The Boston Globe Has More Online Subs Than Print

The Boston Globe reached a milestone earlier this year when the number of its digital subscribers surpassed that of its weekday print subscribers for the first time — likely the only traditional, regional daily in the U.S. to have done so, according to the Boston Business Journal.

Filings the Globe submitted in the past week to the Alliance for Audited Media show that the inflection point occurred sometime in the first three months of the year. During that time, the number of weekday print subscribers fell from 108,719 to 98,978, an 11 percent decline year-over-year. That’s about on par with industry-wide rates of decline.

During the same time, the filing indicates that digital subscriptions — as measured by a category called “restricted digital access”— went from 107,902 to 112,241 as of March 31. While the Globe doesn’t specify exactly how it counts the number of online subscribers, restricted digital access seems to be a good approximation, and the paper’s director of consumer revenue, Tom Brown, confirmed this week that its number of online subscribers now stands at 112,700.

As for what's led to the rapid increase in online subscribers over the six-month period from last September to this March — during which time subscriber numbers rose by 15.5 percent — Brown pointed to a number of factors.

“While there were specific tactics employed including experimenting with the meter model and introductory offers — high traffic, the coverage, and highly converting content, particularly the Spotlight series on Aaron Hernandez was a major driver of the surge,” Brown said in an email to the Business Journal. “We also extended our mobile offerings, with iOS and Android apps for digital subscribers.”

“Boston is still a newspaper town, and we seem to have finally reached the tipping point at which most readers don’t care whether they receive the Globe in print or online,” said Dan Kennedy, journalism professor at Northeastern University and local media blogger. .