Digital Subs Continue Increase At NYTimes

The New York Times Company added 139,000 digital-only subscribers in the first quarter of 2018, a 25.5 percent increase from the same period a year ago, helping to fuel total revenue growth and offset a decline in digital advertising.

The company said on Thursday that about 40,000 of the new subscribers came from digital products like the cooking and crossword apps. The gains helped push the company’s total digital-only subscribers to roughly 2.8 million.

The company said total revenue was about $414 million, a 3.8 percent increase from the first quarter of 2017. Subscription revenue increased 7.5 percent to about $260 million.

“We’re seeing good retention of new cohorts of subscribers and continue to believe there is a big opportunity to further grow this increasingly important part of our business,” Mark Thompson, the company’s chief executive, said in an earnings statement. “Subscription revenues accounted for nearly two-thirds of the company’s revenues, and as we continue to adapt our subscription model and introduce new products, we expect that trend to continue.”

Despite the growth in subscribers, however, the company saw a 6 percent decline in digital advertising revenue from the same period a year ago. It was the first time since the second quarter of 2016 that digital advertising declined. In the first quarter of 2017, digital advertising increased 19 percent, part of the so-called Trump bump.