As The New York Times operated at full tilt through a fraught election — one of the most consequential votes in modern American history — the company announced a milestone: As of last week, it had topped seven million paid subscribers, a high.
The New York Times Company has bet on digital readers as the future engine of its business since 2011, when it started charging for online content — and it has largely been a good gamble. In the three-month period ending in September, for the first time, the revenue from digital subscribers was greater than the money the company brought in from print subscribers, The Times said Thursday as part of its third-quarter financial report.
Total revenue during the third quarter was flat, at $426.9 million, and adjusted operating profit jumped 28 percent, to $56.5 million, beating investors’ expectations on both counts. Net income doubled to $33.6 million.
There is little doubt that Donald J. Trump’s presidency has helped lift The Times’s subscription business, and the readership numbers have risen at a steady pace during his years in office. The company set a goal of 10 million subscribers by 2025, a mark that appears within striking distance.
The company added 393,000 digital subscribers during the three months, bringing the total of paid online readers to more than six million. Of that group, about 4.7 million pay for the core news product, with the rest subscribing to the crossword and cooking apps. An additional 831,000 readers continued to pay for print subscriptions, a drop from last year, reflecting a steady decline in the broadsheet business.
But a worrying trend might be this: Digital readers were the only growth business for The Times. Every other unit fell. As online subscription revenue rose 34 percent, to $155.3 million, print subscriptions decreased 3.8 percent to $145.7 million. And advertising sales, once the lifeblood of the newspaper business, dropped 30 percent, to $79.3 million. The pandemic has cut even deeper into ad sales, which were already falling as fewer people read the paper in print and many companies cut their marketing budgets.
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