The New York Times Tops 5 Million Subscriptions

In the fourth-quarter earnings report that came out on Thursday, The NYTimes company said its total subscription figure was over five million, a high. The company’s stated goal is to reach 10 million by 2025.

The 5,251,000 total subscriptions include customers who receive ink-and-paper editions on their doorsteps and driveways and the close to 3.5 million who are digital-only customers for the core news product, the company said. With impeachment proceedings underway and the 2020 presidential campaign heating up in the quarter, digital-only news subscriptions grew by 30 percent in the last three months of 2019 compared with the year before. The other Times subscribers are the nearly one million who pay for the Cooking and Crossword apps.

The company added more than one million net digital subscriptions last year — the most new subscriptions annually in the newspaper’s history.

In a statement, Mark Thompson, the Times Company president and chief executive, called 2019 “a record-setting year for The New York Times’s digital subscription business, the best since the company launched digital subscriptions almost nine years ago.”

Advertising was a weak spot, with print and digital ad revenue each declining slightly more than 10 percent from the previous year’s final quarter. The company attributed the drop in digital ad revenue to an unusually strong finish to 2018.

The company said it expected to continue generating revenue more from readers than from the advertisers that were once integral to the newspaper business. Not unrelated: The price of subscriptions is going up.

Starting this week, the price of a digital-only subscription to the main news product every four weeks will increase to $17, from $15, the company said.