The New York Times is the biggest English-language news organization in the world, counting almost 8.4 million paid subscribers as of its latest update from last week.
How it makes its money has changed — and is changing — quite dramatically.
Shifting sands
Like many other modern media entities, the NYTimes has been fundamentally changing its business model in two ways. There's the ongoing shift from print revenue to digital revenue, but also an ongoing shift away from advertising into subscription revenue — which companies like because it's usually more predictable.
Most of the NYTimes subscribers, 7.6 million to be exact, are digital-only. That's folks reading news online, in-app, or subscribing to some of their other digital subscription products like its cooking or games sections. Despite being the vast majority of subscriptions that group only accounts for ~40% of revenue. Even accounting for digital advertising, digital only makes up just over half of all revenue.
That's because, even though it's dying, print is still a chunk of the core business. A year ago the New York Times had 831,000 print subscribers. Today it has 795,000, a 4% drop in a time when everything has been going online. Print is dying, but it's taking its time. Maybe it'll never die? Or make a comeback like Vinyl.
