NYTimes Adds 455K+ Subscribers During 3Q

The New York Times Company said on Wednesday that it added 455,000 new digital subscriptions in the third quarter, a gain that keeps the publisher on pace to reach its stated goal of 10 million subscriptions by 2025.

Of the new digital subscriptions, 320,000 signed up for The Times’s journalism. The rest came for Games, Cooking and Wirecutter, the product review site that started offering subscriptions in September.

“This was our best third-quarter performance in both News and total net subscription additions since the launch of the digital pay model more than a decade ago, and, outside of 2020, our best quarter ever for digital subscription additions,” Meredith Kopit Levien, the company’s chief executive, said in a statement.

Of The Times’s nearly 8.4 million total subscriptions, 7.6 million are now digital. The number of print subscriptions fell to 795,000 in the July-through-September quarter, from 831,000 in the same three-month period last year, a decline in keeping with trends affecting the news industry as a whole.

The Times also hit a milestone, passing one million subscriptions outside the United States, the company said. Roughly 12 percent of its subscriptions are international.

Levien  attributed the gains in the quarter to “a busy news period,” as well as improved retention of subscribers and new initiatives meant to turn casual readers into paying customers.

The company reported adjusted operating profit of $65.1 million, a 15 percent increase over the same quarter a year ago, on $509.1 million of revenue, a 19.3 percent rise. Operating costs rose nearly as much, to $460.1 million, or 18.8 percent. Subscription revenues rose 13.8 percent, to $342.6 million, from last year.

After a down period last year, when the economy slowed at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, many companies were once again buying ads for both the print newspaper and the Times site, lifting ad revenues by 40 percent, to $110.9 million. Compared with the third quarter of 2019, a more typical year, ad revenue was down 2.3 percent, however.

The Times Company’s balance sheet surpassed $1 billion in cash as it continued to build its free cash flow, a measure of financial health. The company has been conservative with its resources but pays a quarterly dividend to shareholders that costs $40 million annually.

The Times said it expected subscription revenue to increase 12 percent and digital subscription revenue to go up 25 percent in the fourth quarter. It also projected growth in ad revenue around 15 percent. Costs will also rise by 17 to 20 percent, the company said.