Times now has more than 10 million subscribers, the company said on Wednesday, edging closer to its goal of 15 million by the end of 2027.
In its third-quarter report, The New York Times Company said it had added 210,000 net digital-only subscribers in the three months through September, giving it 9.41 million along with 670,000 print subscribers.
The Times Company has focused on getting subscribers to sign up for more than one of its offerings, which include the core news report, Cooking, Games, the Wirecutter review site and the sports news site The Athletic. Nearly 3.8 million of the 9.41 million digital-only subscribers are subscribed to at least two products, the company said.
Meredith Kopit Levien, the company’s president and chief executive officer, said in a statement that the third-quarter results showed that The Times’s “multiproduct bundle” was performing well and would “further us down the path to building a larger, more profitable company.”
The Times Company had an adjusted operating profit of $89.8 million for the quarter, up 30.1 percent from a year earlier. Total revenue was $598.3 million, up 9.3 percent from a year earlier.
Quarterly revenue at The Athletic grew 45.8 percent year over year, to $34.4 million, because of an increase in subscribers and the introduction of display advertising, The Times said.
The Times disbanded its sports desk in September, with reporters and editors moving to other sections across the organization. Content from The Athletic, which is operated separately from The Times’s core newsroom, is now used in The Times’s print paper and its digital report.
Despite a challenging advertising environment across the industry, The Times posted a 6.7 percent year-over-year increase in digital ad revenue, to $75 million, aided in part by the new ad sales for The Athletic. Total advertising revenue was up 6 percent, to $117.1 million.
The Times, like other newspapers, has seen a steady decline in print subscribers. It has lost 70,000 in the past year.
For the final quarter of this year, the company expects total subscription revenue to increase 8 to 11 percent from a year ago on an adjusted basis, it said, while it forecast a single-digit percentage increase in digital advertising revenue.