(New York) The New York Times has reached its goal of 10 million subscriptions four years ahead of schedule and is now aiming for 15 million subscribers by the end of 2027, the press group said on Wednesday, an acceleration partly due to the acquisition of the site The Athletic.
Posted at 11:39 a.m.
CEO Meredith Kopit Levien said the takeover of this sports news platform for $550 million, announced in early January, had alone tipped the Times beyond the symbolic threshold of 10 million subscriptions.
However, the group “estimates that it would have reached this objective well before 2025 thanks to its organic growth alone”, added the leader, quoted in the press release published on Wednesday.
The new objective relates to the number of subscribers and not subscriptions, the second being higher than the first, specified the press editor, certain readers having subscribed to several products. The last target, 10 million, set in 2019, concerned subscriptions.
Prior to the acquisition, the New York Times ended 2021 with 8.78 million subscribers (internet and paper combined), a figure up 16%, driven by products not directly related to information.
The company has been seeking for several years to diversify its offer and has successfully launched subscriptions to cooking recipes (NYT Cooking) or to an online games platform, structured around crosswords.
The New York press group announced on Monday the acquisition of the rights to the ultra-popular online word game Wordle, for a sum of between 1 and 5 million dollars.
On the financial level, all the seers of the New York Times are green, with growth in subscriptions and newspaper sales of 23% in the fourth quarter over one year, and 26% for advertising revenues.
After having suffered for a long time from the decline in sales and advertising revenue from print editions, the daily has managed to stabilize the situation. Print newspaper sales fell only 2% in the fourth quarter in value terms, while advertising revenue jumped 33%.
In total, the New York Times did better than expected on both revenue and profit, with $594 million and $69 million, respectively.